Last night’s presidential debate at Case Western Reserve University was certainly one for the history books. It was truly an obtuse entry into the American political almanac. But the most concerning moments didn’t come from Vice President Joe Biden openly calling his opponent a “clown” or Chris Wallace’s abysmal moderating skills. No, the most horrific moments of last night’s debate came from the incumbent—President Donald Trump.

The event was off to a rocky start when the president incessantly interrupted both the moderator and his opponent, speaking over them almost continuously. Wallace failed to assert any control whatsoever in those first minutes, and that failure continued throughout the night.

The most dreadful moment of the debate, however, began when Wallace asked the question: “Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups? And to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland?”

Following the question was thirty seconds of the three men shouting over each other and Trump dodging the question like it was the draft for service in Vietnam. Finally, Trump answered. 

“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” he said. Then he followed by trying to place blame on Antifa, an organization that doesn’t actually exist.

To put it all simply, the sitting president of the United States refused to denounce white supremacy and he has a neo-fascist hate group on standby.

But that was only one of Trump’s concerning moments during the debate. During another question in the debate about how each candidate will respond to the election outcome, Trump told the nation, “I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully.”

He followed that statement by falsely claiming that people were blocked from watching the polls in Philadelphia and saying that bad things happen there. Trump purposely painted a target on the city, and his words forced the city of Philadelphia to begin developing an anti-voter intimidation plan in order to prevent people from coming into the city to stop voters.

This is just another instance of the president attacking a majority-minority city while defending white supremacists and domestic terrorists.

Alone, those answers are concerning enough, but together they raise even more serious alarms. He told the Proud Boys to stand by and then told his supporters to watch the polls and make sure nothing bad happens. If you were to create a Venn Diagram, the Proud Boys would be a small circle inside of the circle labeled “Trump supporters”.

Members of the Proud Boys organized the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 where Heather Heyer was murdered by a white supremacist. That’s the organization that the president just told to “stand by”. They were the ones that terrorized Charlottesville, carrying tiki torches and chanting racist and anti-semitic swill—the ones Trump claimed at the time were “very fine people”.

The Proud Boys and their ilk have been standing by throughout our nation’s history. They’ve gone by many different names: the Confederacy; the Ku Klux Klan; Aryan Nations; League of the South. They were there in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. They were in Selma on “Bloody Sunday”. They were there in the Jim Crow Era, blocking every polling place they could get to. They may have gone by different names, but make no mistake: the ideology; the violence; the hate—it’s all the same. It’s completely unchanged, and Trump knows that. It’s how he wins.

What we saw last night was horrific. The president all but deputized a violent hate group to target voters in a majority-minority city. 

The public response to the debate is pretty clear. People are scared, and they should be. This election isn’t about the Democratic Party vs. the Republican Party. It isn’t about liberal vs. conservative. It’s about neo-fascism vs. America. And it’s terrifying to know that there is a very real chance that America could lose that fight.