When Donald Trump rode down the escalator and announced his presidency with his outrageous insults toward Mexican immigrants and a promise to “make America great again,” we couldn’t get enough. We regarded him with naive candor, training all of our cameras and conversations on him and using his soundbites as fodder for humor and ridicule. After all, the hatred and stupidity he proclaimed only resonated with a small minority of backwoods bigots, right? We gobbled up every word he said, convinced he was winding up to the punchline of a marvelous practical joke.

Either the punchline hasn’t come yet, or we missed it, and the joke’s on us.

Over the last few months on the Trump Coaster, our joy has morphed into horror. We watched in shock as Trump defied the predictions of all the pundits and soared in the polls, receiving continuous support despite all of the ignorance, insults, and outlandishness. Many times, I looked around in shock and expressed my confusion, asking, “Who are these people? I don’t know a single person who supports Donald Trump!” A few weeks later, my sister answered my question. She is currently attending Liberty University, a place recently made more infamous last week when the school president joined the tide of insane anti-Muslim rhetoric and fear-mongering. She has told me that she experiences serious conversations stating that if Ben Carson doesn’t make it through the primaries, they will have no choice but to vote for Donald Trump.

While it’s true that many Trump supporters are backwoods bigots, he is actually being supported by millions of people, and it would be simply inaccurate to disregard all of his supporters as racist rednecks. Around October, I lost my amusement with Trump when I realized that he is using his populist power to whip latent racists into a frenzy. Trump is reaping the fruit of seeds professional reality-twisters on Fox News and in the Religious Right have been been sowing into white, Christian, conservatives for decades – and especially since President Obama won the Democratic presidential nomination. Hordes of latent racists have been coming out of the woodwork to express their support for Donald Trump’s outspoken brand of unapologetic intolerance. These people, who used to whisper their socially unacceptable views at home – or a least wait until all the minorities left the room – have now been given a chance to shout their misguided and programmed hatred and fear in and astonishing battle cry. They are people we all know and associate with. They are people very similar to ourselves. In fact, under different circumstances, they could be us.

This is the scary part.

Remember how we had to learn about the Holocaust for years and years on end in school. It seemed like every year from 5th through 12th grades, we sat through an exhaustive history program on World War II and the Holocaust and how horrible and devastating it was for the world. By the end, I was thinking, “Dear, God, how many times do we have to go through this?” We got it. The Holocaust was a horrifying, disgusting, heart-wrenching, and sickening atrocity, and World War II was one of the biggest scars on modern history and perhaps humankind. We’ll never do it again. Obviously.

See, what we do when we learn about horrible things like genocides and terror attacks and mass shootings is we immediately appropriate the perpetrators into monstrosity. We use keywords like “inhumane,” “senseless,” and “evil.” We think to ourselves that a real human could never do something like that. But when we do that we miss the point of years and years of Holocaust history lessons. The point isn’t just that we have to learn about it because it was a major thing that happened a couple generations ago. It’s to remind us that people committed the Holocaust. Humans killed over 10 million other humans in the Holocaust and 50 million more humans in warfare.

Take a moment to think about what 10-50 million murders would look like in your country. In your state. In your city. Ten million people is every single person in my state dead. Times two.

I’m sure in the early days of Nazi rallies no one thought they would be complicit in 10 million murders. Nazi supporters were just regular folks like me and you. Regular folks like our Trump-supporting friends who were manipulated by fear and hatred toward a group of others. People who sincerely wanted the best for their country and thought that a population of minorities was ruining it for them. When we monstrify the Germans or Hitler or other villains of history, we do ourselves a disservice because we fail to see the common humanity that links us to them. We fail to see how under a different set of circumstances, we could be them. And when we do that, we can repeat the past.

This is the scarier part.

Trump’s official campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again.” What exactly does that mean? According to him, the United States has been on some sort of spectacular decline, and, so far, the main culprits are Mexican immigrants, liberals, President Obama, political correctness, Muslims terrorists, black people thugs, women, and anyone who disagrees with him. That means that all he has to do to “make America great again” is to eliminate the aforementioned obstacles and define what a real American is.

Donald Trump’s great America does not include me.

His America is an America where Muslims are identified by special ID cards just like the Star of David that Jews wore in Nazi Germany. His America is an America where a person could be rounded up and shipped to Mexico for looking too much like an illegal immigrant. A place where millions of undocumented immigrants are hunted down like animals for trying to find a better life. A place where people fleeing persecution – much like our own forefathers – are turned back at the border. A place where a black person can be beaten by crowds of whites shouting “All Lives Matter”  or shot down by police or any gun-toting vigilante or lynched by the hordes of new KKK, Aryan Nation, Stormfront, or Oath Keepers recruits spurred by Trump’s vitriolic and influential rhetoric.

Donald Trump’s America is an America that is not safe for me or my loved ones.

After the outrage from Trump’s newly revealed stance on Muslim immigration wore off, I was left with an unfamiliar feeling. It was a mixture of deep sadness, heartbreak, and dread for my country. This America is my America too. It is my home. And right how, we are faced with the choice of continuing and bettering America’s legacy of freedom or taking the first steps down the road of Fascism and genocide. It is up to us to either learn the lessons of the past or to repeat them. That’s the terrifying reality of America right now.