It must be said that Donald Trump is no Big Brother. Nor, despite his revival of such toxic phrases as “America First” and “enemy of the people,” is he simply a throwback to the 1930s. He has the cruelty and power hunger of a dictator but not the discipline, intellect or ideology. A more apt comparison would be Buzz Windrip, the oafish populist from Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, or, in the real world, Joseph McCarthy, a demagogue who displayed comparable levels of narcissism, dishonesty, resentment and crude ambition, and a similarly uncanny ability to make journalists dance to his
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