section_path: Invocations of the comparison/Invocations after the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack
section_name: Invocations after the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack
paragraph_text: Invocations after the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack
  
  Following the January 6 Capitol attack, Robert Paxton, who had initially resisted calling Trump a fascist, announced that the label now seemed necessary. Mattias Gardell argued that Trump's MAGA campaign centered fascist visions of a national rebirth and that Hitler and Mussolini were also dismissed as "egomaniacs, big-mouths, and buffoons" by commentators at the time. David Renton has said that figures such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Mosley became fascists over time and that January 6 served as a warning to America about how vulnerable it is to authoritarianism. Maria Bucur has argued that the "surfacing of fascist sympathies" were facilitated by Trump. Brian Hughes has called for further study of Trumpism and Trump's fascist merits through Lacanian terms, arguing that Trump "not only meets the criteria of charismatic strongman" but "he exceeds them".
  
  Ruth Wodak has said that while Trump's rhetoric applies "salient discursive practices of fascism", it is not useful to lose oneself in "terminological debates", and instead encouraged greater study on Trumpism's socio-political, historical and situative contexts, along with the ideological positions of his close advisors such as Steve Bannon. Raul Cârstocea argues that Trump has "adopted fascist ideological or stylistic trappings without embracing fascism's revolutionary impetus" and that whether or not Trump is a fascist is less relevant, as "Trump did radicalize the Republican Party considerably and he did mobilize actual fascists to seek a violent overthrow of the establishment" and that Trump may or may not represent a "2.0 version of analogue fascism for our digital post-fascist present".
  
  In Fascism in America, a book published after the January 6 attacks, Ruth Ben-Ghiat stated that, "Trump can be called a fascist because he differed from any previous American president in having the explicit goal of destroying democracy at home, disengaging America from democratic international networks, and allying with the autocrats he admires, like Putin." Ben-Ghiat further stated that she "started writing about Trump in 2015 because everything about him seemed familiar to me as someone who had studied fascism for decades: the rallies, the attacks on the press, the lying, the loyalty oaths, the declarations of violent intent, the need to dominate and humiliate".
  
  In Jeremy W. Peters 's 2022 book Insurgency, former Trump staffer Steve Bannon was repeatedly quoted comparing Trump to Hitler. Bannon said that Trump's aides showing him misleading polling data during the 2020 election was "like showing Hitler fake armor divisions when the Reichstag is burning down". According to the book, Bannon said that the sight of Trump descending from an elevator in New York made a Triumph of the Will scene in which Hitler exits his aircraft to an adoring crowd "flash" through his mind. According to the book, Bannon told Peters that he thought "that's Hitler", meaning it as a compliment to Trump.
  
  Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying author Henk de Berg said that there are "massive differences" between Trump and Hitler, but also that both politicians shared similar rhetorical patterns. He stated that, "most of their electorate are dissatisfied with the status quo for a variety of reasons (globalization, automation) so they want to change the system and here you have an anti-establishment candidate who is not politically correct."
  
  Mike Godwin, the creator of Godwin's Law, stated in 2023 that, "Trump's opening himself up to the Hitler comparison." He also said that, "You could say the 'vermin' remark or the 'poisoning the blood' remark, maybe one of them would be a coincidence. But both of them pretty much make it clear that there's something thematic going on, and I can't believe it's accidental."