By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

Reconcile the following 10 points if that is even possible.

1. Donald Trump cites Adolf Hitler and praises his Nazi generals for their efficient discharge of his orders.

2. Hitler hated the Jews and ordered genocide on an industrial scale in what was perhaps the greatest single crime in human history.

3. Trump also lauds the coldly violent leader of the Jewish state, Benjamin Netanyahu and particularly admires "Bibi's" unceasing massacre of Gazan civilians which may constitute crimes against humanity and a new genocide.

4. Trump brands those Jews who support Kamala Harris as haters of their own religion and of Israel which, under her, would be gone within a year.

5. Trump fawns over the brutal Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin preferring his word over America's intelligence and security officials.

6. Putin, however, despises America. As well as interfering in US elections and threatening the use of nuclear weapons against civilians, Putin actively supports democracy's enemies, including Iran. Just days ago, the Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch-owned broadsheet, reported that Russia had supplied "targeting data for Yemen's Houthi rebels as they attacked Western ships in the Red Sea ... helping the Iranian-backed group assault a major artery for global trade and further destabilizing the region".

7. Trump boasts that he can end Putin's war with Ukrainian "Nazis" (Putin's words) in a single day.

8. Trump says that conflict and those between Israel and Hamas/Hezbollah/Houthis/Iran would not have commenced had he been president.

9. Like Trump, Netanyahu seeks to stave off potential prison time by holding high office. Trump would "sack" special counsel Jack Smith "within two seconds" of retrieving his "stolen" presidency. Day one would be a "day of retribution".

10. Trump vilifies the free press positioning journalism itself as an enemy of the state.

These flagrant contradictions constitute the rudiments of a new and dangerous American delusion of which Trump is both symptom and cause.

As a mere outsider candidate nine years ago, Trump, the NY property mogul rendered "real" to voters by reality TV, had skited, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."

It is. Trump is the new Max Headroom - a TV avatar parcelling up all the fear and envy of an electorate lost in the morass of global decline, sick at heart from a high-sugar diet of "angertainment" confusing fame with virtue, and gun-violence with "freedom". Increasingly, America is a society driven by disappointment, its hyperbole exhausted, its language stripped of meaning. Trump presents as both rescuer from the future and reckoner with America's unrequited promise - an oranged-up rider on a pale horse. A foundation-wearing saviour devoid of moral foundation.

His rise shows most Americans (tens of millions will not vote on November 5) no longer demand even the pretence of decency, much less duty, honour and responsibility.

Rather, they will excuse obvious lies, fraud, theft, sexual assault, electoral stand-over tactics and outright contempt for the will of the voters.

Is Trump a fascist? Intellectually he is not that organised. Still, Republicans including decorated generals and party loyalists who have worked for him, say yes.

Yet that debate, raging on CNN and in the east coast broadsheets, will probably have zero impact on the election result.

Americans, in large numbers, don't want to know. Don't care about the sacrifices of "the Greatest Generation" who defeated the terror of Imperial Japan as well as Hitler and Mussolini and other fascists in the Balkans.

They don't care either about the constitution, civil rights, fairness, or even the explicit threat of openly capricious presidential power.

Neither, therefore, do they care about "freedom" so much as its oft-repeated, near-mythic incantation. This was an idyll frequently cited by the murderous Nazis also as they pursued "freedom" from the racially impure, from degenerates and inferiors.

Conservative historian and journalist Anne Applebaum has observed that the language Trump deploys comes straight out of Hitler's "national socialism".

"The term [vermin] has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump's description of his opponents as "radical-left thugs" who "live like vermin," she writes in The Atlantic.

In Trump's chaotic rallies he has called migrants "rapists and degenerates" and "cold- blooded killers".

"They're poisoning the blood of our country ... they're not humans; they're animals" he says.

Again, not even America's self-appointed moral guardians can be relied on to speak up.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd notes that the nihilism propelling Trump's reprise extends to the Catholic church which hosted him at a key charities function last week.

There, Cardinal Timothy Dolan expressed no objection to Trump's loathsome invective as he vilified Harris and her running mate: "I used to think the Democrats were crazy for saying that men have periods. But then I met Tim Walz."

The enabling of Trump's misogynistic juggernaut of white superiority reveals a moral decay uncannily like the complicity of German civil society in the 1930s.

Dowd was rightly incredulous: "It is the church's job, after all, to teach right from wrong".

The inescapable truth though is that Trump is America, or at least a wide swathe of it. If he has fascist sympathies, so do they.

He hasn't read much, but he's read that.

Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.