Sorry, I just don’t get it.
Maybe we should leave it at that.
You mentioned that you had read a great essay and did not say where you had read it. I asked you to provide a link.
No; facts are what is real, or they aren’t facts. “Social consensus” has nothing to do with it. They can deny the facts all they want, but no amount of denial of reality will change it even a little. And history is full of fanatics and dictators who tried simply declaring reality to be what they wanted it to be and walked into disaster because reality didn’t care about their opinion.
Huh? I don’t recall being asked to provide the link. But no matter, glad to share.
You are so right. My mistake. This is odd. What I posted was this:
It was @Ulfreida who referred to a good article and I asked for a link. Not you. Apologies for the confusion (I created). 
I remembered where I read it. Heather Cox Richardson cited someone in a recent Letters From An American blog post. If you don’t subscribe you should.
Sadly, in Canada, many of us don’t feel safe from that.
He may not be interested in “conquering the world” per se, or in some classical invasion sense of things, but if he wants resources around the world, and is completely devoid of principles, the definition doesn’t matter and any country with valuable resources could, to all intents and purposes, be raped for their resources by Trump.
That’s the difference between a Hitler and a Mussolini. A Hitler wants to defeat the big powers and rule the world. A Mussolini wants to bully some weak neighbors. Mussolinis want little wars; Hitlers want world wars.
And there’s the issue of who will come after Trump. Trump himself one way or another is a short term problem; he’s too old to be anything else. But if America goes fascist the next guy is likely to be a lot more driven and Hitlerian than Trump.
I think Trump only gets credit for rabble rousing, for exemplifying bigotry and giving people a model of it that seemed more mainstream than KKK robes. I think the teensy bit of skill came from Republican politicians. Remember when Obama beat Romney and then the RNC autopsy happened? The Republican party was heading into a demographic disaster, committing itself to white supremacy while the US population was clearly heading toward becoming minority white.
I think the Republican mind trust decided that they couldn’t survive as a party if real elections kept happening. I think turning away from democracy was their answer. When famous NYC buffoon Trump started attracting a popular following, Republicans seized the opportunity.
I understand what you’re saying. There is such a thing as observable, scientific fact, obviously. But people can experience ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ independent of facts. Humans have their own reality. We’re storytellers, and we’re story believers.
No worries! 
I think it’s more that they intended one of their own to become dictator, and then Trump almost accidentally stepped into the Trump-shaped hole the Republican party has spent decades carving into itself. The Old Guard Republicans didn’t expect the MAGA types to hijack the party from them (although I think it was an inevitability eventually); the OGR thought they’d just use the “deplorables” as a tool to get elected. The OGR were some of the first people to get their faces eaten by leopards when their tools turned on them and took over.
Ted Cruz “Buh-but… I wuz next! 
”
This is giving them way more credit than they deserve. No one in the GOP either predicted or planned Trump (with the exception of the likes of Bannon or Miller who were thinking from the start “this guy’s gonna be America’s Hitler, I gonna be his Goebbels/Himmler”).
They hated Trump (cos he was clearly out for himself and didn’t give a crap about the GOP, not because he’s fascist) and didn’t think he’d get enough support outside the GOP base. They only changed their tune when it became obvious her completely taken over the GOP base and stood a good chance of winning the general election. At which point, to a man, they clicked their heels, gave a smart Nazi salute and said “how can we help you, mein Fuhrer?”
My thoughts are to wonder when we frogs will realize the water is unlivably hot. We have already entered living in a fascist state, about where Germany was in the mid-1930s, to my mind, and the only question is will we live long enough to see it vanquished, whether by the vote (unlikely, without a national disaster-- another plague, or economic collapse-- neither of which I look forward to enduring) or World War III with the odds not looking good for the Allied powers (mainly Europe and Australia) beating the new Axis (U.S. -Russia alignment). Right now, we’re dealing with massive denial—“It’s not so bad,” “The Constitution will hold up,” “I’m contributing heavily to the 2026 mid-terms,” “Trump will fuck it up through incompetence.” All of which could have, and probably was, voiced by 1930s Germans. They were deluded, and so are we.
We’ve got people here on the SDMB literally saying this, that Trump is too incompetent, and saying Hitler by comparison was a great planner.
Hitler was NOT a bright man. He was not educated and exhibited not a single bit of evidence of high intelligence. It’s documented fact that when talking to his military advisors he struggled to understand complex ideas, which made it hard for them to get him off of talking about small minutiae that he could comprehend and back to topics of importance. He was not stupid - by all accounts he was a decent student in elementary school - but he was no genius.
What he WAS good at was manipulating people with emotion and simple rhetoric to get them to follow him. Gosh, who does that remind me of?
“Transfer three fresh divisions to Berlin immediately’” he ordered in April, 1945.
One thing Hitler and trump have in common is the are both lazy (and both don’t drink or smoke). Temper tanTrump sleeps less and does not even read, but both spent more time with their hobbies (dogs for the one and cheating at golf for the other) than at their desk.
This did not make it any better: others did the hard work.
This dumpster fire is almost starting to make me think that Trump is deliberately sabotaging himself.
Resolve his legal problems, openly grift a big payday and be ‘forced to retire.’