Tons of American leaders and industrialists and what we would now call "Thought leaders" openly and proudly talked about how awesome Hitler was and how great the Nazis were for dealing with the jewish problem. This wasn't because nobody knew Hitler was a hateful and Bad guy, they were proudly declaring how important Mein Kampf was to them and how well it described the "problem"
Henry Ford bought a local newspaper so he could print the fabricated propaganda "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" to an American audience. This is not a fucking joke, this is accepted history!
A decade later, Smedly Butler made credible accusations that several top Bankers had worked with the literal fucking Nazi party of Germany to overthrow FDR and install a Fascist government under Butler, because FDR was a communist or some bullshit. It was screamed and cried as a "Hoax" in the news at the time, but most historians agree that there was a conspiracy to do that, but it did not get close to execution.
These people only shut up when Germany finally declared open war against the US and started killing Americans and really only when the death camps became public knowledge and really turned some of america sour on the whole "The jews are the problem" thing.
But they never stopped hating. They continued their hate quietly, raising hateful kids and families, pushing local institutions to support hateful educations like "Slavery wasn't even that bad and the North was the aggressor in the Civil War" because they really are fine lying to your face. They fly the Confederate flag "for heritage" while they descend from french canadians in a northern state. They obsess over affirmative action "Taking up seats in top universities" as they actively avoid getting educated because education is a "Liberal propaganda" thing and meant to "brainwash" their hateful kids into being less stupid.
They build an entire alternative media ecosystem, going all the way back to Henry Ford's bullshit, and literally never ending, where THEY are always the victim, always suffering from oppression, always having a "War on christmas" or other horseshit for when their blatantly unconstitutional desires are shut down, or a business stops prostrating itself for them. They teach their kids that scientists are all part of a socialist satanic conspiracy to lie to them about everything from evolution to plate tectonics to (of course) global warming, and when that turns away supporters, they cover it up with a claim that science is all a fraud because the scientists want a "paycheck", as if there is any money in government funded science, because uneducated America is apparently so hard up and failing that a middling salary in a high pressure environment is considered worth selling your entire world for.
They attempted a coup on FDR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
It has been mostly whitewashed in favor of "the greatest generation" and the WW2 hero narrative.
Restricting foreign scientists here is yet another way we are paying for this whitewashing and romanticizing of US exceptionalism today.
There are enough "enemies of the people" in the US at the moment that the MAGA leadership doesn't have to go after American citizens.
There's been rhetoric about how some Americans are not "real americans" but America seems a way off 1934 yet, and they're going about it in a different order. History never repeats, but it usually rhymes
Tell that to any trans person that is an American citizen. They are literally trying to make "trans" into a terrorist designation.
Tell that to the many Latino American citizens who have been arrested by masked armed ICE agents, thrown into unmarked cars and taken away simply because of the color of their skin.
The US hasn't reached the level of "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" or "Denaturalization Law" yet, although you can easily see it's on the cards. The Brownshirts were around over a decade before then
It is more than willing to implement its extreme nationalism via executive orders, regardless of what the law says.
Yet still roughly half of America wants this.
Republican support has dropped 2 points in the last year.