His putsch was shit. Embarrassingly so. He neither had the deep state support or the numbers on the streets to get anywhere close to something that might be called a coup. If the March on Rome had turned out like that Mussolini would have slinked away in shame. It was little more than a protest, albeit it a very violent one containing a small number of agitators with insurrectionist aspirations.
His language is not that far off the kind of rhetoric Thatcher and others employed in the past. It's easy to forget just how virulent some of the language used back then was, when LGB people were routinely smeared as perverts, the loony left was destroying the fabric of society and miners were the enemy within who had to be crushed at all costs.
Don't get me wrong though. I'm not undermining the threat he represents. Worse than Thatcher is bad, really bad. But he hasn't really behaved in the way radical wannabe dictators have in the past - most of them were already up to their neck in murders by the time they got to the stage Trump is at, and he hasn't got long left, electorally or literally. And his ideology is not out of step with mainstream capitalist thought, albeit at it's most extreme end.
But that doesn't mean I don't think the next four years won't be a nightmare, or that Trump doesn't have the capacity to veer off in a totalitarian direction depending on how events unfold, or that there might be something much worse waiting in the wings if Trump fails in his ambitions or drops dead.
