He's One of Us - We Own This Mess

English-language media have compared President Trump to more than 120 different people, ideas, things and nonhuman life forms in the last 18 months, according to one rough tally, including the Zika virus, Richard III, a Galaxy Note 7, P.T. Barnum and, of course, Adolf Hitler. For a media struggling to understand Trump’s improbable rise to power, “Trump is like X” has become an exceedingly popular genre.

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[O]ne iteration of this trend — comparing Trump to Latin American, Middle Eastern and Asian leaders — often does double-duty as a way to bash countries hostile to U.S. interests. Not only that, it contributes to the whitewashing of Trump’s quintessentially American origins.

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[W]hile some comparisons can elucidate, the practice of analogizing Trump to foreign enemies has the effect of veiling Trump’s right-wing agenda. Pundits who engage in it seem more comfortable criticizing “authoritarianism,” a Davos-friendly catchall, than 21st century conservatism.

  Adam Johnson @ LA Times

I'm guessing because the majority of these pundits (if not all of them in practice if not in name) are 21st cenury conservatives.

The groundwork for Trump was laid by Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck, Fox News and the Drudge Report. All pushed the limits of “post-truth,” all spent years stoking white grievance, demonizing immigrants, spreading “black on white crime” panic.

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“Trump is like Bad Leader X” meme-makers may not realize it, but they’re indemnifying the forces that gave us Trump: the GOP establishment, which acquiesces at every turn; NBCUniversal, which ignored Trump’s anti-black racism for years while revitalizing his career; and a corporate press that gave Trump almost $2 billion in free media in 2015.

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[T]his approach allows them to, at the same time, praise George W. Bush while treating Trump as beyond the pale, despite the fact that the two men share many of the same political objectives, including a bloated military, economic policies that favor Wall Street and the installation of anti-choice judges on the Supreme Court.

And frankly, they share pretty much the same personality. Trump is a lot like Bush - arrogant, infantile, privileged, ill-informed even after an ivy league education, to name a few traits.  Trump is just moreso and less constrained in public.

[F]oreign leader analogies notwithstanding, Trump’s agenda is largely the same as the broader Republican Party; his rise, moreover, was the logical manifestation of the xenophobic, “insurgent” tea party movement — funded and supported not by foreign governments, but by entirely domestic billionaires.

There’s a reason why Republican senators from John McCain to Marco Rubio have voted to confirm Trump’s nominees: They basically agree with him. How strange, then, that we have zero hot takes drawing parallels between Trump and McCain or Trump and Rubio, and dozens of hot takes drawing parallels between Trump and Latin American leftists.

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Trump is a raw, unfiltered expression of American nativism and white grievance. The effort to stop Trump would be better served attacking these threads — and their specific right-wing ideology — than continuing to draw lazy parallels to foreign enemies in bad standing with the U.S. national security establishment.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.