Professor Peter Fritzsche recently wrote an op ed in The Forward about the 2024 presidential election.
Voters elected Hitler because they liked his fascist promise. Trump’s reelection repeats that history
"The end of the presidential campaign was characterized by broad charges that President-elect Donald Trump is a fascist. Vice President Kamala Harris and her surrogates invited voters to view the former president as a reckless, self-interested dictator in the making. Trump’s own former chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, characterized him as an authoritarian “in the far right area” and said he “falls into the general definition of fascist.” The assumption was that voters would be turned off by seeing Trump for what he is — authoritarian, pitiless, hateful — and would recognize him as a kind of Hitler.
Hitler, the most identifiable villain in modern history, and America’s arch-enemy in World War II.
But the charges didn’t stick. “Fascist” and “authoritarian” proved themselves to be abstract, unfamiliar, and even esoteric labels that did not particularly matter to voters concerned with inflation or immigration. And there was another, less savory, reason that the charges did not really hurt Trump: To suggest that Trump was a fascist was, actually, to identify many of the attributes that made him appealing."