Jonathan Rauch

So what are the things we're talking about?

About half the items on this list, more or less...

are things that are new since his first term or things that have gotten so much worse that we have to recontextualize them.

Others are old, but now looking back, we can say that they fit into fascism and the demolition of norms is one of these.

He starts his campaign in 2016, 15, I guess,

With trolling, with extreme insults, with making comments about a news anchor's apparently her period, with insulting John McCain and saying he's not a war hero.

Insult after insult.

And we think this is just because he's some kind of crazy person or he's mentally unbalanced.

But this is what you do if you're a fascist and you want to dominate the dialogue because liberals, people like me, people like you who are kind of trained to be civil and tolerant

We can't function in that space.

We just become dumbfounded in that space.

We don't compete there.

And fascists know that.

And it's why something Hitler says in Mein Kampf is, it doesn't matter if they laugh at us or ridicule us.

All that matters is that they can't stop thinking about us.

And that's what they're doing in the context of fascism.

Well, it's a historical pattern.

You're correct.

Hitler was seen as a buffoon in the 1920s.

Mussolini was seen as this kind of strutting poppin' J. Actually, even Hitler wound up thinking of Mussolini as something of a buffoon, but Mussolini was not a buffoon.