Past Trump advisers say he’s fascist. Trump says he’s not. Whom to trust?

One of Donald Trump’s most effective and most useful tactics in rebuffing criticism has been to insist that any critic is operating in bad faith. There are no valid complaints about Trump, he insists, and there are no reliable complainers. Saying something critical of the former president means that you are not loyal to the former president and therefore that your criticism is tainted by your anti-Trump bias. Question-begging as political defense.