A more compelling Italian comparison, I think, is Benito Mussolini who, as Wikipedia notes, "dropped all pretense of democracy and set up a legal dictatorship." What we're witnessing with Trump is much more akin to that. The question remains as to whether we as a people will arrest his autocratic rise after he succeeds in demonizing the media, or be blind to it as the Italians were with Mussolini or the Germans were with Hitler. 

The other day I was watching a show about the Third Reich and a Jewish writer chronicling Hitler's rise to power said watching the Germans embrace Hitler was like watching people who were in a trance together. Vintage video of a Hitler rally then focused on one particularly Aryan-looking woman who looked as if she was indeed in a führer-induced trance. That image has haunted me ever since. 

With Trump we're witnessing the normalization of extremism, and a willing populace, willfully blind to the truth, is once again being seduced into a collective trance.