I dunno what you want me to say:
A fascist got himself elected president of the United States, did a bunch of fascist shit, and then tried a type of coup known as an autogolpe - a coup to keep a strongman in power anti-democratically. Instead of putting that guy's ass in jail, we're putting him all over our TV under the logic that "he's running for office, so stopping him is anti-democratic."
In many ways, Weimar Germany would laugh at how weak WE are; so the comparison is more than apt.
@AnarchoNinaWrites IMHO, it's still that Trump saw that the GOP had turned itself into a fascist leaning party, and took advantage for his own gain while pushing it all the way over the ledge. He's too lazy, corrupt and incompetent to be any good at being a fascist, but those he surrounded himself with and who enabled him? Oh yeah.
Point being that the problems with the GOP are far deeper than just Trump.
@pyperkub Sure, I think roughly half of Republicans are that sort of flavor of populist isolationism: protectionist tariffs, skeptical of international institutions like ICC/etc, against international-police-style wars, fear of immigration, pissed about the state of working class jobs. It surged around 2016 due to Syria, and Trump & Brexit rode that wave. Sanders too, maybe?
It isn't useful to call that "fascist" of course, but politics seems to be about nonsense breathless rhetoric, so I'll ignore that for now.
Was it an attempted autogolpe? The sheer number of lawsuits Trump's team filed was indeed over the top, but it is the "front door", so to speak: if that was autogolpe, then you could also argue that Gore in 2000 was attempting an autogolpe, just he gave up way before Trump did. Same with many other losing candidates. That's silly, so this charge of an autogolpe seems similarly absurd.
Put it this way: if autogolpe was the plan, he would have been a lot more careful about the judges he installed: many of *his* judges shut his lawsuits down!
@ech Also, thanks for introducing me to the autogolpe term - hadn't heard it before.. It is rather awkward to use in a sentence tho! ;)
@pyperkub sure, human nature to blame the other team. (Just look around mastodon.social etc and see all the blaming of "fascists" or whatever going on here.) And I think you're right, it's maybe a bit going out of your way to be unflattering, but blaming others is sort of what populism is all about, whether it's sanders/warren or trump/tucker.
Yeah, stoking fear is a great way for governments to consolidate power. Both parties play into that, for sure.
"build a wall rather than pass immigration legislation" – I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Both parties built the wall, both parties whine about our collective inability to pass "meaningful comprehensive immigration reform", whatever that means. You see a direct line from those things to authoritarianism?
@ech regarding Build the Wall v Legislation - mostly talking about how Trump's *signature* issue in 2016 was Immigration and the Wall, yet it was the Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress who a) Never passed an Immigration package and b) killed Trump/Pelosi's DACA for Wall Funding deal. As such, I see the GOP Immigration position as "our donors love it the way it is, but our voters hate it, so we'll stoke the hate, rake in the cash, and continue to do nothing but sell more hate".
@ech I do think that a lot of the issues with the Republican base is the belief they have embraced that everything is somebody else's fault, and so targeting "somebody else" becomes a panacea for actually solving the root policy problems (which, of course, those who finance the politicians want to stay that way - see build a wall rather than pass immigration legislation). And, of course, that is how Authoritarians everywhere gain power.