It Can’t Happen Here, Right? RIGHT???

The adage is old enough to have been lampooned in the title of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel: “It can’t happen here.”

That “it” back then was an imagined fascist takeover of the United States. Writing 13 years after Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy, barely a year after Adolf Hitler installed himself as dictator of Germany and just before Francisco Franco and his Nationalists overthrew the Spanish republic, Lewis spelled out in dystopian detail how it, indeed, could well have happened in America, too.

Nine decades later, that “it” is also what dozens of Republican donors, campaign consultants, pollsters and others interviewed by HuffPost say cannot possibly happen. They scoff at any analogy between former President Donald Trump, a man they support with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and the infamous dictators of the past. They insist that worries about Trump remaking the country as an autocracy are overwrought and designed solely to keep a Democrat in the White House.

“This will be a short period in history and we will swing right back to the middle,” said Hugh Culverhouse, a Miami lawyer who so far has given $500,000 toward Trump’s reelection effort.

While authoritarianism experts and democracy advocates hope Culverhouse is right, they worry – deeply – that he is not.

It is, of course, impossible to know for certain what a second Trump presidency might bring or whether, should he manage to seize absolute power, his rule would come anywhere close to the depravity of the tyrants of the last century.

Still, no other presidential nominee in United States history has behaved with the contempt for democracy that Trump has already demonstrated or even hinted at the sorts of autocratic actions Trump promises if he is returned