The word 'fascist' has lost all meaning. And Trump is using that to his advantage | Emma Brockes

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

49% : At the weekend the Wall Street Journal, the Murdoch-owned title which, despite its coy insistence that it hasn't endorsed a presidential candidate "since 1928", is staunchly supportive of Trump and his mission, decided to grapple with the f-word once and for all.
49% : Trump had swung by the Journal's offices to be interviewed by the paper's editorial board, a moment that, when it's time to look back on all this, might serve as the point at which another dusty old word - appeasement - was fully re-animated.
41% : In the Atlantic, Trump was compared in a headline to "Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini."
29% : And this week, the New York Times ran a front page interview with John Kelly, Trump's former chief of staff, who during the encounter, incredibly, read out the definition of the word "fascist" he had found online, and confirmed that in his view Trump fit the bill.
29% : "That is, yours would not be a fascist-style government that would use its agencies, entities or military to move against your political foes because they have opposed you - is that correct?"Despite the fact Noonan's elbow was buried in Trump's ribs and she was practically doing Marx brothers' eyebrows at him, it took Trump a moment and several digressions to catch on to what it was Noonan was after.
29% : It then suggested that Trump is not a "unique threat to democracy" because, in fact, it is the Democrats who have broken "all sorts of political norms to defeat him".
27% : And when it is used for Trump, the word has tended to be batted easily back to the Democrats as a piece of hysteria, not least by Elon Musk, for whom "fascist" has a non-hysterical meaning only when he is using it to describe, for example, efforts by the county sheriff's office to shut down Tesla production during the pandemic.
24% : From multidirections and across multiplatforms there is a push among opponents of Trump to slap the electorate in the face - Come on!
10% : Addressing a crowd in Pennsylvania last week, Kamala Harris quoted Gen Mark Milley, "Donald Trump's top general", who, she said, "has called Trump, and I quote, 'fascist to the core'".
5% : Trump has been called a fascist by commentators before, obviously, but it has rarely come from the very top - though in 2022, Joe Biden called Trump's philosophy "semi-fascism", a doomed effort to put some nuance back in the term - nor in such concentrated form.

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