It’s the latest rage among American leftists to point out that Donald Trump has fascist proclivities. A recent example is Robert Reich, who was secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997. In an article recently on Raw Story, Reich states that “Trump has finally reached a point where parallels between his presidential campaign and the fascists of the first half of the 20th Century – lurid figures such as Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Oswald Mosley, and Francisco Franco – are too evident to overlook.”

Reich isn’t the only one. Former Mexican President Vincente Fox also called Trump a fascist. Current Mexican President Enrique Pena Calderon said that Trump’s “strident” rhetoric is how “Mussolini got in, that’s how Hitler got in.”

In another recent article, this one in the Los Angeles Times, reporter Patt Morrison states: “Well, there’s language and there’s style and manner that has echoes of the fascism of Europe in the 1920s and ’30s. There’s the claim that the United States is in decline and needs a strong leader. And that was at the heart of what Mussolini and Hitler promised. They offered a recipe for revival: nationalism, aggressive foreign policy, attacks on the enemies inside and out without much regard for due process, an obsession with decline and with enemies like Jews or socialists, foreigners – those are the echoes of that today.”

But in their attacks on Trump, those on the left conveniently forget a discomforting fact: Their hero and icon – the man they (as well as conservatives) have extolled and glorified for some 80 years, President Franklin D. Roosevelt – was himself a fascist.