President Trump hates the press. He spends nearly as much time attacking CNN and the “failing” New York Times as he does attacking Democrats. He’s referred to journalists as an “enemy of the people” both on Twitter and in public appearances. In March, he asked then-FBI Director James Comey to examine options for jailing reporters who published leaked information.

A poll from the Economist/YouGov, released on Wednesday, pushed the president’s ideas even further. It asked Americans whether they would support “permitting the courts to shut down news media outlets for publishing or broadcasting stories that are biased or inaccurate.”

The results were scary for anyone concerned about the future of American democracy.

According to the poll, Americans are roughly evenly divided on whether the US government should have the power to shut down unfriendly media outlets: 28 percent favor, 29 percent oppose, and 43 percent are unsure. But the results become really striking when you break them down by partisan identification:

A fairly large plurality of Republicans — 45 percent — support allowing media organizations to be shuttered. A scant 20 percent oppose the idea; that’s less than half the number who support it. The remaining 35 percent of Republicans have not made up their minds.

By contrast, more Democrats and independents oppose shutting down media organizations than support it (by a 21-point margin among Democrats and 2-point margin among Independents).

Let that sink in for a second: More than twice as many Republicans support giving the government power to shut down media organizations that it deems either “inaccurate” or “biased” than oppose it. Such a proposal isn’t something you see in democracies, as it would essentially end freedom of the press entirely. It’s along the lines of what you see in Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan’s Turkey.

Experts say it’s not hard to draw a straight line between these results and Trump’s rhetoric. Basically, they say, Republicans are adjusting their opinions on press freedom to fit the kind of language they hear from the leader of their party.

“There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that on a wide range of issues, an individual’s party identification tends to drive attitudes rather than the other way around,” Will Jordan, a poll analyst at the Global Strategy Group public affairs firm, told me. “This poll seems to show one way how Donald Trump’s norm breaking is trickling down and shaping the opinions of rank-and-file Republicans.”

Imagine this happening in another country

These poll results don’t mean that Trump is going to tear up the First Amendment. There is no indication whatsoever that he wants to try to do so, nor that the courts would allow him to. Recall that it was President Obama, not Trump, who used the Espionage Act to put a huge number of journalists’ sources in jail (Trump has yet to follow in his footsteps).

It’s jarring all the same. Mass support for shuttering media outlets is the kind of thing you’d expect in a country the US condemns for its anti-democratic practices, not in the US itself. You could imagine seeing something like this in a country like Poland, whose authoritarian ruling party has purged critical voices from its public broadcaster, or Venezuela, where journalists who criticize the government are jailed under “defamation” charges.

Both of those countries are undergoing what scholars Yascha Mounk and Roberto Foa call “democratic deconsolidation”: wherein a formerly democratic country starts to slowly collapse into some kind of authoritarian regime. The ruling parties in both Poland and Venezuela were democratically elected but proceeded to crack down on freedom of the press and other basic democratic institutions after taking power — with the support of their own hardcore backers.

In either of those countries, we’d look at a poll result like this and think, “Well, of course.” We wouldn’t be surprised that supporters of the ruling party back attacks on the free press when that’s what their leaders are doing.

Donald Trump isn’t jailing journalists or shutting down media organizations he sees as hostile or biased against him. But he has threatened to come after Amazon financially as punishment for hostile coverage from the Washington Post (which is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos). Some of Trump’s aides told the New York Times that they were thinking about blocking the Time Warner/AT&T merger to punish Time Warner, CNN’s parent company, for the television network’s coverage.

These threats, and the overall tone of Trump’s rhetoric about the press, are quietly altering the way Americans think about restrictions on press freedom, to the point where support for the kinds of actions being taken in actual collapsing democracies is growing among Republicans.

It is yet another signs that the foundations of our democratic system may be more rickety than we ever would have imagined six months ago.