By Michael Bitzer
Of course, it can’t be a Monday morning without another crashing headline to start the week in politics. And this one gave me a pause to a past survey question that explored a concerning principle.
While in the Oval Office this morning, President Donald Trump was speaking about sending the military into American cities, and said the following:
Set aside if we can take his word that “he is not a dictator,” as soon as I saw this clip, I thought about a February tweet the president issued and a subsequent question that I had on the March 2025 Catawba-YouGov Survey of 1,000 North Carolinians.
Within a month of taking office, Trump sent out the following tweet:
This sentence is attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, who created the Napoleonic Code of civil law before declaring himself emperor of France.
And it fits into a critical perspective about the power of the chief executive that I discuss in Presidential Politics class, courtesy of Richard Nixon:
This kind of executive power—whatever the president says or acts upon, then it is legal—was at the heart of the case Trump v. United States, decided by the United States Supreme Court’s decision in 2024. As noted by SCOTUSblog:
“As an initial matter, (Chief Justice John) Roberts explained in his 43-page ruling, presidents have absolute immunity for their official acts when those acts relate to the core powers granted to them by the Constitution – for example, the power to issue pardons, veto legislation, recognize ambassadors, and make appointments.
…
Roberts concluded (that) a president should have immunity from criminal prosecution for his official – but not his unofficial – acts unless, at the very least, prosecutors can show that bringing such charges would not threaten the power and functioning of the executive branch.
…
In her dissent, which (like Jackson’s) notably did not use the traditional “respectfully,” (Associate Justice Sonya) Sotomayor contended that Monday’s ruling “reshapes the institution of the Presidency.” “Whether described as presumptive or absolute,” she wrote, “under the majority’s rule, a President’s use of any official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt, is immune from prosecution. That is just as bad as it sounds, and it is baseless.” “With fear for our democracy,” she concluded, “I dissent.”
Eight months after this decision was handed down, the president sent forth the tweet that gained national and international attention. At that time I was in the midst of preparing a survey of North Carolinians, so I decided to put two questions on the poll about the president’s statement, just to gauge what kind of public reaction it would generate.
The first question asked:
“On February 15, 2025, President Donald Trump posted to his social media account the following line: ‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.’ How much do you agree or disagree with Trump’s statement?”
Overall, 31 percent of North Carolinians agreed with the statement, a quarter (24 percent) neither agreed nor disagreed, and 45 percent disagreed with the statement (as a note: the margin of error for the 1,000 weighted respondent survey was +/- 3.6%).
But the partisan divide was very apparent in the cross-tab analysis:
While 72 percent of self-identifying Democrats (a clear majority) and 44 percent of independents (a plurality) disagreed with Trump’s statement, 57 percent of Republicans agreed.
The second question asked:
Some have described Trump’s statement as being ‘dictatorial.’ What is your reaction to describing Trump’s statement as dictatorial?
To say that the results from this question surprised me is an understatement: they are literally the exact opposite from the first question. This time, 45 percent of North Carolinians agreed in describing Trump’s statement as dictatorial, while 24 percent neither agreed nor disagreed, and 31 percent disagreed.
And again, it was pretty much flipping the bars within each partisan perspective on this response compared to the first question’s responses.
I was particularly interested in those respondents who agreed on the first question and disagreed on the second question. In diving into the poll data, 177 North Carolinians answered that combination of responses:
- On the first question, 53 percent ‘somewhat agreed’ and 47 percent ‘strongly agreed’
- On the second question, 71 percent ‘strongly disagreed’ and 29 percent ‘somewhat disagreed’
And yes, I acknowledge that 177 isn’t a lot of respondents to get a statistically significant sense of things. But I was interested in who these folks were.
They were more likely to be:
- Republican on the initial partisan identification question (65 percent of them self-identified)
- strong Republican (53 percent)
- live in suburban counties surrounding urban counties (30 percent, a plurality among the four regions)
- born in North Carolina (60 percent)
- “strongly approve” of Trump at the time (70 percent)
- extremely or very interested in politics (60 percent)
- male (56 percent)
- conservative or very conservative (75 percent)
- White non-Hispanic (84 percent)
- And not surprisingly: overwhelmingly voted for Trump in 2024 (89 percent)
Now, granted: about 18 percent of the 1,000 respondent survey isn’t very much. But these are the type of citizens that appear, at least, to support Nixon’s declaration, and are likely to support Trump’s statement.
And how much would they support Trump’s decision to act with the justification of “I’m doing it to save the country”?
In thinking about that answer, I’m reminded of this exchange:
Elizabeth Willing Powel: "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"
Benjamin Franklin: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
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Dr. Michael Bitzer holds the Leonard Chair of Political Science and serves as director of the Center for North Carolina Politics & Public Service at Catawba College, where he is a professor of politics & history.
The March 2025 Catawba-YouGov Survey was paid for by the Center for North Carolina Politics & Public Service at Catawba College and conducted online by YouGov from March 10th to 20th, 2025. The poll has a margin of error of +/- 3.6 percent for the 1,000 weighted respondents, with larger margins of error among sub-groups. All results should be interpreted as informative and not determinative.
YouGov interviewed 1129 North Carolina respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 1000 to produce the final dataset. The respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race, and education. The sampling frame is a politically representative "modeled frame" of North Carolina adults, based upon the American Community Survey (ACS) public use microdata file, public voter file records, the 2020 Current Population Survey (CPS) Voting and Registration supplements, the 2020 National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll, and the 2020 CES surveys, including demographics and 2020 presidential vote.
The matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. The matched cases and the frame were combined, and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the frame. The propensity score function included age, gender, race/ethnicity, years of education, and region. The propensity scores were grouped into deciles of the estimated propensity score in the frame and post-stratified according to these deciles. The weights were then post-stratified on 2020 and 2024 presidential vote choice as well as a four-way stratification of gender, age (4-categories), race (4-categories), and education (4-categories), to produce the final weight.
