[beachy]

> real fascists wouldn't be gutting the NNSA or the DoD. They'd be building it up and expanding it, even at this early stage.

Not necessarily. If those organisations were not blindly obedient to the leader (which they shouldn't be in a functioning democracy) then the fascist playbook then would be to neuter them and replace them with a more loyal apparatus.

In Hitler's Nazi germany, the SS were a new organisation with loyalty to the Fuhrer rather than the state. The SS acquired immense power and became a virtual state within a state.

You're also assuming that the fascist end goal is global domination. If the Fuhrer was driven primarily by narcissism, and by nature lazy rather than as hard working as Hitler apparently was, and they already have control of the largest democracy and arsenal in the world, then war and global domination may not be required to satisfy their psychological urges.