No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. Applying the lesson to the U.S. When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.
Statement of 1935, quoted in Watchdogs of Democracy? : The Waning Washington Press Corps and How it Has Failed the Public (2006) by Helen Thomas.
Dorothy Celene Thompson was an American journalist and radio broadcaster, who in 1939 was recognized by Time magazine as the second most influential woman in America next to Eleanor Roosevelt. She is notable as the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934 and as one of the few women news commentators on radio during the 1930s. She is regarded by some as the “First Lady of American Journalism.”
See also, from Smithsonian magazine: