I haven’t been a Catholic for years, but as I write this, I feel as if I’m sitting in a confessional, ashamedly looking at my hands as I try to find the words to express the wrong I’ve done.

Yes, I have a confession to make: I used to get giddily excited to watch Donald Trump insult his opponents and talk up the size of his body parts. I would even talk like the blathering billionaire throughout the day with friends because the way he talked was just so amusing to me.

Look, I used to think his humor was tremendous. I was a mess. A mess! A total mess. It’s not politically correct to say but it’s true!

While I’ve been what I like to think qualifies as a strong progressive for years, proudly leaning more toward socialism than capitalism any day of the week, I found Trump much more amusing than dangerous. It seemed crystal clear to me that he would keep making hilarious and/or horrible remarks that appeal only to a sizable chunk – though still a clear minority – of the Republican party, America would wholly reject him, the Republican party would spend the next few years doing damage control and then Hillary or Bernie would make everything better.

The ugly and grave truth of the matter, I have come to recognize, is that Trump could actually be the next president, and even if that doesn’t happen, he has already damaged the country.

The Donald has been making headlines recently because of the anti-Trump protests that led the campaign to cancel a rally in Chicago. The Republican front-runner couldn’t have responded worse, going as far as to consider financially supporting the potential lawsuit of one of his supporters who sucker-punched a protester in the face, when asked about the issue in an interview with Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press.”

“I do want to see what that young man was doing, because he was very taunting, he was very loud, very disruptive, and from what I understand he was sticking a certain finger up in the air, which is a terrible thing to do in front of someone who, frankly, wants to see America be great again,” Trump told Todd.

The fact that Trump has been so clearly ahead of his competition more or less the whole race because of the people who fervently support him is enough to consider him a serious threat. The New York Times recently analyzed polling data from Public Policy Polling and YouGov, as well as South Carolina exit-poll data, coming to several alarming conclusions about Trump’s supporters.

“Nationally, further analyses of the YouGov data show a… trend,” Lynn Vavrek of The Times wrote. “Nearly 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters disagreed with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in the Southern states during the Civil War.”

Think about that; if you pull five random Trump supporters, it’s likely one of them doesn’t take issue with it being legal to treat black people as property. Without the passionate support of those who feel strongly about the most disturbing ideas in the country, Trump wouldn’t be winning.

Sure, the candidate hasn’t actually said that he supports slavery, but the two most prominent pieces of legislation he is running on are building a wall to keep out Mexican immigrants who are largely “criminals and rapists,” he infamously claimed when he announced his presidential run, and temporarily banning all Muslims from entering the country “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” according to an official press release available on the Trump campaign’s website.

It’s surely true that a significant number of Trump’s supporters are simply sick and tired of the establishment, but the most complete explanation of Trump’s success is that he appears, to many voters, willing to go against establishment politics to help out white people, preferably men, at the expense of minorities who are dangerous anyway.

The fact that Trump may very well be running against Clinton, a more or less perfect example of an establishment politician regardless of how much one likes her, in the general election is perhaps what makes his presidential bid most scary.

I understand the problems with Clinton; it has been shown time and time again that she will throw away integrity for the sake of political gain even if it means standing against civil rights, she has received large amounts of money from big banks, and she is irresponsible enough to potentially find herself in an FBI investigation. However, the idea that a fascist like Trump is better than Clinton, a candidate running on a platform of more affordable college education, expansion of the Affordable Care Act, an increase to the minimum wage and more, is a joke.

It’s cute that former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney decided to give a speech decrying Trump, but one of the points Romney gave against voting for Trump is that he may not be able to beat Clinton, who is somehow worse than a fascist. Romney pleaded with voters to support one of the other candidates running, whether it be John Kasich, who used his role as governor to sign a bill defunding Planned Parenthood in his state of Ohio, or Ted Cruz, who thought reading “Green Eggs and Ham” in a self-serving filibuster against the already-passed Affordable Care Act was worth shutting the government down, but ultimately, he makes it crystal clear that a fascist is still better than a rather moderate Democrat.

No matter what phonies like Romney say, one of the two major political parties in the United States of America doesn’t have that much of a problem with electing a fascist running on legislative prejudice. Trump has already done a phenomenal job of ginning up hatred against minorities to a politically relevant degree, and if America doesn’t take the threat he poses seriously, he could become the most powerful man in the world.