I was telling my neighbor Swamp Rabbit that Philip Roth would have been appalled but not surprised by the deification of Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden earlier this week. Roth, who died in 2018, depicted a fascist nightmare taking shape in his novel The Plot Against America (2004), which traces an alternative history in which FDR loses the 1940 election to Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh and the United States becomes an ally of Nazi Germany. The author’s message is that the bad guys could take over here as quickly as they did in Germany in the 1930s.

“What’s all that got to do with Trump?” Swamp Rabbit said. “Didn’t you hear Hulk Hogan say there weren’t no ‘stinkin’ Nazis’ at Trump’s Garden rally?”

I did indeed hear a recording of Hogan’s speech. And I heard the comedian who said Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage,” an old friend of Trump who called Kamala Harris “the antichrist,” a radio guy who complained that “f$#%king illegals get everything they want,” and similar statements by a whole raft of uglies eager to kiss Trump’s ass.

Trump spoke last and vowed to “launch the largest deportation program in American history,” perhaps unaware he was echoing the German American Bund leader who expressed similar anti-immigrant sentiments at a pro-Nazi rally held in February 1939 at Madison Square Garden (one of three previous incarnations of the Garden, not the current arena).

“There you go again,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Making a big deal of the fact that Trump’s fans are as dumb and nasty as he is. Implying that he and them MAGA boys, just because they talk and act like Nazis in the 1930s, are planning to make America a fascist state.”

He smiled, unable to disguise his irony. He knows what the Trumpers will do to the country if they get the chance.

“Don’t forget to vote for Harris,” he said.