Nah, /r/theDonald always had a layer of 4chan themed humor over everything. As if they knew they were spouting bullshit but kept it up "for the lols", and every time someone wandered in and believed their bullshit, it was all the more funny to them that they could so easily steer "normies" how they wanted. Rare Pepe's, calling eachother {centi}pedes, hell even the term MAGA itself started there. Trump was a meme. "Hey fellow retards, know what'd be funny? If we got that guy on The Apprentice nominated for president. It'll be funny as shit and we'll all laugh our dicks off!"
Fascism came from fucking memes, anyone who tells you otherwise either didn't pay attention to where it came from, or are too embarrassed to admit it, because holy shit is that stupid.
Tankies are something else. They aren't fueled by 4chan humor. More like weaponized angst. They're the edgy "umm akshually" kid who grew up with hatred and disgust towards Western culture and society and it poisoned them into a jaded contrarian of an adult. While they wield humor sometimes, it's always vicious in nature and paints others as inferior. It's never "hurr hurr, China's so great, right guys?" it's more "hurr hurr, all Westerners are idiots and deserve to suffer".
I don't know what you want me to say, .ml was created by tankies. It was once the largest Lemmy community so it drew a ton of new people which for a while drowned out the tankie rhetoric. Then the mods started to be little more mask off with their leanings, which caused an exodus of users to other instances, leaving behind a collection of tankies, true believers, people who had never heard criticism of the West or socialist ideals before so thought they were learning secret knowledge, and those too apathetic to bother changing instances. When they started getting defederated, even those last two groups started to leave.