When I first heard Donald Trump was running for president I figured he’d be considered a joke. During the last election cycle Trump teased about running for president and started to post stuff about being a birth certificate truther.

Eventually Obama posted his birth certificate and made Trump look like ridiculous. I figured this would have been the last time we’d have to hear about Trump being anywhere near the White House.

This election season Trump has come back and now I am terrified that he might win. When he first started running he started his campaign by being unbelievably racist towards the residents of Mexico and Mexican-American residents. I thought this alone would have made people shy away.

I was beyond wrong. He immediately was supported in the polls and people were talking about how great Trump would be as president. Trump himself went so far was to make his slogan “Making American great again.”

Soon after Trump started to turn his attention to other issues in the U.S. Earlier he started talking about how he believed vaccinations caused autism. Everything he came in support of or against seemed to be pandering to the far right ring conspiracy theorists. And there must be a lot more of them than I thought because his strategy is working scarily well for him.

Now most recently he has labeled Syrian refugees and Muslims as terrorists. At first he wanted to close the U.S. borders to Syrian refugees, but he’s gone so far as wanting to ban all Muslims from the U.S. altogether. He labels them all as terrorists. Trump has taken a step further to the right from just being a conservative to being a full blown fascist.

Trump has gone so far as to say he wants to kill the family members of every known ISIS terrorist. Trump wants to counter terrorism with even more terrorism. He wants to kill people who may or may not be completely innocent. Without a trial, without proof that they will hurt anyone. Just because they’re Muslim.

At first I thought calling trump a Fascist was over reacting a bit. His earlier campaigns seem to be in line with what most people who watched Fox News or went to Breitbart would think. But closing the borders and making the U.S. discriminate against people who need help, and wanting to commit genocide against a group of people is literally being a Fascist.

Trump on Tuesday also decided that he wanted to shut down part of the internet to try to prevent people from being radicalized into being a member of ISIS. Although it’s clear he knows nothing about how the internet works as he wants to ask Bill Gates, who has nothing to do with the internet, to help him close it down.

He literally wants to shut down parts of the internet. Wants to cut people off from ways of communicating. This is literally censorship.

At first I thought the best strategy was to ignore Trump. But that isn’t going to work. He gets too much coverage from CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. People are getting behind what he’s saying, and it’s downright terrifying.

The best course of action is for people to directly challenge what Trump is saying, point out to people how scary his ideas are and to rally against him. Don’t let the U.S. become a fascist Nation.

Mace Mackiewicz is a senior journalism major. He can be reached at 581-2812 or mmmackiewicz@eiu.edu.