There’s a repeating motif in David Simon’s passionate, gutting adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel “The Plot Against America.” A Jewish boy in early 1940s Newark is sitting in his bedroom when he hears an airplane overhead. Maybe it’s a warplane. Maybe it’s the president. Neither is a comforting thought.

The president is Charles Lindbergh (Ben Cole), the famous aviator who, in this alternative past, defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 on a platform of antiwar isolationism laced with anti-Semitism, made nice with the Nazis and began a gradual program of persecuting American Jews in the name of assimilation.

That airplane motoring overhead is a symbol of what Simon and Ed Burns’s dazzling mini-series so mightily conveys: the ominous approach of history from a vantage where you can hear and see it but can’t touch it. It can only touch you.

“Plot,” beginning Monday on HBO, asks the audience to imagine the outlandish idea that the presidency might have been won by a celebrity demagogue new to politics who appeals to bigotry and fear, who ran on the slogan of “America First,” who boasts of having “taken our country back,” who sees fine people on the most reprehensible side of history, who cozies up to despots and behaves as if he were their puppet.