I really need to re-read Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, but just going by memory, these guys are definitely more in the Hitler/Stalin camp than the Mussolini camp. (And Franco was practically a saint next to any of them.) The racial stuff, the terror, the propaganda methods--it's all there. Supplanting independent artistic and intellectual endeavor with mediocre hacks presents more of a challenge in the absence of state run media, and in an era wherein methods for disseminating such are sof diversified, but... they're probably looking into ways to rectify that.
As for the architects? Obviously Trump isn't terribly knowledgeable in these areas, to put it mildly. I suspect Stephen Miller (a Jew, incidentally) is behind a lot of this.
I don't know about that. I think Trump has an eerie gift for how far he can go and get away with it, coming back for a bit more each time. Let me quote a passage from "Defying Hitler", by Sebastian Haffner, a biographical account of life in Germany in the interwar years, which I read a year or two ago. (This passage describes the situation a little before Hitler took power):
"As nothing of the sort
[Hitler being arrested for his cruel and threatening speeches] happened, and on the contrary the man surpassed himself, becoming ever more deranged and monstrous, and also ever more notorious, more impossible to ignore, the effect was reversed. It was then that the real mystery of the Hitler phenomenon began to show itself: the strange befuddlement and numbness of his opponents, who could not cope with his behaviour and found themselves transfixed by the gaze of the basilisk, unable to see that it was hell personified that challenged them.
Summoned as a witness before the highest German court, Hitler bellowed at the judges that he would one day come to power by strictly constitutional means and then heads would roll. Nothing happened. The white haired president of the supreme court did not think of ordering the witness to be taken into custody for contempt. In the presidential elections against Hindenburg, Hitler declared that the victory was his, in any case. His opponent was 85, he was 43; he could wait. Nothing happened. When he said it again at his next meeting, the audience tittered, as if it had been tickled. One night six stormtroopers fell on a "dissident" in his bed and literally trampled him to death, for which they were sentenced to death. Hitler sent them a telegram of praise and acknowledgement. Nothing happened. No, something did happen: the murderers were pardoned."
I feel we see a paler version of this playing out in the USA at present. The prosecutors and the courts have had four years to put this man on trial for subverting American democracy and various other crimes, but they have moved at such a glacial pace that he has been to get re-elected and wriggle out of his date with justice. And now he will subvert the justice process itself. (There is a passage about that too in "Defying Hitler": the writer was a clerk at the court and saw first hand the sacking of the judges and their replacement.) The USA seems paralysed, unable to see the danger Trump represents to everything noble that the country has stood for and everything that binds its society together.
Trump needs control of the judiciary, which he is well on the way to getting, and control of the military, which is his next move, courtesy of this Hegseth fellow. He can't afford another stand-off with someone of the rectitude of Gen. Mark Milley. (Milley himself is on record as saying he fears being called up out of retirement, to be court-martialled.) We've already discussed the likely attempts to cow the less sympathetic media organisations - and of course Musk's X is there already in plain sight.
Where I agree with you about a wider strategy is this Project 2025. Trump didn't invent that. It is the long-gestated product of Republican/plutocrat thinking about how to secure power permanently.
