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In 2016, before most people imagined that Donald Trump would become a serious contender for the Presidency, the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik wrote about what he later called the \u201cF-word\u201d: fascism.\xa0 He saw Trump\u2019s authoritarian rhetoric not as a new force in America but as a throwback to a specific historical precedent in nineteen-thirties Europe.\xa0 In the years since, Trump has called for \u201cterminating\u201d articles of the Constitution, has marked the January 6th insurrectionists as political martyrs, and has called his enemies animals, vermin, and \u201cnot people,\u201d and demonstrated countless other examples of authoritarian behavior.\xa0 In a new essay, Gopnik reviews a book by the historian Timothy W. Ryback, and considers Adolf Hitler\u2019s unlikely ascent in the early nineteen-thirties. He finds alarming analogies with this moment in the U.S.\xa0 In both Trump and Hitler, \u201cThe allegiance to the fascist leader is purely charismatic,\u201d Gopnik says. In both men, he sees \u201csomeone whose power lies in his shamelessness,\u201d and whose prime motivation is a sense of humiliation at the hands of those described as \xe9lites. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t that the great majority of\xa0 Germans were suddenly lit aflame by a nihilist appetite for apocalyptic transformation,\u201d Gopnik notes. \u201cThey [were] voting to protect what they perceive as their interest from their enemies. Often those enemies are largely imaginary.\u201d