IT’S hard not to call Donald Trump a fascist. His latest brutality – publicly traducing Ilhan Omar, a Muslim-American Democrat politician, then standing silent as the massive crowd shouted for her repatriation (“Send her home!”) – seems straight from the playbook of the 1930s and 40s.

The charismatic leader, and his devotees, confirm their superiority by defining themselves – and their nation – against an ethnic “other” in their midst.

This is the peak of a recent escalation, in an already befouled landscape. The Hispanic Democrat – and socialist – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explicitly tied Trump to fascism, when she described the migrant detention centres on the American border as “concentration camps”.

Taking to CNN, Ocasio-Cortez said: “This is an opportunity for us to talk about how we learn from our history in order to prevent it from ever happening in any form, at any step – whether it’s a concentration camp, or whether it’s the final steps of that phase.”

The National:
From left, Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley responded to Trump’s rant about them

Trump had already reacted to AOC and her “Squad” of Congresswomen – including Omar, but also Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib – by suggesting, in tweets, they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came”. (All of them US citizens, three actually born there).

READ MORE: Donald Trump claims he was 'not happy' with 'send her back' chants

And so it goes. By now, most of you won’t need to be persuaded, as one academic put it, that Trump is “a total xenophobic racist male chauvinist bastard”. But, as Roger Griffin from Oxford Brookes University continues, “he can still not be a fascist”.

Why be cautious about applying the ultimate political judgement to such a manifest monster?

Some of the US left worry that, if Trump’s is rendered as such a total horror, it means being prematurely invited into a “united front” against him. A front in which the structural problems, economic and racial, that led to Trump are still not directly addressed by a sclerotic Democrat leadership.

READ MORE: When racist chants poll well, what hope is there for the US?

Some academics want to be more precise about the term, both historically and theoretically – in order that we can be ready to ward off a genuine fascist threat.

For example, the 30s fascisms were very much forged in crucibles of war and imperial expansion. Trump, for all his twittered and scattered sabre-rattling, is all about reducing America’s role as a nation-building interventionist. (Though who knows what conflagration his tweeting thumbs may blunder into).

There’s also some crucial social differences. The 30s fascisms were a bourgeois nationalist response to a radicalised and internationalist working class. Trump’s support flips this round. They comprise an abandoned working class who see themselves as distinct from, and oppressed by, the globally oriented knowledge elites, flying over their heads from coast to coast.

Call this an “illiberal populism”—one that might easily respond to a hardcore economic alternative from the left. But it’s perhaps not quite yet fascist.

The third scholars’ objection looks to how the 30s fascisms forced their way into power by means of mass organised parties. They deployed intimidation, violence and murder to subvert the rule of law. Are Trump’s carefully managed electoral turnouts, or his expiatory public rallies, really evidence of this?

Now the rise in racially and ideologically motivated attacks and shootings is factually undeniable. And the harassment of journalists as peddlers of “fake news” is directly reminiscent of when Hitler and his Nazis called the news media “Lügenpresse” (lying press). But is Trump organising goon squads to physically disrupt courts, town halls and editorial floors?

(Some might immediately object: what else is ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under the Trump regime, than his own police force – monitoring, harassing and deporting immigrant workers daily? Yet ICE is a government department that functioned and flourished under both the Bush and Obama administrations).

The final point the academics make is to note the nostalgic, protectionist overtones of Trumpism. It’s about making America great again, restoring the industrial (and ethnic) supremacies of yesteryear.

The National:

Trump doesn’t seem to have that ambition to revolutionise and transform the nation (and its racial stock) which typifies the European fascisms of the 30s. He displays little of the diseased futurism or programmatic purism that came from Hitler or Mussolini.

These objectors are in no way intending to reduce the horror of Trump. But they are trying to dissuade us from applying the label of “fascist” too eagerly. They’re afraid that it might attribute too much fiendish intent to a phenomenon that is much more incoherent, contingent – and therefore opposable – than the juggernaut of cruelty and perversion implied by “fascism”.

There is one bit of the “fascist” charge which I would want to take seriously. That’s the kind of deep psychology operating among core elements of the Trump support.

Many commentators find themselves going back to the work of post-War intellectuals like Theodor Adorno – who nowadays seem quite uncannily insightful.

Why do a demagogue’s supporters so identify with him or her? Adorno would suggest that there’s not just Trump’s narcissism to contend with here, but that of his followers too. “A feeling that one has failed to meet standards one has set for oneself”, as critic Eli Zaretsky puts it.

The leader invites idealism “by possessing the typical qualities of the individuals who follow him, but in a ‘clearly marked and pure form’, that gives the impression ‘of greater force and of more freedom of libido’”.

In Adorno’s words, “the superman has to resemble the follower and appear as his ‘enlargement’... the leader ‘completes’ the follower’s self-image”.

Which probably isn’t a great self-image, under these modern and stressful times. And so Trump’s solecisms, crudities and instinctual responses bond him more tightly to his followers, rather than alienate them.

“The leader can guess the psychological wants and needs of those susceptible to his propaganda because he resembles them psychologically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to express without inhibitions what is latent in them, rather than by any intrinsic superiority,” writes Adorno.

“To meet the unconscious wishes of his audience, the leader simply turns his own unconscious outward ... Experience has taught him consciously to exploit this faculty, to make rational use of his irrationality, similarly to the actor, or a certain type of journalist who knows how to sell their sensitivity.”

For a creature whose character was honed in the realms of property speculation and reality TV, “making rational use of his irrationality” as a demagogue would seem to be a smooth career move for Trump.

But all of this is probably the murkiest issue in contemporary politics: the charisma of political leaders in a hyper-mediated age. How much can this charisma subvert or shape the rational self-interests of voters?

How can it be refined, developed or taught to the ambitious? Or better, how can we develop the critical methods and skills to resist their charms?

Donald Trump is a object of fascination. Does that make him a fascist? Or should it make you an anarchist? It’s important to gaze critically upon such a lurid spectacle. But sometimes it’s more important just to turn away from the tinsel show, and turn to each other.