Does fearmongering rhetoric increase support for authoritarian politics and policies, and if so, why and how? In this paper, I theorize the way in which authoritarian behavior and individual characteristics interact to create public support, drawing on long-standing psychological theories about the behavioral effects of deeply held ideas regarding authority and power (Adorno et al. 1950; Hetherington and Weiler 2009), fear (Gray 1987; Ruiter, Abraham and Kok 2011), and patriarchal norms (Sidanius et al 1994; 2000, 1995). In short, authoritarians utilize fearmongering rhetoric to tap into citizens’ fears about a variety of threats, and these performances activate the authoritarian aspects of individual personalities. While this process is not activated in all citizens, authoritarian rhetoric may have a substantial effect on the certain portions of the population. The motivation and evidence for my analysis comes from contemporary Egypt, where military president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has overseen authoritarian retrenchment since the 2013 coup which displaced democratically elected president (and former Brotherhood member) Mohamed Morsi. I test hypotheses about propaganda and personality through a nationally representative survey of Egyptian citizens conducted in November 2018. The survey included an embedded experiment, which randomly assigned respondents to one of give treatments including vignettes approximating Sisi’s rhetoric about the existential threat of infrastructure, terrorism, identity, and economic problems currently facing Egypt (in addition to a control for comparison, which did not include a vignette). Preliminary analyses demonstrate that exposure to fearmongering rhetoric increases citizens’ ranking of the specific threat discussed (whether economic, national security, identity, or infrastructure) as a major problem for Egypt, and makes them significantly more likely to think this problem will affect them personally. In addition, economic fearmongering causes citizens to report significantly more support for non-democratic government and a strong leader (rather than representative government) in times of crisis. Preliminary results also suggest that reactions to the fearmongering rhetorical primes interact significantly with pre-existing personality attributes. These findings contribute to a small but growing literature on the important question of how mass political behavior contributes to or detracts from the consolidation of democratic transitions, and how and why ordinary citizens might facilitate authoritarian retrenchment.