Hannah Arendt Understood the Forces Behind Donald Trump
Holding political office in America has always involved risks to a person’s career and reputation. Today, it also involves risks to their lives and their families’ safety. President Donald Trump and his administration have sanctioned violence toward immigrants and ordinary American citizens. Based on new evidence, a majority of his core supporters think that’s fine.
At every level of government, public officials endure physical threats and violence. Studies by the Brennan Center found that over the past three years, 43 percent of state legislators reported being physically threatened or attacked. The Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University reports that, on average, 18 percent of city and county officials receive physical threats each calendar quarter. And the U.S. Capitol Police recounts that over the past four years, members of Congress received an average of 9,000 violent threats per year against themselves, their families, and staff.
Some extremists carry out those threats. An assailant shot and wounded Trump during the 2024 campaign, while another missed. A Utah youth has been indicted for killing the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The Democratic leader of the Minnesota state House and her husband were murdered, while a state senator colleague and his wife survived but were shot and badly wounded. The husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was brutally attacked, and the residence of Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro was firebombed.
Trump has been a national role model for such violence by regularly threatening retribution against opponents and critics. As a candidate, he encouraged supporters to assault demonstrators at his rallies. As president, he charged that Barack Obama and Joseph Biden, Hillary Clinton, Generals Mark Milley and James Mattis, intelligence chiefs John Brennan and James Clapper, and former National Security advisers John Bolton and Susan Rice, along with former FBI officials James Comey, Peter Strzok, and Andrew McCabe, were guilty of crimes “punishable by death.” In each case, his targets received hundreds of death threats from his MAGA supporters.
Recently, two U.S. senators and four representatives also received hundreds of those death threats after the president accused them of treason for urging service members to decline to carry out illegal orders. It happened again after Trump denounced Indiana’s GOP governor and state senators for opposing his plan to gerrymander the state’s congressional districts—and again after he decried erstwhile allies, Representatives Tom Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert, for supporting legislation mandating the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
A decade of Trump’s public threats, pardons of January 6 rioters who assaulted police, and refusal to investigate ICE agents attacking and even killing innocent citizens and immigrants created the impression that violence against the president’s critics is permissible. We know that a majority of Trump’s MAGA followers—more than 20 million Americans—unabashedly support political violence to defend his actions and advance his agenda.
MAGA is not the first mass movement to endorse violence in the service of its leader’s aspirations. If history is a valuable guide to understanding this moment, the most penetrating historical analysis is, famously, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which has been widely discussed since Trump rose to power.
Unquestionably one of the most important Western political thinkers of the 20th century, Arendt was shaped by Adolph Hitler’s rise. She had been a student of Germany’s three leading philosophers of her time—Edward Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger. As a Jew, she fled Germany for Paris in 1933. She emigrated to the United States in 1939, where she taught at Princeton University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the New School for Social Research.
Her 1951 analysis of the movements that propelled the rise of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes begins with the insight that their followers were not a typical interest group seeking benefits or rights. Instead, they’re individuals who feel that recent disruptive societal changes cost them their status and are brought together by a charismatic leader who exploits their shared sense of injury.
The leader of these movements offers lies to explain why his followers lost their place, claims he can restore it given enough power, and, equally important, manipulates his followers’ anger to support violence committed at his behest.
With violence and threats now part of our politics, the question becomes, is the MAGA movement a populist version of a normal interest group or an extremist faction of the type that modern dictators have used to help establish and support their rule?
That MAGA is a mass movement is not in question. A 2025 survey by The Economist and YouGov.com found that 16 percent of American adults self-identify as MAGA supporters, totaling 43 million people. Those numbers are consistent with the findings of a large-scale academic survey conducted by the Violence Prevention Research Center at the University of California, Davis. They interviewed 7,255 Americans—3,916 Democrats and Independents, and 3,339 Republicans, including 1,128 MAGA Republicans. They identified MAGA Republicans based on their agreement with the Trump claim (and big lie) that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” Those believers accounted for 34 percent of self-identified Republicans, representing about 15 percent of U.S. adults (39 million).
While MAGA followers are fiercely loyal to President Trump, they differ on some matters, most prominently the release of the Epstein files. This divide appears anomalous because a substantial share of them came from the QAnon movement. The UC Davis study asked its thousands of participants if they agreed with QAnon’s founding fantasy that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.” About 53 percent of the MAGA Republicans agreed, compared to 13 percent of the non-MAGA Republicans. So, as Trump tries to bury the evidence around the world’s most notorious sex-trafficking pedophile, the MAGA Republicans’ belief in QAnon’s basic tenet splits them off. It’s hard to imagine another issue that could comparably test their loyalty to him.
Virtually all Republicans, MAGA or not, broadly support Donald Trump. Part of it is our current climate of extreme partisan polarization: An average of 94 percent of Republicans voted for Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024, the same average share of Democrats who voted for Hillary Clinton, Biden, and Kamala Harris. Large majorities of Republicans back controversial Trump actions, such as their 70 percent support for sending armed military forces to U.S. cities.
But his MAGA followers are his most reliable supporters across many issues. Surveys by The Economist and YouGov.com in 2025 found that 88 percent of MAGA believers endorse his positions on the economy, inflation, jobs, foreign trade, health care, education, civil rights, and civil liberties, compared to 64 percent of non-MAGA Republicans.
A greater divide among Republicans is apparent around the use of violence in politics. The UC Davis study found that 83 percent of MAGA believers agreed that “the American way of life is disappearing so fast, force may be necessary to save it,” compared to 46 percent of other Republicans.
When the issue is reframed more tentatively as, “if elected politicians will not protect American democracy, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires taking violent actions,” MAGA agreement edged down to 73 percent. Non-MAGA Republican support edged up to 50 percent.
Such substantial support also reflects a serious decline in Republican support for democracy itself: 69 percent of MAGA believers and 58 percent of other Republicans agree that “having a strong leader is more important than having a democracy.” Nearly equally disturbing, they’re joined by 36 percent of Independents and Democrats.
Arendt also highlighted the role big lies play in building a mass movement to support an aspiring strongman’s rise, as well as the use of violence against the objects of those lies. Trump introduced his first big lie when he announced his candidacy in 2015, declaring that Americans should fear Mexican immigrants and support expelling them because they were criminals or here to steal jobs from Americans.
Scapegoating non-white immigrants remains a central part of Trump’s playbook, and Republicans, especially MAGA, support it: 83 percent of MAGA believers and 58 percent of others agree that “native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants,” the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Remaking ICE into a new corps of armed, masked agents to manhandle, arrest, hold, and sometimes shoot immigrants and their supporters is central to Trump’s current agenda. Most of his devoted followers endorse it: 75 percent of MAGA Republicans agree that “violence is justified to stop illegal immigration.”
The current waves of random and sometimes lethal violence by ICE have badly eroded public support for ICE’s brutal tactics. But there is no evidence that MAGA believers’ endorsement of violence against undocumented immigrants has flagged.
Donald Trump’s second big lie for his mass movement has become tied directly to his followers’ declining support for democracy. When he lost his bid for re-election in 2020, he called his defeat a fraud and those who attacked Congress on January 6 righteous patriots trying to right the wrong. He had laid a foundation for the lie in his 2016 campaign with the story that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were trying to rig the election, and when he won but trailed Clinton by almost 3 million votes, the lie shifted to Democrats rigging the popular vote by corralling illegal immigrants to the polls.
The MAGA movement quickly embraced the big lie explaining his 2020 defeat, and eventually, most non-MAGA Republicans followed. In 2021, a University of Washington study found that 98 percent of self-identified MAGA members believed Trump won the 2020 election. By early 2024, 69 percent of all Republicans agreed that Democrats stole the presidency in 2020.
In the interim, Trump’s lies that he was the victim of a vast conspiracy by enemies also became his public defense when he was indicted in four criminal cases, convicted in one of them, and found liable for fraud, sexual abuse, and defamation. Trump then used these lies to re-energize the MAGA movement and lay Republicans by framing his 2024 comeback as a mission to protect Americans from Democrats, immigrants, and the media determined to rig another election.
Many MAGA members not only believe it; 50 percent of them say violence is acceptable “to stop an election from being stolen,” and 48 percent see violence as justified “to stop voter fraud.”
Hannah Arendt also found that those drawn to mass movements based on big lies gradually lose their ability to distinguish between facts and lies, in general, and especially when facts conflict with loyalty to the leader. This past year, after he imposed tariffs, when inflation increased, he told his followers that “every price is down.” He declared his Big Beautiful Bill “did not touch Medicaid” when it cut the program by $1 trillion over 10 years. He dismissed evidence that thousands of African children died because he slashed foreign assistance; he said foreign aid was a program to send $100 million in condoms to Hamas. He insisted he never pressured the Justice Department to bring charges against his opponents, even as he publicly posted a text message directing the Attorney General to indict James Comey and Letitia James.
Trump’s lies are always stark when they support his foundational big lies. He repeatedly claims that mail-in voting leads to rigged elections and every other country has banned it, when investigators found four cases of fraudulent mail-in ballots for every 10 million votes cast. Mail-in voting is widely used in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Switzerland. When people protested peacefully against ICE raids in Portland and Los Angeles, Trump said he had to deploy troops because immigrants were “burning down” the cities. When public videos showed ICE agents killing innocent protestors in Minneapolis, Trump said they were domestic terrorists, and his agents acted to safeguard the public from criminal immigrants.
Given the facts that contradict Trump’s lies, his target audience is his MAGA supporters, who believe him because they believe in him, and endorse violence in support of his big lies. Their role is not to take up arms themselves, but to intimidate Trump’s critics and opponents, often with direct threats, and rationalize the violence of the masked, armed federal agents
As a matter of history, the role of Trump’s mass movement in advancing his ambitions to become an American strongman has some parallels with Hitler’s devoted followers in the Sturmabteilung, the Brownshirts of the SA. The SA began as an outside movement affiliated with the Nazi Party that intimidated and harassed Hitler’s opponents and Jewish Germans. It was always distinct from the Schutzstaffel or SS, the brutally violent agency of the Nazi government that broke off from the SA following the Night of the Long Knives purge in 1934. But members of the original SA mass movement became loyal, public supporters of Hitler’s steps to suspend Germany’s constitution, much like many MAGA followers today.
We don’t have brownshirts brawling across American cities. But threats of government-sanctioned violence are palpably present, as they were in Germany in the early 1930s, and the president and his administration have repeatedly defended the bloodshed in Minnesota and elsewhere by some elements of ICE.
Despite the analogies and Trump’s attacks on his opponents and critics, the constitution, and numerous laws, here the opposition party, a fair share of the media, and much of the judiciary have not been neutralized (the verdict on the Supreme Court is still out). But even as Trump has lost popular support, he retains the devotion of his 40-million-strong mass movement.
There is an alternative interpretation of the MAGA movement as an unconventional variant of a typical interest group. In this perspective, MAGA followers were drawn to Trump’s populist persona, and he used them to expand the GOP coalition and become the party’s leader.
How can we tell if MAGA is a mass movement that supports strongman rule and political violence or an atypical interest group still part of democratic, everyday politics?
One gauge is whether Trump expanded Republican support among voters with MAGA’s profile. MAGA followers are distinct within the Republican Party. They are more likely than other Republicans to be women (52 percent versus 44 percent), slightly more likely to be Hispanic (8 percent versus 7 percent), and equally likely to be white. Consistent with media portrayals, MAGA followers also are much more likely than other Republicans to have never attended college (40 percent versus 28 percent) and earn less than $50,000 per year (31 percent versus 23 percent).
In his runs for the presidency, did Trump expand support from MAGA-type voters, compared to Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush? Certainly not among women: Trump won an average of 43 percent of female voters in his three races, compared to an average of 45 percent who voted for Romney in 2012, McCain in 2008, and Bush in 2000 and 2004.
On incomes, Trump’s support from voters with incomes below $50,000 averaged 45 percent, the same share Bush won in 2000 and 2004. McCain and Romney carried smaller shares of moderate and low-income voters. Still, the reason was that they ran against Barack Obama: Black turnout peaked for Obama’s historic candidacies, and Black households were more likely than white or Hispanic households to earn less than $50,000. Once Obama left the scene, Trump attracted the GOP’s share of low and moderate-income voters in 2000 and 2004.
The MAGA movement also did not increase Trump’s share of white voters; in fact, that share slightly declined: He won an average of 57 percent of white voters in his three runs, compared to 58 percent when Bush, McCain, and Romney ran. And Trump’s support from Hispanic voters averaged 35 percent across his three races, the same as the average Hispanic support for Bush, McCain, and Romney.
Trump did carry an average of 11 percent of Black voters across his three elections, substantially outpacing the 8 percent average won by Bush, McCain, and Romney. Again, the main reason was Obama, whose candidacy reduced GOP Black voter support to 4 percent against McCain and 6 percent against Romney. And Trump’s 11 percent Black support matched Bush in 2004.
Given Trump’s average support from female, low- and moderate-income, white, Hispanic, and perhaps Black voters, there is little evidence that Trump’s MAGA movement is a new interest group that broadened the Republican national coalition.
The exception is voters who never attended college: Trump won an average of 53 percent of those voters across his three runs, compared with 50 percent who voted for Bush, McCain, and Romney. But those gains changed the GOP coalition without expanding it, because Trump’s support from college-educated voters averaged 45 percent, compared to the 50 percent who supported Bush, McCain, and Romney.
On balance, the impact of the MAGA movement on presidential elections is at best minimal. Trump’s narrow victories in 2016 and 2024 were based not on an influx of MAGA voters and others like them but on a fortuitous distribution of his national support across a handful of contestable states. His defeat in 2020 by 4.5 percentage points was more definitive but also had little to do with MAGA: He lost mainly because his support fell substantially among those earning $50,000 to $100,000 and college graduates.
Based on the facts, MAGA is not an interest group, even an atypical one, but a mass movement following an aspiring strongman of the kind Hannah Arendt saw in Germany. Its political significance rests on its followers’ extreme views about violence and democracy, their faith in Trump’s big lies, their defense of the political use of intimidation and threats, and their support for Trump’s attacks on democratic institutions. In these ways, MAGA shares features of the popular movements that supported the rise and consolidation of dictatorial power in the past century and the early years of this one.
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