Whatever you think of it, the conservatism of the pre-Trump GOP required beliefs. Trump said “You need not believe anything. Luxuriate in your basest hatreds and resentments forever. No thinking required, just the endless catharsis of grievance, as long as you also celebrate my name, my person.”

But the secret to Trump’s power is that his fascistic politics, while separate and often hostile to the GOP’s movement conservativism, were perfectly tuned to the endlessly permissive phantasmagoria of Fox News - and later, the internet and social media.

He doesn’t want government reduction, he wants government EXPANSION - just, the parts that celebrate and protect him. He doesn’t want to cut agencies like the Dept. of Ed because of an ideological commitment to reduced bureaucracy, but because they do not glorify him or give him armed men.

I doubt Trump’s ever owned a gun and he certainly doesn’t care about it. He doesn’t care about abortion beyond loathing women and not wanting them to have his babies. He doesn’t care about small government. He’s an effeminate NYC dandy with narcissistic personality disorder.

Trump isn’t even pro-corporate or pro-market! He’s a mafia shakedown artist who is crushing the economy by extorting everyone in sight, inserting himself directly into private companies and looting their profits. His support for rich people is conditional on their support for him. Personality cult.

Before Trump, these were not major forces in GOP politics. The fear was a movement conservative president, who believed in small government, gun rights, was a devout evangelical, would turn power over to the markets through deregulation, would protect the rich and corporations. Not this.

The only ideological principles to be found anywhere in Trump’s administration are the purely fascistic notions of advancing racial purity, that the will of the nation is embodied in an all-powerful leader, and that national degeneracy must be destroyed.

Trump has historical antecedents and analogues, but they are mostly not American - they’re foreign strongmen like Putin and Orban. His politics are overtly fascistic in a way Bush’s people never were, even if he sometimes practices them in the key of post-9/11 rah-rah Americanism. Sort of.

Bush’s admin was corrupt, and so is Trump’s, but that’s not enough of a commonality. Trump’s corruption is different in kind and orders of magnitude greater; he is auctioning off every national institution and turning the White House into the Trump Co. There isn’t even really a historic analogue.

Trump was not in any sense an ideological movement conservative. He was not a theocrat. He is perhaps the least religious and ideological man to ever hold the presidency. He explicitly campaigned against Bush and company from the start. He was an invader, a demagogue with a cult of personality.