> In practice facists are precisely the people who self-identify as facists
Man, i feel bad for coming up with this. But when everyone can identify as $gender regardless of their physical condition and respecting that decision is part of societal norms (or be an asshole)... what if Trump said "I'm not a fascist, mislabeling me as such is harassment"? Do we have grounds to say that's invalid?
Apples are not oranges.
There is no definition of facism and as far as I know there almost never was. The reason the term is so popular in politics is because it can be used to label anything without being falsifiable.
Trump probably is facist, but the tricky thing to define is what properties a politician would need to have to be not-facist because a lot of his opponents also appear to be facists. All the bad things that characterise facism also characterise non-facists systems. Nationalism is not facism, nor are hierarchies. Nor is violence. Nor are cults of personality. Lots of systems have those things individually or in combination (like communism, for that matter).
In practice facists are precisely the people who self-identify as facists. People have stopped doing that because facist ideologies lost to liberal ones in literal and metaphoric senses.