This election feels like a national nightmare.
I woke up from my own nightmare last night in a cold sweat. In my troubled sleep, and in graphic detail, Trump was Hitler and his Nazis were killing those they called “vermin”, the “enemy within”, those who were “poisoning the blood” of the country.
In World War II, the Nazis targeted for extermination in death camps those who they said were “poisoning the blood”: Jews, Gypsies, artists, political enemies. Trump’s disgusting neo-fascist campaign is modeled on the same playbook. His Madison Square Garden event was all too redolent of the 1930’s Nazi rally in New York. He casts a wide net for those he considers the enemy within: political opponents, immigrants, people of color, women.
In politics and life, words and rhetoric matter. I take seriously Trump’s blatant and explicit use of Nazi rhetoric. I take seriously his threats of persecution and revenge. I take seriously that his rhetoric of fear and retribution could lead this country down a path too horrible to contemplate but all too real. I believe Trump and his henchmen when they say they want to rule without regard to the Constitution. Trump has a bizarre charismatic hold on a huge segment of our population and his promises if he is elected threaten all our assumptions about what it means to be American.
We are a nation of immigrants. My grandparents came to this country as immigrants around the turn of the last century from Eastern Europe and Ukraine, escaping persecution, looking for a better life of opportunity and freedom. A hundred years later, I was elected to the United States Congress. I was the first Jewish congressman from New Hampshire.
As a congressman, I visited the Holocaust Museum at Yad Vashem and saw pictures of Nazis standing over the mass graves of Jews in my grandfather’s hometown in Ukraine. My nightmares are alive in my DNA. Millions died at the hands of the Nazis and millions died defending our freedom in World War II.
This is no ordinary election. This is an inflection point in our history as a nation. I hesitate to use fear as any sort of motivation, but I confess that in sharing my own, I want to move readers to action. As a member of the United States Congress, I swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
I served with Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) I will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, in great part, because I know they are good, decent people who can be trusted to take the oath of office seriously and protect and defend the sacred rule of law under which we have the privilege to live.
Please join me when you cast your ballot.
