He is a smart man, and has been speaking truth to power for a long time. The opening paragraphs of that article:

On Tuesday last week, as police officers across the country deployed brutal tactics in response to protests over the killing of George Floyd, the former secretary of labor Robert Reich announced that his old vocabulary — crowded already with harsh words for President Trump — was making way for a new addition.

“I have held off using the f word for three and a half years, but there is no longer any honest alternative,” Reich tweeted. “Trump is a fascist, and he is promoting fascism in America.”

Reich wasn’t alone. Until last week, the journalist Masha Gessen was also a skeptic. Gessen had just published “Surviving Autocracy,” which lists “fascism” among the words that get thrown about in the American political conversation without sufficient precision. The day after the book’s publication date, Gessen wrote a short essay for The New Yorker commenting on what it meant when the president — enamored already of military parades and masked men in combat attire — told governors to crack down on protesters. “Whether or not he is capable of grasping the concept,” Gessen wrote, “Trump is performing fascism.”

It was a notable turn. The word fascism is so loaded that even some of the president’s most vociferous detractors had long been reluctant to use it. Derived from the Italian for “bundle” or “group,” fascism was born at the end of World War I in Italy, adopted by the Nazis in Germany, and soon became such a widespread epithet that George Orwell decided the closest synonym to “this much-abused word” was “bully.” Ever since Trump became the Republican Party’s standard-bearer in 2016, the term has been floated and then dismissed for being too extreme and too alarmist, too historically specific or else too rhetorically vague.