There certainly is a script, or recipe, for organizing a fascist coup. What I don't agree with is that it is a program spelled out by older generations of fascists and carefully studied by newer ones. I believe the process is more organic, almost Darwinian in the way it evolves. Ecological conditions, the environment, make certain things possible, and make others harder to happen, and natural selection just takes over. Water flows down hill.

This may be just an academic distinction, since the end result may be indistinguishable, but it does make avoiding that result problematic. Trump and his allies are not necessarily master strategists, deftly moving pieces on a chessboard. They are brutal tribal chieftains following the path of least resistance. If we spend too much time over-intellectualizing the subtleties of their strategy we will simply be overwhelmed by the brutality of their tactics.

Trumpism is on the ascendant because a temporary alliance has arisen between the greed of the commercial elites and the desperation of the working class. The victims have been convinced that they must support their victimizers, that their interests are best served by accepting the goals of their oppressors. This has been accomplished by the exploitation of fear, greed, anger, hate, bias, bigotry and hypocrisy. Sure, it can be argued that manipulating this world view required a certain amount of technical skill--no one disputes the role of money and propaganda and its merchants here. But we are a society based on and driven by financial manipulation and commercial advertising, the application to political ends was inevitable. The infrastructure and the technical expertise was available, it was only a matter of time before it would be used.

I hate to be "going all Toynbee" on you (to borrow Bolshie Bob's unfortunate phrase), but I fear that our desire to understand exactly what is going on will only make it too difficult to actually mobilize any meaningful resistance to it. Like the Nazis and the Communists before them, the new Fascism isn't a carefully engineered plot administered by brilliant but evil masterminds. They are more like an organized crime family, a Conservative Cosa Nostra, a violent biker gang or drug cartel.
They are a lynch mob with the town banker in charge.

I'm afraid that we are just going to have to let this epidemic run its course. Sooner or later, its own greed and contradictions will bring it down, and we, hopefully, will all emerge wiser for it. There will be much misery before that all plays out, and much wreckage will be left behind to clear up, not to mention unresolved issues pushed into the distant future for an uncertain resolution. But that is a lesson we learned from our last Civil War, isn't it?