KEEP THOSE SEAT BELTS BUCKLED.

When Donald Trump tells you who he is, Michael Tomasky of The New Republic says, "believe him."

Trump and his followers are capable of every one of them: shutting down critical voices in the press; banning books, and even burning some, just to drive the point home; banning opposition organizations or even parties; making political arrests of opponents without telling them the charges; purging university faculties; doing the same with the civil service.… If you doubt that President Trump and the Republican Party are capable of all these things and several more, you need to read some history pronto.

Apparently many Americans need to. I woke up Sunday to a Latino man telling CNN, for a story about Trump gaining among Latinos, that well, under Trump, we didn’t have all this inflation. Which is true as far as it goes. The inflation wasn’t Joe Biden’s fault, but of course Biden and the Democrats can’t say that true thing because it sounds like excuse-making. And one can’t blame this man, who I assume is working hard to feed his children, for thinking this way.

But dear God. Can’t we get people to think about fascism, and what Trump would do to this country?

No doubt, the True Believers at Town Hall are all over the projection inherent in that excerpt, invoking social media companies and "Russian disinformation" and "weaponization of government" and all the rest.  Or they can just laugh, as Rick Moran does.

Hitler had brown shirts, the SS, the Gestapo, and the "whole odious apparatus" of Nazism. What's Trump got? The Proud Boys? Oath Keepers? Moms for Liberty? Let's get real.

No Trump is not a Nazi. He's not even close. He'd be a very bad dictator. As we saw in his first term, the promises on the left that Trump was going to destroy the Constitution or set up some kind of authoritarian nightmare of a government never came close to panning out.

Every time the left calls Trump a Nazi, he gets 10,000 more votes. By the time election day arrives Trump will have won in a landslide.

What I observed three years ago might still be relevant today.

The past few years there has been a struggle between a Trumpified Republican party and a fractious coalition of Establishment grifters and Resistance militants. In a Biden presidency, the grifters and the militants will have their spats, with Mr Biden playing the part of a college president who pays lip service to the traditional verities whilst caving to the student militants, and the Trump supporters representing a wild card.

I'm going to continue to be the purist here: if you don't like the idea of a president acting like an elected despot, vest fewer powers in the presidency.