I thought I understood Trump and the shift that the Republican party was undergoing.

I thought it was because the establishment Republicans, after taking both the House and the Senate, failed to make any progress on repealing Obamacare, despite having the largest majority in the country in nearly a century.

I thought that it was backlash to these Republicans who obstructed rather than built, who failed to even attempt to keep any of their promises which they knew were impossible to keep to begin with.

I thought that the rise of Trump was because people wanted someone who spoke his mind, regardless of the factual inaccuracies or concern for politically correct speech, and sounded like he genuinely wanted to do what he said.

After seeing the Republican National Convention, I’m not so sure I was right. And that scares me.

In a speech this week, Chris Christie, a former candidate for the Republican nomination and the current governor of New Jersey, hammered Hillary Clinton on issues such as her foreign policy experience in the Middle East and her role in creating the Iran nuclear deal. Christie called the agreement “the worst nuclear deal in history,” which is certainly a debatable claim, and pronounced Clinton “guilty” on making many bad policy choices. These attacks, though delivered slightly distastefully, were at least based on some sort of policy. However, it was the crowd’s reaction to the speech which truly made me worry for our democracy.

The Republican delegates started chanting “lock her up” in reference to Hillary Clinton.

This wasn’t the only time it was chanted, either. It became a staple of the convention and was repeated many times, including during Trump’s acceptance speech on Thursday.

There is no disputing that Hillary Clinton was “extremely careless”, as FBI Director Comey put it, in the handling of classified information; he was very clear that he did not recommend charges. She is not guilty of committing any sort of crime. We have no reason to “lock her up.”

To me, besides the fact that they are simply baseless, hearing these chants felt like watching American democracy curl up and die. I have always been of the mind that if we are open minded and willing to hear the other side out we can come to a mutual understanding of our positions and work together to find a suitable solution. I have found this to be true in my personal anecdotes speaking to many people who disagree with me politically.

But how can you hear someone out when all discourse is deafened by the continuous sounds of chants screaming for the imprisonment of an innocent woman? There is no way I can say that this person belongs in jail and then turn around and hear what she has to say about gun control. Once you cross that line, the room for conversation is just gone.

I left the RNC feeling sad, more than anything. I was sad for the state of our politics and its partisan nature. I was sad for our ability to come together as a country. And I was afraid for where we may be heading in the coming months and years.