Trump is starting to act like an outright fascist, so I think it's a good time to look back at history to see what mistakes were made that allowed fascists to rise in the past.

Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat It.

Ernst Thalmann, leader of the German Communists (KPD) called the Social Democrats "social fascists" and regarded them as the main enemy even in the face of Hitler's rise. One of the slogans the KPD used was "after Hitler, our turn!"

Thalmann died in a concentration camp in 1944.

Also, the 1932 Federal election was the last free and fair election in a unified Germany until 1990. So thinking that your turn is right around the corner is a great misjudgment.

"Both within Germany and abroad, there were initially few fears that Hitler could use his position to establish his later dictatorial single-party regime. Rather, the conservatives that helped to make him chancellor were convinced that they could control Hitler

and "tame" the Nazi Party while setting the relevant impulses in the government themselves; foreign ambassadors played down worries by emphasizing that Hitler was "mediocre" if not a bad copy of Mussolini; even SPD politician Kurt Schumacher trivialized Hitler"

Even the Jewish German community were convinced that "nobody would dare to touch [their] constitutional rights".

This strikes me a frighteningly familiar.

A major worry of mine is that this won't strike most Americans as familiar because their knowledge of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is sorely lacking.

http://claimscon.org/study/ 

As I said in the beginning, those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.