I agreed with you up to this point.
DeSantis is not a fascist, and painting him as such will alienate voters genuinely unsure whether to vote for the Democrat or Republican.
If DeSantis is a Mussolini type, what would be his (metaphorical) Ethiopia?
When Trump won, I feared that Mexico would be his Ethiopia. After all that talk about Mexico paying for the wall, I thought he might go to war in an attempt to steal the payment, perhaps by occupying oil fields. But it turned out that even Trump, bad as he is, isn’t a Mussolini.