There's indeed a lot of similarities in person here, characters of self-aggrandizement & mythologizing. Willingness to sleaze & act low. Both are deeply deeply deeply cynical. Both take advantage of those around them. But mercy heavens be, the output of these men could not feel more apart. Thompson's latter Kingdom of Fear is one of the few of his books I own, but seems characteristic. It describes the corruption & sadness of conservatist furor (including in Democratic characters such as then Mayor Dianne Feinstein) in story after story, decries racism & state violence & hatred, questions the abuse of authority that pervades American policing & war-making. Thompson decries the american hysteria, again and again (having been very very much shaped by the apocalyptically bad democratic convention of 1968), rebuffs those possessing self importance. It's absolutely cynical as shit (like DJT), but it does not purport some great new dawn by returning to the past, does not propose we make enemies of those who arent in our in group; Thompsons treatise is clearly that far too much of America has gone way way overboard defining battle lines. Is sickening bent on conflict & doomed by it.
There's a remarkably convincing job done here, impressive even, in it's attempt to convince that two men who espouse dramatically opposed beliefs miggt in fact be kindred spirits. Perhaps so, perhaps they share a nature, but one of them is acute, aware, sensitive, concerned, begging for open consideration & wider perspectives, and the other preaches only totalizing belief in himself, has no other apparent values or sensitivities to offer. To try to conflate these two is a boldly vulgar emterprise. One has to ignore utterly what Thompson writes to make these arguments.