Corey Robin via Facebook alerted me to this great essay on “the Trump as fascist thesis”

Dylan Riley: What Is Trump?. New Left Review 114, November-December 2018.

The pitfalls of bad historical analogizing laid bare in ubiquitous attempts to pin a ‘fascist’ label on the 45th president. Instead, Riley argues, Trump is better grasped as an incoherent amalgam of Weberian forms of rule-ramshackle patrimonialism, weak charisma-operating like a foreign body inserted into America’s capitalist-bureaucratic state.