Noam Chomsky makes a case on Thom Hartmann's show for why he thinks calling Donald Trump a fascist gives Trump too much credit. He proposes that Donald Trump is more akin to a tinpot dictator we'd see in a failing third-world state where the government is overthrown by a coup at regular intervals.
I'm not so sure. I think the right-wing oligarchs of America, their propaganda networks, the GOP, police guilds, militant right-wing groups and Trump are to some degree a single entity - which is much more powerful, and dangerous, than any third-world dictator could ever hope to be.
This 1995 article by Umberto Eco and this recent video of Jason Stanley on PBS tend towards labeling the Trump-era of today as a pre-fascist state.
Calling Trump a tinpot dictator or pre-facist authoritarian may be a distinction without a difference - whatever is going on is massively corrupt, hurtful to the people in our nation, and weakening our democratic and legal institutions. If we don't succeed in voting him and the GOP appeasers who stood by while all this occurred it's hard to imagine what will happen.
On the other hand to put things in some perspective - in maybe another 10 or 20 or 30 years, whatever Trump and the GOP did to America in 2016-2020 will be vastly overshadowed by what the GOP did to the planet by denying climate science starting in the 1980's. Continuing that denial to this day in the Wall Street Journal is the height of irresponsibility from both a moral and fiscal standpoint. Maybe we'll be able to enact a green new deal and fight this battle...there is always hope.
When I loaded the Hartmann/Chomsky YouTube video this is a screen grab of the ad that went along with it...so much for micro-targeting ;-)
Junior the great white hunter is calling on you to fight. I didn't listen to his words but I assume since he is on my screen he means fight to remove Senior from the white house.
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At the end of that interview with Thom Hartmann, Noam Chomsky mentions the Davos World Economic Forum. That reminded me of this video where Tucker Swanson Carlson is interviewing a Dutch writer and historian named Rutger Bregman who attended the forum and things don't turn out quite as expected when Rutger starts to cut through the Fox fog and speaks some truth.
This video gives some background on the Tuck..
There's always this 2004 classic with Jon Stewart telling Tucker and his co-host on the CNN Crossfire show that cable television hurts America by presenting politics as entertainment (masquerading as news) to generate profit and foster division in service to the owners of the corporations who pay their salaries.
