Mass killing does not begin with mass killing. It begins earlier, in language, in law, in bureaucracy, in the daily rehearsal of who belongs and who does not. A people are made killable when a society is taught to see them not as neighbors, citizens, classmates, co-workers or fellow worshippers, but as contamination, danger, burden or enemy. Once that work is done, violence no longer looks like a crime to its perpetrators. It begins to look like defense, purification, necessity, even patriotism.

That is what happened in Nazi Germany. Jews were not marched straight from ordinary life to Auschwitz in one leap. First came the lies, old and new: Jews as corrupters, conspirators, parasites, threats to the nation. Then came the law. The Nuremberg Laws turned Jewishness from a matter of religion or culture into a matter of blood, stripped Jews of full citizenship, criminalized intimacy with non-Jews, and laid the legal foundation for systematic persecution. After that came hundreds of decrees and regulations that took away rights, property, jobs, mobility and dignity. The point was not only exclusion. It was moral reclassification. Jews had to be taught to the public as a people outside ordinary obligation, so that injury to them would no longer shock the conscience in the same way.

Rwanda followed a different road to a chillingly similar destination. Tutsi were made killable through years of hardening propaganda, political radicalization and the rhetoric of existential threat. In 1994, the genocide was carried out primarily against Tutsi civilians and moderate Hutu. The killers were not only soldiers or party militants. They included politicians, gendarmes, Interahamwe militia, local officials and ordinary citizens. RTLM radio and the newspaper Kangura did not merely spread hate; they helped create a world in which the Tutsi next door could be marked as the enemy and the moderate Hutu as traitor. Roadblocks, lists, local administrators and neighborhood knowledge turned ideology into action. The body next door became actionable.

The similarities between Germany and Rwanda are therefore not superficial. In both places, the targeted group had to be turned from human beings with biographies into a problem with a single name. In both places, propaganda narrowed sympathy and widened suspicion. In both places, law and administration mattered: in Germany through racial law, registration, expropriation and deportation; in Rwanda through local power, identity marking, radio incitement and militia coordination. In both places, bystanders were trained long before they were called by that name. A society first learns to look away, then to accept, and finally, in some cases, to participate.

But the differences matter too, and we dishonor history if we blur them. Nazi Germany was the work of a modern bureaucratic state radicalizing over years and then scaling extermination across Europe. Rwanda’s genocide was compressed into roughly one hundred days, with extraordinary speed, local participation and intimate killing. Germany moved through legal ostracism, civic death and industrial murder. Rwanda moved through political crisis, organized incitement, roadblocks and neighbor-on-neighbor slaughter. The method was different. The mechanism was not. In both cases, people were first made morally available for destruction.

That is why the right lesson is not lazy analogy, but vigilance about preparation. America is not Nazi Germany. It is not Rwanda in 1994. But history does not teach that catastrophe arrives only when the uniforms, symbols and dates all match. History teaches that catastrophe is prepared by habits: dehumanizing language, official categories of contamination, emergency rhetoric, punitive bureaucracy, and the steady shrinking of the circle of people whose rights and suffering count.

This is where Donald Trump enters the picture. He has spent a decade rehearsing a politics of preparation. He launched his presidential career in 2015 by saying Mexico was sending “rapists” and criminals across the border. In 2018, according to Reuters, he questioned why the United States should want immigrants from Haiti and African countries, referring to some as “shithole countries.” In 2023 and 2024, he said undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country, called some immigrants “animals,” and said they were “not human.” He also repeatedly used the phrase “enemy within” for domestic opponents and floated using the military against that supposed internal threat. This is not ordinary democratic disagreement. It is the language by which groups are shifted from fellow residents to suspect populations

If anyone doubts the authoritarian echo, the record is there too. In 2016 Trump amplified a quote attributed to Benito Mussolini on social media and later defended the message. In 2024, Reuters reported that his former chief of staff, John Kelly, said Trump had told him Hitler “did some good things,” met the definition of a fascist, and preferred the dictator approach to government. Trump has denied or rejected such characterizations. But the larger point is not whether he keeps a shelf of fascist biographies by his bedside. The point is that his public method repeatedly echoes the old script: worship the leader, degrade the outsider, threaten the opponent, and present coercion as national rescue.

And in his second term, the rhetoric has been matched by machinery. Trump’s White House has issued immigration orders framed around “invasion,” including a January 2025 order titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” and a proclamation “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion.” Another June 2025 proclamation reinstated and expanded a travel ban affecting citizens of 12 countries, with additional partial restrictions on others; rights groups had earlier warned that January 2025 orders were laying the groundwork for a revived Muslim-style travel ban. The message is not subtle: the migrant is not a person seeking entry; the migrant is an invading force.

ICE has been the more visible arm of this politics. Reuters documented a 2025 wave of mass arrests that induced fear in immigrant communities, including street detentions and arrests that reverberated through neighborhoods from Chicago to Texas. Reuters also reported that after restrictions around churches were eased, arrests in or near church parking lots became easier, pushing some immigrant congregations toward virtual worship or more cautious routines. Again, the point is not that every detention is genocide. The point is that a government can teach a public, day after day, that some people may be hunted in daylight with less and less shame.

Even institutions that do not look like police can help prepare the ground. DOGE—the so-called Department of Government Efficiency—was established by executive order in January 2025 to carry out Trump’s agenda of government “efficiency.” Reuters later reported that DOGE made aggressive early moves to restructure agencies and slash the federal workforce, then failed to provide transparent accounting for its claimed savings before being quietly folded into other bodies. That matters because authoritarian politics is not only about whom the state arrests. It is also about hollowing out the institutions, norms and professional cultures that might resist arbitrary power. A state that teaches itself to treat whole categories of workers, experts and watchdogs as disposable is teaching a broader lesson about disposability itself.

The same pattern can be seen in Trump’s attacks on perceived foes and on civil-rights infrastructure. Reuters reported that in his first 100 days of his second term Trump used presidential power against a wide array of perceived enemies, including former officials, prosecutors and major law firms. At the same time, he moved aggressively against DEI programs, including executive orders that ended diversity offices across government and revoked Executive Order 11246, Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 order on equal employment opportunity in federal contracting. You do not have to agree with every DEI program to understand the signal: racial equity itself is being recoded as suspect, and anti-racist institutions as enemies of merit and nation. That is how the circle widens—from immigrants and Muslims to Black activists, anti-Trump citizens, university protesters, civil-rights lawyers, and anyone who can be painted as the internal obstacle to national restoration.

That is the warning. Not that America is one speech away from Auschwitz or one rally away from Kigali. History is not that cheap, and comparison should not be that reckless. The warning is that the road to catastrophe is paved long before catastrophe arrives. It is paved with names: vermin, invaders, animals, traitors, enemies within. It is paved with laws that sort people by blood, origin, paper, faith or usefulness. It is paved with institutions that stop protecting and start classifying. It is paved with the public rehearsal of indifference.

The lesson of Germany and Rwanda is not simply that evil men did evil things. It is that societies can be taught, step by step, to see some people as less grievable, less rescuable, less entitled to ordinary protection. Once that lesson sinks in, violence need not even begin with murder. It begins with abandonment, with humiliation, with open season, with the public feeling that if something terrible happens to those people, it was somehow already in the script.

That is what must be resisted—now, before the script hardens.