Bonkers Study Finds Millions Would ‘Participate In The Use Of Force To Restore Donald Trump To The Presidency’

L: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images — R: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

Millions of Americans believe the “use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency,” and are even ready to kill to do it — but that’s just the bad news.

The good news is that the percentage of Americans who believe that force is “justified” to return Trump to the presidency has gone down considerably since last year. From CBS News:

More than 18 months after the rioting at the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, an estimated 13 million U.S. adults, or 5% of the adult population, agree that force would be justified to restore former President Donald Trump to the White House and an estimated 15 million Americans believe force would be justified to prevent Trump from being prosecuted , should he be indicted for mishandling classified documents, according to a new study from the University of Chicago.

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The 13 million estimated in the early September survey represents a reduction since June 2021, when an estimated 23 million Americans had insurrectionist sentiment. CPOST researchers extrapolated data from over 3,000 nationally representative survey participants who responded to surveys in June and September of 2021, and April and September of 2022, to reach their conclusions in the study.

Following Trump’s defeat at the hands of President Joe Biden, poll after poll has shown staggering majorities of Republicans believe that victory was illegitimate, and for the entirety of 2021, a good chunk of them held on to the belief that Trump would be “reinstated” to the presidency.

The study by the University of Chicago’s Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) features some other fascinating results. While 5 percent of overall respondents said the use of force is “justified” to restore Trump, almost all of those people said they were willing to “participate” in that violence — if it means killing.

Three percent of respondents agreed with the statement “I would participate in the use of force to restore Donald Trump to the presidency,” a number that actually went up — to 4 percent — when that statement was amended to “I would participate in the use of force to restore Donald Trump to the presidency, even if some people are injured or killed.”

It’s not just Republicans driving these numbers. Independents were just as likely to espouse or promise participation in violence — and were nearly twice as likely to say that “Use of force is justified to prevent the prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified documents by the federal government,” at 9 percent, versus 5 percent of Republicans. Six percent of Democrats agreed with that one.