Perhaps, but in my opinion this incident does not demonstrate it. His explanation is plausible.
> "So I help a seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black, Ye (Kanye West), who has been decimated in his business and virtually everything else, and who has always been good to me, by allowing his request for a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, alone, so that I can give him very much needed ‘advice’," Trump wrote in a message posted Saturday to his Truth Social account. "He shows up with 3 people, two of which I didn’t know, the other a political person who I haven’t seen in years. I told him don’t run for office, a total waste of time, can’t win. Fake News went CRAZY!"
His explanation is not printed at the beginning. It is printed near the end, only after quoting 10 people who disapproved of the meeting, plus an extensive catalogue of Ye's and Fuente's moral failings. The article relies on emotionalism to craft a specific view. They even capitalize CRAZY, which makes the explanation sound less plausible.
Trump may indeed be a "textbook fascist" whatever that means, but this article does not grant its audience the intelligence to work that out for themselves. Rather, to accept the article without skepticism requires one to believe that Trump is a white supremacist anti-Semite. That will be much easier to do if one has been primed by similar low-quality articles to believe it.
Ye has been a friend to Trump and is clearly disturbed. He brought people along with whom Trump was not familiar, yet the article makes it sound as if he deliberately invited them to attend some kind of sinister summit. The idea that a Latino and Black man would be welcome in white supremacist circles is absurd.
Trump has been the most pro-Israel President in history, and has a Jewish son-in-law - one of his closest advisors - and grandchildren. He is not an anti-Semite, so the article's attempt to tar him with that brush is silly.
Just walk through each article about Trump with the skeptical view that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you will see that most such articles - even from formerly well-respected journals like NYT and WaPo - rely on emotionalism to convey an impression about Trump. The only evidence that Trump is a dangerous fascist is of similar low quality. Like the evidence for alien visitation: lots of evidence, but all of it very low-quality rumors, innuendo and wishful thinking.
The question of whether Trump is a good President is a separate matter. He may be petty, vindictive, selfish. On the other hand, he invited a friend for counseling at great political risk to himself. He's also the only President in my lifetime who did not start a new war. So, a mixed bag, like all the others. The extreme hysteria around Trump actually prevents people like me from evaluating Trump on his actual merits. Every article only highlights the negative of anything Trump does, which is as unhelpful as highlighting only the positive.
But no, I don't think Trump is a fascist, textbook or otherwise. I think the unhinged reactions to Trump are far more dangerous to our country, to be honest. We allowed the FBI to suppress a news story last election that would have been bad for Biden. That's terrifying.
> He's also the only President in my lifetime who did not start a new war.
There is no coherent standard by which both Trump did not start a war and every other recent President has. This is just a “say something often enough and people begin to accept it as true” thing.
> The extreme hysteria around Trump actually prevents people like me from evaluating Trump on his actual merits.
You seem to have a very firm opinion of him on the merits, which is inconsistent with believing that you have been prevented from that.
> Every article only highlights the negative of anything Trump doe
Where'd you get the idea that he is the only President in your life not to start a war then? The truth is that there are plenty of outlets pushing neutral and positive Trump outlets, and even actively suppressing stories that might hurt Trump (less so now than immediately before the election, as a whole bunch stopped such suppression when it no longer served to influence the election), and “every article highlights only the negative” is a lie.
> But no, I don't think Trump is a fascist, textbook or otherwise
He openly has proposed personal-loyalty-based purges of the military officer corps and thr civilian civil service, deploying the military domestically in a deportation operation he explicitly modeled on the notoriously racisr, due process denying, legal injigrant and citizen expelling Operation Wetback of the 1950s (which itself, unlike Trumps overt olan, stopped short of using the military), massively scaled up, and has proposed solving urban homelessness by forcibly relocating the homeless to concentration camps.
And lets not get started on Musk, D.O.G.E., and fascist corporatism.
(But I, too, think Trump is not exactly a fascist, he’s a kleptocrat hiding behind fascism. But the functional difference between that and an actual fascist is likely to be minor.)
> "So I help a seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black, Ye (Kanye West), who has been decimated in his business and virtually everything else, and who has always been good to me, by allowing his request for a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, alone, so that I can give him very much needed ‘advice’," Trump wrote in a message posted Saturday to his Truth Social account. "He shows up with 3 people, two of which I didn’t know, the other a political person who I haven’t seen in years. I told him don’t run for office, a total waste of time, can’t win. Fake News went CRAZY!"
His explanation is not printed at the beginning. It is printed near the end, only after quoting 10 people who disapproved of the meeting, plus an extensive catalogue of Ye's and Fuente's moral failings. The article relies on emotionalism to craft a specific view. They even capitalize CRAZY, which makes the explanation sound less plausible.
Trump may indeed be a "textbook fascist" whatever that means, but this article does not grant its audience the intelligence to work that out for themselves. Rather, to accept the article without skepticism requires one to believe that Trump is a white supremacist anti-Semite. That will be much easier to do if one has been primed by similar low-quality articles to believe it.
Ye has been a friend to Trump and is clearly disturbed. He brought people along with whom Trump was not familiar, yet the article makes it sound as if he deliberately invited them to attend some kind of sinister summit. The idea that a Latino and Black man would be welcome in white supremacist circles is absurd.
Trump has been the most pro-Israel President in history, and has a Jewish son-in-law - one of his closest advisors - and grandchildren. He is not an anti-Semite, so the article's attempt to tar him with that brush is silly.
Just walk through each article about Trump with the skeptical view that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you will see that most such articles - even from formerly well-respected journals like NYT and WaPo - rely on emotionalism to convey an impression about Trump. The only evidence that Trump is a dangerous fascist is of similar low quality. Like the evidence for alien visitation: lots of evidence, but all of it very low-quality rumors, innuendo and wishful thinking.
The question of whether Trump is a good President is a separate matter. He may be petty, vindictive, selfish. On the other hand, he invited a friend for counseling at great political risk to himself. He's also the only President in my lifetime who did not start a new war. So, a mixed bag, like all the others. The extreme hysteria around Trump actually prevents people like me from evaluating Trump on his actual merits. Every article only highlights the negative of anything Trump does, which is as unhelpful as highlighting only the positive.
But no, I don't think Trump is a fascist, textbook or otherwise. I think the unhinged reactions to Trump are far more dangerous to our country, to be honest. We allowed the FBI to suppress a news story last election that would have been bad for Biden. That's terrifying.