Is Donald Trump turning into a fascist with each succeeding comment?

[Statilius the Epicurean]

He's most accurately the American equivalent of the anti-immigrant, anti-EU populist parties in Europe, which range from backwards-looking liberal-conservatism (UKIP) to outright neo-Nazism (Golden Dawn). Reaction to the forces of globalisation, post-Great Recession economic stagnation and rapid cultural change are underlying all these movements, but their particular expression is shaped by the national context in which they operate.

Whether or not they are actually fascist programmatically or self-consciously is besides the point, since the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini was also itself a product of a bygone historical period that can't be transplanted to the present. That said, the social base of the NSDAP in the 30's was pretty much exactly the same as what we think of as the typical Tea Partier: the rural lower-middle class with its traditional values squeezed from above by economic crisis. I remember listening to Nigel Farage's speech at CPAC and thinking that his rhetoric was almost exactly identical in substance to that of Hitler's (save "evil big business" in place of "Jewish capitalism"). That absolutely does not mean President Trump would invade Mexico for lebensraum, but that the social forces which produced fascism in the 30's are producing movements again within a contemporary material context.

tl;dr: It's fascism, Jim, but not as we know it.