CR: There is no question, in my mind, that Trump and his supporters are far-right and illiberal. I’ve said so from the beginning. One of my differences with Snyder and people who subscribe to the view that Trump is a fascist or authoritarian is that their desire to call Trump that often arises from a failure to understand conservatism more generally, which has always been a far-right and illiberal and anti-liberal form of politics. Many of the attributes people decry in Trump and his followers were primary features of the conservatism I was describing in The Reactionary Mind (and got a lot of flak from liberals for so describing). To my mind, the comparisons between Trump and Hitler or Mussolini come from people who only began thinking about American conservatism and the Republican Party when Trump came along.
I would also reject some of the premises of your question. The issue is not that Trump is lazy or incompetent, though he is. As I said in my previous answer, the real reason for Trump’s ineffectiveness has virtually nothing to do with Trump and everything to do with the larger forces on the right that I discussed. Virtually any Republican president elected in 2016 (and I’m not sure anyone but Trump could have been elected) would have been as constrained in their effectiveness as Trump has been.
Conversely, I also think it’s wrong to say that the reason Trump didn’t prevail is that the institutions were stronger than people feared. This is part of an argument that is often falsely posed by liberals and the left: If you assert that Trump is weak and will fail, as I have said from the beginning, people assume that means that the institutions will constrain him. That’s nonsense: American institutions have often been the friend of the most authoritarian projects, as I argued in my first book, Fear: The History of a Political Idea. And in fact, to the extent that Trump’s politics had any juice at all, it was precisely because the institutions support that politics. Where would Trump be without the Electoral College or the Senate confirming his judges and justices—and where would Trumpism be under a Biden administration without the Senate and the courts?
It’s ironic to me that people would choose this moment, and Trump’s presidency, to assign the label “fascist” to the right, for what fascism is about, above all else, is a politics of strength and will. That’s why fascists traditionally loathe the constitutional order: because they think it constrains the assertion of political will. The irony of Trumpist/GOP politics is that it is completely dependent upon the constitutional order. In that regard, it’s almost the complete opposite of fascism.