How messed up are Trump Supporters?

[Angrboda]

Washington Post | Your everyday Republican has some galling views

The views of rank-and-file Republicans, captured in voter surveys, are nothing less than galling.

Let’s lead with a poll conducted by the global marketing firm Ipsos and reported by the Daily Beast. It found that 43 percent of self-identified Republicans said they believed “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.”

When asked if President Trump should shut down The Post, CNN and the New York Times, 23 percent of Republicans said yes.

These findings are obviously troubling to me as a member of the Fourth Estate. But in the Trump era, assaults on the media come with the territory.

More disturbing to me as a citizen is that those Trump cultists would knowingly and willingly give him the power to trample on the First Amendment, destroying an essential part of our democracy that he doesn’t like. That is appalling.

They either don’t know or care about what Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote in New York Times Co. v. United States in 1971: The Founding Fathers intended that “the press was to serve the governed, not the governors.”

Get this: In a Yahoo Finance-SurveyMonkey poll conducted from July 25 to 27, 11 percent of the Republicans surveyed said it would be “appropriate” for Russia to interfere in the midterm elections if it helped their party keep control of Congress, and 29 percent said it would not be “a big deal.” Yes, a majority of Republicans (55 percent) opposed the idea. But the fact that 40 percent of Republicans would be okay with Russian interference in a U.S. election if it helped their side speaks to a lack of allegiance to our democratic institutions.

Here’s another scary story. Nearly a quarter of Republicans (22 percent) believe Trump tells the truth only “some of the time or less,” but more than half of that group still approves of the job he’s doing as president, according to an NBC News-SurveyMonkey online poll. They seem to believe that Trump can do no wrong, even though they know he’s likely lying to them.