ABSTRACT
The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States not only appeared to herald a new political era and the triumph of a certain sort of post-truth politics but also provoked the public engagement of a variety of historians of 20th-century Europe, called forth to analyse the meaning of the Trump phenomenon and reflect on the historical parallels. This chapter seeks to analyse how historians responded to the problem of the portrayal of Trump as a fascist and the challenges of the uses of history in the public sphere. It argues that the ascendency of Trump created an audience for both the diagnosis of post-truth and the genre of history as warning but that the historical parallels obscure as much as they enlighten.
