…but he is in most respects "business as usual" for the imprudent wing of the ruling class:

Accusations of fascism and assertions that “This is not normal!” belong to the hysteria of professionals, those for whom Trump’s poor taste and political incorrectness finds its criticism in late show monologues and The New Yorker cartoons. For them, a return to normal is merely not being forced to look at Trump’s spray tan. It is the return of feeling safe enough to not have to care. So long as they know the captain is competent, they can stop worrying about the ship going down and get back to reading White Fragility.

The reality is that Trump’s presidency has been anything but “not normal.” It has continued the same brutal worldview of his predecessors, albeit with unorthodox theatrics that has made the mockery of our two-party system transparent. This became evident when the neutralization of Bernie Sanders’s social-democratic message was celebrated even more by Democrats than Republicans, the former of whom could never get beyond Sanders’s fatal error of using the term “working class.” Unsurprisingly, these same people have nostalgically pined for the “decency” of George W. Bush and rallied behind Joe Biden, a man whose entire political career has been spent championing the very policies that made a figure like Trump appealing to so many in 2016….

There's obviously something to this, but like some on the left (I mean the actual "left," not the neoliberal-identity-politics-pretend-left), he underestimates the real threat posed by Trump's authoritarian instincts.  One would not want to repeat Ernst Thälmann's world-historic mistake of identifying the "social democrats" as the bigger threat!