-->
@Double_R
Fascist? Sure, if you're broad with the term. Fascist doesn't just mean evil, it's a specific brand of authoritarianism. For example, was Genghis Khan a fascist, despite the fascist movement not officially forming until long after his death? He certainly did a lot of things we would call fascist today. So it's not really objectively measurable any more than you can objectively measure whether someone is secretly a Republican or a Democrat. Sometimes it's just what party they're registered as.
Trump isn't the first president to take aggressive military actions or challenge the checks and balances on his office, nor the first politician to stretch the law to attack his political opponents. Maybe it's simply the case that Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, Lincoln, Truman, and FDR are all fascists, but if one authoritarian action makes someone a fascist, then I'm not sure how useful the term is, or how consistent it is with how other political descriptors are used. Does promoting socialized medicine make someone a socialist if they support the free market in some other respects?
So in just the past week Trump has deployed the US military onto US streets
Is that fascist? An appeals court temporarily allowed this, so I think that's a stretch.
endorsed his administration arresting the governor of California, and said anyone who protests his birthday parade will be met with force, publicly pressured a news organization to fire a journalist for saying mean things about Trump
Sure, let's grant that this is authoritarian. I think the bar for fascism is probably higher than that, given that he's not the first president to make vague and likely unenforceable threats.
arrested a sitting US senator for the crime of asking a question at a press conference.
He said he wasn't arrested. But sure, let's grant that forcibly removing him from a building is authoritarian.
Are we seriously still pretending this isn't everything the left said about Trump during the campaign that you all claimed was just TDS?
Everything the left said? So Trump has banned all abortions and put all gay people in death camps?
I'd say Trump is more authoritarian than some presidents and less authoritarian than others. Arguably FDR (or any president to fight a world war) has a better claim to being fascist than Trump. If we're calling Trump fascist for what he's doing now, you definitely can't give a pass to FDR for internment camps or to Washington for owning slaves or to Abraham Lincoln for forcing Native Americans out of their land. But who knows, maybe they're all fascist. I definitely think you could make a case that they were all evil to some extent (imo, this depends a lot on whether they sincerely believed their actions were justified). For fascism, it's all a matter of where you draw the line, and we've been pretty generous to presidents up to this point.
