Was Trump a Fascist?

Here’s a great article whose author argues that, where Trump’s policies were brutally neoliberal, racist, nativist, authoritarian, and narcissistic, they were not fascist.

I won’t try to summarize, except to say that there are, to be sure, different flavors of fascism, and I’ll concede that Trump was unable to achieve any of them.

I guess I would call his politics “proto-fascist.” With every victory he scored in escaping removal from office, he became bolder in taking actions that moved him even closer to absolute power. This culminated in something never before experienced in the United States: a colossal attempt to overturn the results of a presidential election, one he had lost by 8 million popular and 74 electoral votes.

What if he had succeeded in his attempt to coerce the Secretaries of State in Georgia and Arizona?  We know about those, because there we have taped recordings, but in what other states did he attempt to tamper with the election results?  In other words, what if he actually had been able to topple American democracy, and get to a position where he and his crimes would have become completely unassailable?

This nation came within a gnat’s derrière of falling to a dictator.  Would you have called that fascism?  Does it matter?