Frank Luntz in the spin room after a CNN Republican presidential debate at the Olmsted Center at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa on January 10, 2024 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
On Independence Day 2025, Americans celebrated the 249th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence — which was signed on July 4, 1776 in Philadelphia's Independence Hall (which was called the Pennsylvania State House at the time). The U.S. has been a democratic republic for 249 years, but on this year's 4th of July celebration, many critics of President Donald Trump expressed their fears that the country won't remain democratic.
Conservative pollster Frank Luntz discussed the state of U.S. democracy during an appearance on The Atlantic's podcast. And he candidly laid out some reasons why many MAGA voters are drawn to authoritarianism.
During the interview, posted on July 18, Luntz told host Garry Kasparov, "We have never been this angry. We've never been this distrusting. We don’t trust any institution except for the military. We don't trust any people who lead anything right now. We're fed up, we're mad as hell. If I were to summarize in a single word how Americans feel, it's all caps with an exclamation point: ENOUGH! Enough politics, enough lies, enough being ignored, forgotten, betrayed — which is an emotion that breaks society. And however bad you think it is, it's worse. Because I can't sit 15 people in a room that's a little bit bigger than this and have them not tear each other apart."
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Luntz continued, "The problem that I have right now, and I don't know how to fix it, is that we don't want to listen to each other. We want to be heard, we want to speak and make sure that other people listen. And when a democracy stops learning and a democracy stops listening, that democracy's in trouble."
The GOP pollster recalled that in 2014, his "head was exploding" because the U.S. was "heading toward the conditions that gave us Donald Trump just two years later."
Luntz told Kasparov, "I was getting ready to move to the U.K. Not that it is so wonderful, but I just couldn't watch my country tear itself apart. Because I still have, I still have even deep down, a love for this place, even with its flaws and even with the anger that we get out there…. In 2014, I got it. I got how awful our country already was with each other. And that's because all these focus groups I was doing would degenerate into delegitimization, dehumanization. It was all the bad that we were to come to see 24 months later."
In 2016, Luntz argued, Trump resonated with his hardcore MAGA base because they "played by the rules" yet "live paycheck to paycheck."
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"For tens of millions of people," Luntz told Kasparov, "Donald Trump is Ronald Reagan, is FDR. For tens of millions of people, Donald Trump speaks the truth, and only Donald Trump does. And his graphic descriptions and language that is accessible to a high-school grad is exactly what FDR was to people back in 1932 and what Reagan was to people in 1980. That's exactly the point…. They truly are struggling. And I sympathize with them."
Luntz continued, "I don't think that justifies their rudeness. I don't think that justifies how so many of them are mean. But they were promised something as they grew up: in their textbooks, in their history books. They were promised an America that would deliver for them a better future. And it didn't happen. "
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The Atlantic's full interview with Frank Luntz is available at this link (subscription required).