People have debated whether Donald Trump is fascist since he announced he was running for president. In 2015, Jamelle Bouie wrote in Slate that Trump, in his campaign speeches and Twitter utterances, exhibited seven of the 14 characteristics identified by the Italian novelist Umberto Eco in his defining essay “Ur-Fascism.” In 2016, the Georgetown professor John McNeill assessed Trump’s fascist tendencies on a scale of zero to four “Benitos,” after the father of fascism, Benito Mussolini. As an amateur, Trump fell short.