Pretty risky. The number of Republican primary voters who agree with this can’t be more than, what? 80-85 percent?

The actual figure is a little lower, although only a little. From a CBS poll last December:

Forty-nine percent of Americans think waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation tactics are sometimes justified to get information from suspected terrorists, but just over a third — 36 percent — think they are never justified. The percentage who thinks these tactics are justified has risen slightly from three years ago.

More than seven in 10 Republicans (73 percent) and half of independents (50 percent) think these tactics are sometimes justified. Most Democrats (54 percent) do not. Those who have heard or read a lot about the report are even more likely than Americans overall to say these tactics are justified.

One of the techniques highlighted in the report is the use of waterboarding, in which the sensation of drowning is created by either dunking a restrained prisoner in water or pouring water over the prisoner’s face. As they did five years ago, most Americans consider this technique to be torture, including majorities of Democrats (83 percent), independents (67 percent), and half of Republicans. The percentage of Americans who do not consider waterboarding torture is unchanged, at 26 percent.

Fifty-one percent of Republicans think waterboarding is torture but 73 percent say it and other “aggressive interrogation tactics” are justified at least some of the time. And the trendline is upward, not downward, which feels counterintuitive as we get farther away from 9/11. FiveThirtyEight crunched some data from Pew late last year:

Even Democrats are a few points more likely to endorse torture than they were 10 years ago, putting them within striking distance of a clear majority in favor. (We’ll see how durable that support is once a Republican’s back in the White House.) In theory, the growing support for torture is a function of the growing threat from ISIS; the more dangerous they seem, the more willing Americans will be to thwart a planned terror attack by any means necessary. I don’t think that’s what’s really going on in this data, though. After all, these numbers were gathered last year, long before the most recent Paris attack and even before the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January. It’s not the suddenly renewed prospect of major terror attacks in the west that drove the uptick in the polls. What drove it, I think, was pure revanchism towards ISIS after they started beheading people on camera. Tit for tat — if they want to show off their barbarism, they should prepare for a modest taste in kind if the CIA gets hold of any of them. That’s always been the dirty little secret behind the waterboarding debate. Whether it works or not to produce trustworthy intelligence is a hard question to answer — logically, it would depend on the particular psychological make-up of an individual prisoner — but that’s beside the point for most Americans. They back waterboarding as punishment, because degenerates who are committing mass murder of minorities and systematic rape of women prisoners deserve to suffer. That’s the key to Trump’s comments here. Even if waterboarding them doesn’t produce usable intel, they deserve it. You can oppose torture for other principled reasons, like not wanting to encourage the state to get creative with corporal punishment, while still recognizing that point as correct. They deserve it.

Anyway. This is a perfect issue for Trump in that it pits him and GOP voters against elite opinion, and not just elite opinion but pearl-clutching “you can’t possibly believe that” elite opinion. That’s Populism 101. I’m surprised the media hasn’t tried to pin down other ostentatious hawks in the field like Bush and Rubio (or “conservatarian” Ted Cruz) to see where they stand. It’s a dynamite gotcha. If they say no to waterboarding, they’re undermining their hawkish cred to Trump’s benefit. If they say yes, they’re cutting against the consensus view of the political class — or, in Cruz’s case, the consensus view of the Paulite libertarians he’s trying to consolidate. Tough question for them. Not for Trump.