Republican front-runner Donald Trump deserved every bit of the criticism he caught this week for his proposal to "shut down" Muslims from entering the country. Denunciations rang (with various levels of intensity) from his side of the campaign trail (South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, for example, called him a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot") to the Democrats' side (former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, for example, tweeted that Trump is a "fascist demagogue"), from the Democratic White House (spokesman Josh Earnest called Trump's plan "disqualifying" of the presidency) to the Republican Capitol ("this is not conservatism," House Speaker Paul Ryan said).

And by the same token the tyrant of Trump Tower deserved the support he got from one particularly odious group, white supremacist nationalists. "Finally: Someone speaks sense," was the take from the Daily Stormer, per Media Matters for America, which rounded up such reactions. Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke approvingly argued that Trump just wants to "preserve the heritage of this country." And the Vanguard News Network ("No Jews. Just Right.") proclaimed that "Trump is beginning to sound like a white nationalist, even more so than before."

It's no wonder they're delighted – Trump is mainstreaming post-Paris and post-San Bernardino the same noxious bile that they produced post-9/11, when these same types made comments like, "It's the immigration, stupid" and "open border access is suicide." (That's the ones who weren't praising the attacks as "acts of justice" and "I wish our members had half as much testicular fortitude" … in case Trump is still looking for people who publicly celebrated 9/11.)

The whole episode is the latest and clearest reminder that Donald Trump is, in a word, awful. His run is fueled by the pernicious aspects of the national character even as he seeks an office that should be animated by the best ones. He represents, to borrow the words of Fox News' Shepard Smith, "the worst, darkest part of all that is America."

That Trump is terrible is not a startling observation at this late date. But what is is that his foray into politics actually seems to have made him worse. He started out as a bombastic, bullying oaf more concerned with casting insults than crafting policy and has metastasized into a neofascist thug anxious to slice up the Constitution.

Words like fascist tend to be used too loosely, especially in the Internet age, but here we have a case where the leading candidate of a major political party wants to ban adherents of a religion from entering the country (even, by the way, Americans who happen to be abroad) and speaks approvingly of shutting down houses of worship while declining to rule out establishing databases of followers of that religion or even forcing them to bear specially distinguishing IDs. We have a candidate who is interested in "closing that Internet up in some ways," which, The Daily Beast helpfully points out, is something only despots try to do. Despots? Here's Trump, explaining his reasoning: "Somebody will say, 'Oh, freedom of speech, freedom of speech.' These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people.'"

As the L.A. Times' David Horsey wrote this week, Trump's "appeals to hypernationalism, his scapegoating of ethnic groups, his fear-driven appeals to disgruntled working-class voters and his presentation of himself as the strong man who can fix every problem through the force of his will all have echoes of fascist political leaders of the past." That Trump initially came across as entertaining, Horsey adds, may be the modern face of fascism: "Trump is Don Rickles with the political inclinations of Francisco Franco."

Did I mention that a few weeks back Trump mused that perhaps someone who had the temerity to protest him "should have been roughed up"? I'm not even sure if that qualifies as a sign of fascism or just the general keen eye he has displayed for teasing out or personally expressing the worst in everything, from his derogation of Mexicans in this country illegally as "drug dealers" and "rapists" to his free-floating misogyny to his making fun of a reporter's disability. He dishonors the memories of our 9/11 dead with his twisted fantasies about "thousands and thousands" of New Jersey Muslims cheering that awful day.

And more broadly he's a serial fabricator of epic and at times comical proportions. It's so rampant that at least one editor – Buzzfeed's Ben Smith – told his staff that it's "entirely fair to call [Trump] a mendacious racist" because it's a factually indisputable statement. Good for him – other news organizations should follow suit.

His turn after the Paris attacks to focus in on Muslims as the scapegoat for his campaign exemplified the worst kind of overreaction to extremist violence – the kind that chips away at or wholly demolishes our values and our liberties in the name of security. That's the only scenario in which the Islamic State group defeats us: our self-destructing for them. And in the mean time Trump does their dirty work by proclaiming to the world that Muslims are not welcome here – precisely the story the extremists are working hard to sell. And as NBC News' Richard Engel pointed out this week, virtually all of the intelligence we collect on the Islamic State group comes from Muslim sources. "Trump is offending our allies," Engel noted.

And his defense of his Muslim shutdown plan is that President Franklin Roosevelt, certainly one of our finest presidents, interned Japanese-Americans during World War II. Leave it to Trump to justify himself by reaching back to the most shameful part of FDR's legacy to shield himself. Watch, if Trump takes the next step and calls for interning Muslims in the same manner – an idea he hasn't ruled out – he'll bolster his case by also referencing the "Trail of Tears."