Henry Jay Karp is the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Emanuel in Davenport, Iowa, which he served from 1985 to 2017. He is the co-founder and co-convener of One Human Family QCA, a social justice organization.

The night after Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump duked it out in Philadelphia, unsurprisingly, Chris Hayes dedicated his MSNBC show, “All In With Chris Hayes,” to conversations about the debate.

Rebecca Traister was among the guests who appeared on that show. While my wife Gail and I do not remember ever having heard her before (she writes for the New Yorker), after that night, we look forward to hearing more from her in the future.

Probably most mainstream media analysts, when reflecting upon the debate, had something to say about when Trump ranted, lied, and spouted bizarre conspiracy theories like Haitian immigrants are eating their neighbors’ pet dogs and cats, or there are states in which the abortion laws legalize the killing of babies after birth. They probably all agreed on how absurd, if not insane, were those statements; how hearing them, they could not help but laugh at the absurdity of it all.

But Rebecca Traister took that conversation to another level; an important level we dare not ignore. She said she had been thinking “so much” about Vice President Kamala Harris “baiting him into saying all these ridiculous things.” She noted that “a lot of us absorbed them as ridiculous, unhinged, out of control,” and Harris “spoke to him at times like he was a toddler. I think he looked like a toddler a lot of the time.”

Traister added that something “a little less fun than that” has really stuck with her: “the things that he was baited into saying; him at his most unguarded, at his most explosive, is so chilling.” It’s easy to forget that while feeling “relief and exhilaration” about Harris’ performance. “But that side that is exposed, you know, the horrible, racist, xenophobic lies he’s telling about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, these are dangerous locutions.” Harris got Trump to say those things, and “people are joking about them, but this is so perilous for our country, and this is the man who wants to be president.”

No sooner did Traister say this than it reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about in a long time, for you don’t hear people talking about it anymore.

In my younger days, when those who lived through World War II were alive and vibrant, I heard their stories about how in the 1930s, people in the U.S. would go to the movies and watch the newsreels before the films. It was common to see newsreels about that new political player in Germany—Adolf Hitler—delivering his speeches. The audience would watch those film clips and laugh at this funny little man with his funny little moustache, waving his arms all around and banging on his podium.

They did not know then that they were watching the person who would become the embodiment of evil in the modern world. Yet they thought he was a comic character, perhaps because he looked somewhat like Charlie Chaplin. Indeed, Charlie Chaplin would eventually capitalize on that likeness and lampoon Hitler in his film, “The Great Dictator,” which also was a stark warning about the dire threat Hitler posed to the world.

When Rebecca Traister observed that Trump “is so chilling” in his “unguarded moments,” and called out his “horrible, racist, xenophobic lies” as “perilous for our country,” my thoughts immediately turned back to those memories. People from my parents’ generation watched Hitler on the movie screens during the 1930s and considered him a laughable person, “saying all these ridiculous things.”

While the American newsreel viewers may have perceived Adolf Hitler as an absurd character, I guarantee you that in Germany at that time, the Jews, as well as the gays, the Roma & Sinti (Gypsies), the Blacks, the Jehovah’s Witness, the Communists, and Hitler’s other political opponents found him and his rhetoric to be not at all a laughing matter. For them, the threat was very real, and the events that followed proved that to be precisely the case.

In 1923, the Nazis introduced into the Reichstag (the German Parliament) the Hereditary Farm Bill—a bill prohibiting Jews from owning farmland in Germany. This antisemitic idea dated back to the 1880s in Germany, and the Nazis picked it up in 1920. When they introduced it as a bill in 1923, they were literally laughed out of the Reichstag by their fellow legislators. Ten years later, after the Nazis gained power, it became the law of the land. No one was laughing then, except perhaps the Nazis.

We cannot afford to forget that while many of us find Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories and baseless accusations to be so absurd that they are laughable, there are many in this country—far too many—who take what he says seriously. After all, the polls tell us that despite all the terrifying statements and promises Donald Trump has made, some 90 percent of Republicans are committed to vote for him in November. The current tightness of the national polling gives an upsetting indication of how many Americans accept as truth all that Trump has told them.

Many believe Haitian immigrants are eating other people’s pets. As a result, today in Springfield, Ohio Haitian immigrants are living in fear for their lives and Springfield institutions (including city hall) have received multiple bomb threats.

Many believe that in some blue states, it is legal to kill a baby after it has been born.

Many believe that almost every person who enters this country across our southern border is either a drug dealer, a rapist, a murderer, or all three.

Many believe that those in the transgender community are seeking to convert American children to change their gender, and are doing so with the active assistance of our school systems and the Democratic Party.

Many believe that everyone who challenges Trump or supports his political adversaries are criminals who should be arrested, imprisoned, and perhaps even executed.

Many believe that any woman who has an abortion, any doctor who performs an abortion, and any person who assists a woman seeking an abortion should be imprisoned, or worse.

Many believe that the books that Donald Trump and his followers find objectionable pose an existential threat to our nation and should be banned, while the ownership of military grade weapons is an inalienable right of every American, regardless of how many Americans are murdered by those who own and use such weapons as an instrument of their rage against their neighbors.

This list could go on and on.

If you wonder what it would look like after a Trump victory, take a look at the film footage of the people of Germany crowding the streets and public gathering places in overwhelming numbers so that they could catch a glimpse of the Fuhrer, raising their voices in cheers and their arms in the Nazi salute, while waving swastika flags. Then view the film footage taken by the Allied troops of the carnage and atrocities they found as they liberated the concentration camps.

We can laugh all we want at the absurdity of Donald Trump’s deranged conspiracy theories, but we must not minimize the threat he poses or the number of our fellow Americans who, for whatever reasons, are buying the message he is selling.

If we fail to take Trump seriously today, and fail to do everything in our power to defeat him, and defeat him handily, in November, then we will be doing so, as Rebecca Traister warned, at our own peril.

---

Top image was shared on Donald Trump’s campaign Facebook page on the afternoon of September 10, hours before the first televised debate.