Loved Madeline Albright's brilliant book, Fascism- A Warning. Excerpts from her chapter on Donald Trump:

"This presidency has often been painful to observe. I find it shocking to cross the Atlantic and hear America described as a threat to democratic institutions and values.

"A month after Trump's inauguration, the head of the European Council listed four dangers to the EU: Russia, terrorism, China, and the United States.

"Since early 2017, surveys show a marked decline in respect for the United States. In Germany, belief that the American president can be counted on to do the right thing shrunk from 86% under his predecessor President Obama to 11% under Trump. In France, the fall was from 84% to 14%. In Japan, 74% to 24%. In South Korea, 84 to 17.

"Too often, Trump has attempted to fulfill campaign promises that he should have never made. The list is a long one and includes: renunciation of the Paris Climate Agreement; putting at risk the benefits of the North America Free Trade Agreement; badmouthing the Iran nuclear pact; squandering resources on the Mexico wall; and proposing to slash our budget for diplomacy, development, and environmental health.

"The potential damage may be of several types. Trump's election alone cast doubt in international circles on the judgment of American people and on the reliability of the democratic systems to produce defensible outcomes.

"The commander in chief's swaggering disregard for how his words are perceived has at times stunned the world, including allies of long standing in Europe and Asia.

"Finally, and even more seriously, I fear a return to the international climate that prevailed in the 1920s and '30s, when the United States withdrew from the global stage and countries everywhere pursued what they perceived to be their own interests without regard to larger and more enduring goals.

"When arguing that every age has its own Fascism, Primo Level added that the critical point can be reached not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned.'

"If he is right (and I think he is), we have reason to be concerned by the gathering array of political and social currents buffeting us today- the dark underside of the technological revolution, the corroding effects of power, the American president's disrespect for truth, the widening acceptance of dehumanizing insults, Islamophobia, an anti-Semitism as being within the bounds of normal public debate.

"We are not there yet, but these feel like signposts on the road back to the era when Fascism found nourishment and individual tragedies were multiplied million-fold."