When I first argued with hard core left-liberals online, was in the aftermath of of the 2000 election, where the Supreme Court intervened and chose Bush. They were upset about that too, and called Bush "the usurper","illegitimate", "hail to the thief", etc. But they also threw around words "fascist" and "Nazi" quite a bit, and pretty much any Republican was fair game to be called these things. Bush was going to take away everyone's civil liberties and become a dictator, some of them feared. After 9/11, Bush had an opening to do so. He did go too far with the warrantless surveilance and indefinite detention of enemy combatants in my view (which Obama has continued, by the way), but he had the perfect opening to establish a dictatorship and did not take it. And he got us into a completely unnecessary war in Iraq which destabilized the Middle East. Bad, yes. Fascism, no. During the 2008 election, numerous liberals were concerned that if Obama won, Bush would declare martial law and refuse to hand over power. Such an action would have been historically unprecedented, and we now know the prediction was completely wrong. As soon as it was clear that Obama had won the election, Bush promised a smooth transition, and he followed through on that promise. Bush was not a fascist.
Prior to Bush, in the pre-internet days I had heard Reagan and Bush Sr. referred to as fascists in liberal circles, and remember seeing caricatures of Reagan with a Hitler mustache. They were not fascists. It seems the more reactionary folks on the liberal side were crying wolf, like the boy in the old children's story who sounded an alarm about wolves when no wolves were present. It is too bad, because if a real fascist came along, they would lack credibility to call the fascist out.
So now we have Trump, and we are hearing about fascism more than ever, both before and after the election. Liberals, and many others who would never have called themselves by that name, are very upset and concerned about Trump's rise to power. And they have very good reasons this time. Donald Trump is thin-skinned and seems unable to handle criticism, has characterized all news media as "terrible" people, and has threatened to "open up our libel laws" to go after them. He has said that Mexican immigrants are generally felons, called for establishing a registry of all Muslims living in the country, and called for a "deportation force" to round up and deport all 16 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S. (I will point out here that being "an illegal" in the U.S. is a civil matter not even rising to the level of a misdemeanor). I think many who voted for him did not take all of this seriously, and saw saw it as hypebole challenging "political correctness". But those of us who fear Trump thought he was as serious as a heart-attack. The White Nationalists took him seriously as well. They finally had their guy. A fascist? If you are on the right, and you voted for Trump, you probably think this is another case of crying wolf. We'll see. When they called Bush Jr. a fascist, I thought it was ridiculous. This time, I am not so sure. Maybe they are crying wolf. But we all know what happened at the end of that story, don't we?