Whatever else it does, the Trump campaign will test the willingness of the American electorate to support a candidate who asserts his right to run roughshod over the Constitution and flout traditional constraints on the exercise of power. Will voters fall in line behind a man who declares “I am your voice” and “I am the law and order candidate,” a man who looks more than 30 million television viewers in the eye as he says

Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.

Trump is the candidate of the massive and unruly rally, seemingly always on the edge of violence, the candidate who dismisses critics and opponents as weak losers and who whips up mass audiences via Twitter, the 21st century counterpart to the Depression-era radio rants of Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh — the aviator-turned-isolationist who brought us the original America First movement.

Trump’s entire campaign is premised on the primal assault of an in-group against an out-group. More brazenly than any major party presidential contender in American history, he promises voters the comfort, security and even happiness that autocratic leaders claim they can provide. He has based his presidential bid on the yearning for authoritarian leadership that he believes animates a majority of the voting public.

Who are Trump’s followers?

Matthew MacWilliams, in a chapter of the forthcoming book, “Why Irrational Politics Appeals,” writes that those who support Trump stand out because of two variables: “authoritarianism and a personalized fear of terrorism.”

MacWilliams, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, goes on to argue in a companion essay that:

Trump’s success in the Republican primaries this year is demonstrably different than what has occurred in America’s political past.

It is instead “the rise of American authoritarianism – America’s Authoritarian Spring.”

As the world knows, Trump set out to tap voters’ fears in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention on July 21st, arguing that 2016 is

a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country.

There is a striking array of statistical data linking Trump to voters disposed to believe in the value of authoritarian control.