It seems like no matter what Donnie says or promises, there are voices that will caution us from jumping to the conclusion that he has embraced fascism. Denying election results and fomenting mob violence against Congress? Surely that's merely authoritarianism, not yet fascism. Referring to rivals as vermin and promising to round up undesirables in camps? Okay, yeah, maybe we're getting close to fascism, but we don't want to be hasty in making that generalization ...
All that reminds me of something I experienced just as the so-called American "War on terror" was ramping up. Particularly the debate around torture.
A whole new plethora of euphemisms were invented on the spot to avoid calling the Bush administration's policy of using pain to extract confessions by the name of torture. Sure, they were enhanced interrogation techniques, but were they really torture? In some cases, people came up with ad hoc standards for proper torture -- such as pain consistent with major organ failure -- that no one had ever used in human history. (And I mean no one.) My question was always, "If it's not torture, then why are you doing it?" Why this desire to hold back the word when you are so clearly doing the act, for all the reasons the act has traditionally been done?
The parallel between Donnie's fascism and torture is clear. If the Bush administration admitted it was committing torture, it would have to stop torturing.
I suspect that much the same dynamic is at play here. The mainstream media shares many perceived enemies with Donnie -- those annoying "progressives", the demanding and disruptive protestors, the "snowflake" college students -- and probably nurse some fantasy that he will "give them something to cry about" while being held back from his very worst impulses by some unspecified institutional inertia. And more broadly, it seems clear that Donnie has long held some kind of mesmerizing power over the mainstream media, which elevated him to the role of a major celebrity despite his lack of good looks, charm, talent, intelligence, or any positive redeeming quality whatsoever. If they called Donnie a fascist, that would mean they would have to give him up -- along with their fantasy of a perfectly calibrated "fascism lite" that would hit only the obnoxious people to their left.
There are all kinds of parallelism between Donnie and fascism that I could make. And each parallel would be valid and burning. But when you have 50% of the American culture determined to call it something else, that parallelism wouldn't (and doesn't) matter.