The No Kings marches across the US were a variation on the ‘Trump is Hitler’ line that has been circulating for almost a decade and which still gets regular outings amongst progressive elites. Yawn. It’s wearing so thin.

Fascism and authoritarianism, historically, requires the complicity of elites. Adolf Hitler rose to power not just on mass populist appeal but with the accommodation of the German establishment – industrialists, the military, the judiciary, conservative politicians, media barons – who believed they could contain or use him. Hugo Chávez gutted Venezuela not just through charisma but through the willing surrender of its institutions via elite submission.

Trump has none of that. The American establishment – from elite universities to the national security bureaucracy, from editorial boards to much of the corporate world – loathes him. Even Francis Fukuyama, usually rational and professorial, can’t utter Trump’s name without sounding just a little apoplectic. That is not how dictatorships are born. It’s how populist insurgencies collide with entrenched power.

Trump’s critics insisted for years that the extraordinary legal pursuit of him and his allies was about protecting democracy. But strip away the euphemisms and what you saw then and now is lawfare: the systematic use of courts, prosecutions and regulatory levers to crush a political opponent who sat outside the establishment tent.

The toll on those around him was remarkable. Close advisers and associates – people like Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Rudy Giuliani – were pursued with a relentlessness that in most cases had jumped the shark. Some were hauled through airports in shackles, others disbarred or bankrupted, often on charges that in any other context would have been handled quietly, or not brought at all. Meanwhile, the Democratic operatives and intelligence officials who drove the Russia-collusion hoax – a fabrication that dominated years of American political life – faced no comparable reckoning. The asymmetry was glaring.

Even those who find Trump distasteful should be able to admit this: a democracy cannot sustain itself on the principle that only one faction gets to use – and abuse –the law.

None of this is to suggest that Trump lacks authoritarian instincts. He is unquestionably testing the constitutional limits of executive power.  If left unchecked, he could test the limits of executive power in ways that should concern any conservative. But that is the point: he is checked – daily – by the very elites and institutions who say they defend the republic from him.

The US military is not his personal guard, and never will be. You only had to observe the stony faces of the generals whom he recently addressed to know they will never be in his corner. The Supreme Court is in no way his instrument: he appointed three justices to the Supreme Court, and since 2016 they have repeatedly ruled against him – and will continue to. They have shown themselves to be strong institutionalists committed to the durability of the republic.

Lawfare is wrong no matter who does it. It is impossible to applaud Trump’s tit-for-tat prosecutions. But let’s get real. This is a long way from Venezuela or Weimar Germany. There is no collapsing state, no captured judiciary, no loyal military. There is a bombastic populist figure operating in a system that, while under serious pressure, remains tied to its constitutional core.

Yet here in Australia we should stop acting smug. We like to imagine that we are immune to the kind of polarised breakdown happening elsewhere, but some time ago it became clear that we’re not.

The frenzied national prosecutorial theatre by the Labor party and progressive media and society’s institutions against the Morrison government and its ministers is Exhibit A for how fragile our own institutional norms have become. The Brittany Higgins saga was possibly the loudest, longest and most unhinged abuse of norms by elites that our country has seen. For more than 18 months – until they got the election outcome they wanted – the nation’s political, media and legal class embraced the narrative of a young woman who was presented by even our national broadcaster and national university as untouchable, her claims beyond scrutiny.

Journalists stopped reporting. Prosecutors lost objectivity. Parliament became the stage for moral posturing. An alleged rape became a political weapon – used to bludgeon a government, its ministers and its advisors – at any cost – in order to shape an election narrative, and demand ritualised national repentance.

Years later, the story is in ruins: now fully exposed is the supposed cover-up that never happened, the institutions that lost their bearings, and the journalists who were nothing but advocates determined to bring down a government.

The defenestration of Christian Porter was arguably worse. His accuser was dead. Her own parents clearly harboured doubts about the veracity of her allegations – for good reason. Yet a populist, febrile alliance of media, activists and so called civil society treated Porter not as a citizen entitled to due process but as a public sacrifice. There was no charge, no trial. There never could have been. It was relentless reputational annihilation until a talented politician was forced from the national stage.

This was not justice. At a time of peak Twitter and identity politics – just like the Higgins debacle – it was mob rule. It exposed how easily the establishment that wraps itself in the language of ‘norms’ will shred those norms when the politics suits. It was a dry run of the same mentality that fuelled the lawfare against Trump and his allies: mere accusation mixed with moral certainty as a licence for institutional vandalism.

This is why ‘Trump as Hitler’ is simply the wrong frame. The real threat to democracy in the United States does not come from a demagogue seizing power. It comes from elites on both sides already willing to abandon the norms that make democracy work – prosecutors, journalists, and bureaucrats who believe their moral viewpoint justifies any means. A legal system treated as a weapon rather than a legitimate curb on improper power is at least as dangerous as the populism it claims to contain.

The American constitutional structure – with its checks, its competing states, its courts, its ever messy resilience – remains quite strong. History shows that Trump cannot ‘capture’ the system without broad elite consent. From here it’s hard to imagine a world where he will ever have it. The No Kings marchers last weekend ironically demonstrated this point.