Dictator.
The worm has certainly turned on the United States in terms of the appearance of a police state led by an all-powerful-, not-accountable-to-rule-of-law-, acting-in-the-interest-of-the-security-of-the-homeland-style dictator.
But actually that's the only style of dictator that exists. And so we find ourselves faced with the worm this time. That being, how the argument can be spun, facts manipulated, lies told outright to a cowed populace as fearful of their government as they are of any terrorists that lurk in their midst. How that cowed population can be distracted from their unease about giving away their liberty and their ability to defend themselves from tyranny. How it is that they can not only be distracted from it, the people can even be manipulated into cheering for it, as easily as the facts are manipulated: by appealing to nationalism and nativism, fear, and lies.
Let's face it, this is the political landscape of the majority of people that have ever lived and who are alive today. And the incessant experience of all our generations tells us that the reasons for despotism, presented in its defense, are ultimately only ever a popular cover for a corrupt regime. An inevitably corrupt regime. The political ideology of the dictator is ultimately only a means to absolute power (or as close as can be come to it), so we know a priori why the police state of Mussolini was not so different as that of Stalin, though they were on opposite ideological extremes. We don't have to parse their speeches to know what was going on there.
Since they are never true to their political words, the dictators' ideologies are not a measure of their similarity. What more accurately distinguishes them and reveals their consistent makeup is the fact of corruption, accompanied by hubris and self-righteous self-assurance.
But for some reason, it never looks the same from the outside as it does from the inside. From the inside of the door that is being approached by black clad jackbooted defenders of the Homeland. From the inside, it's damn scary. Same as it ever was.