section_path: Invocations of the comparison/Invocations before the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack
section_name: Invocations before the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack
paragraph_text: Invocations before the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack
  
  Trump was described as a fascist by philosophers such as Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky. In 2017, Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder published On Tyranny, warning about the danger signs of fascism in the Trump era. Political theorist William E. Connolly analyzed Trump's rhetorical appeal to the working class, exploring its affinities with fascist rhetoric. In her 2018 book Fascism: A Warning, former US Secretary of State and then Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service Madeleine Albright referenced Donald Trump several times; she refused to directly define Trump as a fascist, while comparing his rhetoric and methods with fascist leaders, and characterizing him as the first modern antidemocratic U.S. president. In 2018, American-Canadian cultural critic Henry Giroux wrote an essay linking the subjects of fascism, right-wing populism, Trump, white nationalism, education, and politics. In 2016, Ewan McGaughey in the British Journal of American Legal Studies suggested that Trump's movement was weaker than previous fascists as it was "too hostile to insider welfare", and instead highlighted the Supreme Court's decisions in Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo as an assault on democracy and human rights, starting a long-term trend towards fascism. McGaughey stated the Court's decisions enabled to the election of Trump but that Trump's politics should properly be characterized as "fascism-lite". In How Fascism Works (2018), Jason Stanley wrote that Trump employed "fascist techniques to excite his base and erode liberal democratic institutions".
  
  After Trump called for a Muslim travel ban in late 2015, he was described as a fascist by some Democratic and Republican figures, including Conservative activists Max Boot, Robert Kagan, Bret Stephens, John Noonan, former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, and Libertarian politician Gary Johnson. Republican former governor Christine Todd Whitman referred to Trump's 2015 calls for the travel ban as "the kind of rhetoric that allowed Hitler to move forward". Conservative commentator Glenn Beck compared Trump with Hitler in 2016, calling him "dangerous" and stating that, "we all look at Adolf Hitler in 1940. We should look at Adolf Hitler in 1929... He was a kind of a funny kind of a character who said the things that people are thinking... Where Donald Trump takes it, I have absolutely no idea." Former Republican governor of Virginia Jim Gilmore said that Trump's plans of creating a "deportation force" was "fascist talk". JD Vance said in 2016 that he saw Trump as either a politician like Richard Nixon or "America's Hitler", also calling him "reprehensible". Despite this, he went on to run alongside Trump in his 2024 presidential campaign. Fascism scholar Federico Finchelstein said about Trump that, "Fascism sometimes becomes an attribute to describe someone that is intolerant or totalitarian or even racist... When dealing with an important part of the nation such as Hispanics, I think he definitely fits those categories."
  
  American politician Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has compared Trump to both Hitler and Mussolini, described him as a "threat to democracy" in April 2024 and endorsed the suggestion that some of Trump's base supporters were "outright Nazis". He said in December 2016 that Trump was different from Hitler in at least one way, that being that "Hitler was interested in policy". Kennedy has also compared Trump to Father Coughlin, an American Nazi sympathizer radio host from the 1930s. In 2024, Kennedy endorsed Trump for president, who then nominated him for Secretary of Health and Human Services.
  
  Anne Frank 's stepsister Eva Schloss said in 2016 that Trump was "acting like another Hitler". In 2020, American journalist Rich Benjamin stated that Trump's political movement is "shot through with fascism". Professor Nicholas de Genova described Trump as the leader of a "white supremacist fascist movement" and examined Trump's birtherism, racist rhetoric, voter fraud falsehoods, anti-immigration policies, terrorist and white supremacist events that happened during his presidency, plus Republican capitulation to Trumpism, signaling the whole as the birth of a civil war ethos, in which "everything is permitted".