This is a good example, relying on an historian who apparently thinks that Mussolini was a fascist, but no one else really was. Here’s a different and more perceptive historian, Robert Paxton:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Obviously the Trumpistas are in this vicinity, and some of them (like Stephen Miller) quite clearly, at least if you listen to what they say. Trump himself, as I have said many times, is too stupid to be a fascist, but he is an instinctive authoritarian veering in that direction. America must be made great again; America is no longer humiliated on the world stage, but is respected (as Trump tells us again and again); Trump has obviously developed a personality cult with violent overtones, going so far as to pardon those involved in the January 6 storm-trooper riot; the nation must be cleansed of immigrants and “left-wing” terrorists; and all this is done with little regard for civil liberties, ethical constraints, or legal constraints (although the last still excercise some constraint, thankfully, which is why we’re not fully there). All this is obvious, so I find it mystifying that anyone sapient wants to deny it. Perhaps the tide will turn, perhaps not. But there is no harm in being clear about what’s going on, and using strong language to describe it, without “pearl clutching” about this particular f-word.