"The main reason, I submit, is that most of Trump’s backers are authoritarian followers—people who submit too much to the leaders they consider legitimate, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want. “Well yeah,” you might say. “But that’s like saying an apple is an apple because it’s an apple.” And it would be golden delicious example of a rhetorical tautology except social scientists have had a good, independent way of measuring this kind of authoritarianism since the 1970s. And it was clear from the first studies that political “conservatives”—from ordinary voters to elected officials—tended to score highly on this personality test (Chapter 6 of The Authoritarians, the book on this website). We can gain considerable insight into Donald Trump’s supporters from the research on authoritarianism."