David Simon’s alternate history drama The Plot Against America presents us with an America in which hero pilot Charles Lindbergh is elected president in 1940 instead of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the limited series, Lindbergh runs as a populist candidate in favor of strict isolationism, and he keeps the United States out of World War II once he is in office. However, Lindbergh’s presidency also provokes intense white nationalism, both among his supporters and in the White House, and the country begins to descend into fascism.

Lindbergh’s role in The Plot Against America might be difficult to grasp for some viewers, because Lindbergh isn’t exactly a household name. In 1940, he was arguably one of the most famous people in the world, but the man has been dead for almost 50 years. And judging by how many people Googled “who tf is jimmy hoffa” after The Irishman came out, a quick primer on Charles Lindbergh will probably be helpful to everyone tuning in to the HBO series. Also, one of the goals of the show is to impart a cautionary tale about the fragility of our democracy, and the idea of a Charles Lindbergh presidency immediately becomes more relevant the more you know about him.

Lindbergh was an Air Mail pilot who shot to superstardom after completing the first solo, non-stop transatlantic flight in 1927, flying over 3,000 miles from New York to Paris in a single engine plane. For context, that was absolutely freaking nuts at the time. Imagine someone riding a rascal scooter non-stop across the state of Texas, and that’s roughly what we’re talking about. Because he was in the Army Reserve, he was awarded both the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Flying Cross for his historic flight, and he became an international celebrity.

Unfortunately, the other thing Lindbergh is most known for is the tragic abduction and murder of his infant son. In what the media dubbed “the Crime of the Century”, Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son Charles Jr. was kidnapped from Lindbergh's home in 1932 and held for ransom. Despite receiving the money, the kidnappers killed Charles Jr. anyway. Richard Hauptmann was ultimately convicted of the crime, after investigators discovered a considerable chunk of the ransom money and other bits of incriminating evidence in Hauptmann’s house.

In the years leading up to World War II, Lindbergh became a prominent spokesman for the America First Committee, a staunch anti-war group loudly protesting American involvement in another foreign war. And this is the stuff that The Plot Against America is most concerned with - in his statements against entering the war, Lindbergh frequently cited American Jews as being war agitators, and referred to vast Jewish conspiracies to control the national media. In his personal writings, he was even more emphatic about the importance of limiting Jewish influence in the United States. The man was a galloping anti-Semite, and a very popular one at that. He was close friends with the famously anti-Semitic industrialist Henry Ford, who published a grotesquely racist newspaper called The Dearborn Independent in which he routinely railed against “the Jewish problem”. Lindbergh also believed in Eugenics, the idea of genetic superiority and racial purity frequently espoused by white nationalists and the Nazis in particular.

Speaking of the Nazis, Lindbergh has long been accused of being a Nazi sympathizer, which isn’t that hard to believe. In addition to favoring appeasement (the policy of “let’s just be nice to Hitler and maybe he’ll stop”), he made several trips to Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s while living in Europe. Hermann Goring, Hitler’s second-in-command, awarded Lindbergh the Order of the German Eagle, Nazi Germany’s highest honor. Lindbergh also believed in white genocide, the idea that diversity and multiculturism is a conspiracy designed to destroy the white race. (At one point, he warned that the spread of Communism would replace white Europeans with “a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown”, just so you know where his head was at.) It’s interesting to note that Lindbergh’s wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, didn’t seem to entirely share his beliefs, which is reflected in The Plot Against America.

Lindbergh abandoned his isolationist rhetoric after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the America First Committee quickly dissolved as well, because it’s pretty hard to keep that ball in the air after your country has actually been attacked. But it’s important to keep in mind that the entire nation was pretty divided about whether or not to intervene on Europe’s behalf in World War II - Lindbergh was far from the only person espousing these views, and a major element of The Plot Against America is illustrating just how popular rabid nationalism was even in the face of Nazi Germany.

At one point in the show, Herman Levin (Morgan Spector) derides Lindbergh’s presidential qualifications, referring to him as “a pilot with opinions.” That's but one of many clear parallels to be drawn between the series' alternate timeline and the current political climate in America, and between Charles Lindbergh and Donald Trump. Like Trump, Lindbergh rides a surge of populist support on a campaign of overt xenophobia and dog-whistled white nationalism. And if a game show host with a Twitter account can win the presidency, why couldn't a pilot with opinions?

The Plot Against America airs Monday nights on HBO. For more on the series, check out our interview with co-creator David Simon and our spoiler-free review.