You’ve surely heard “First They Came,” German pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem about the road to Nazi Germany. It’s one of those texts quoted so often that it can feel cliché. “First they came for the communists / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a communist” the poem begins, listing off other targeted groups before its widely referenced conclusion:
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
Yet despite its overexposure, there’s a subtlety to Niemöller’s poem that’s not often appreciated — something beyond the abstract “your rights depend on protecting others’” message. He is describing a specific strategy that Nazis used to dismantle German democracy.
There is a reason why the Nazis targeted the groups on Niemöller’s list: German politics made them particularly easy to demonize. They were either vulnerable minorities (Jews) or politically controversial with the German mainstream (communists, socialists, trade unionists).
After rising to power, Nazis pitched power grabs as efforts to address the alleged threat posed by menaces like “Judeo-Bolshevism,” harnessing the powers of bigotry and political polarization to get ordinary Germans on board with the demolition of their democracy.
What’s happening in America right now has chilling echoes of this old tactic. When engaging in unlawful or boundary-pushing behavior, the Trump administration has typically gone after targets who are either highly polarizing or unpopular. The idea is to politicize basic civil liberties questions — to turn a defense of the rule of law into either a defense of widely hated groups or else an ordinary matter of partisan politics.
The administration’s first known deportation of a green card holder targeted a pro-Palestinian college activist at Columbia University, the site of some of the most radical anti-Israel activity. For this reason, Columbia was also the first university it targeted for a funding cutoff. Trump has also targeted an even more unpopular cohort: The first group of American residents sent to do hard labor in a Salvadoran prison was a group of people his administration claimed without providing evidence were Tren de Aragua gang members.
Trump is counting on the twin powers of demonization and polarization to justify their various efforts to expand executive authority and assail civil liberties. They want to make the conversation less about the principle — whether what Trump is doing is legal or a threat to free speech — and more a referendum on whether the targeted group is good or bad.
There is every indication this pattern will continue. And if we as a society fail to understand how the Trump strategy works, or where it leads, the damage to democracy could be catastrophic.
How Trump’s strategy works
To see this Trump strategy in action, watch White House aide Stephen Miller’s recent interview with CNN’s Kasie Hunt.
During the interview, Hunt repeatedly presses Miller on whether the administration violated a court order by sending alleged Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador. Miller refuses to engage on that key issue of democratic principle. Instead, he repeatedly tries to reframe the debate around the necessity of confronting the gang, arguing that insisting on legal niceties means handing the country over to marauders.
“How are you going to expel illegal alien invaders from our country, who are raping [and] murdering little girls, if each and every deportation has to be adjudicated by a district court judge?” Miller argues. “That means you have no country. It means you have no sovereignty. It means you have no future.”
This, of course, is not a legal argument. If anything, it sounds like a parody of a political argument: “Oh, so you oppose sending people to be tortured in a Salvadoran prison camp without due process? Guess you must support Tren de Aragua killing little girls.”
But as absurd as this sounds, it’s proven to be a powerful form of logic — and not just in extreme cases like Nazi Germany.
In the years after 9/11, the Bush administration and its allies used similar arguments to discredit critics of its policies who have since been vindicated by events. Observers who warned of the threat to civil liberties from warrantless spying and Guantanamo Bay were dismissed as terrorist sympathizers. Iraq war skeptics were labeled Saddam apologists. This “you’re with us or against us” kind of moral blackmail worked on many, both at home and abroad.
The crucial role of partisan polarization
Of course, this kind of thing worked in the Bush era because there was so much hurt and anger among ordinary Americans in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. As much as many Americans may dislike Tren de Aragua or pro-Palestine campus protesters, there’s nothing like the level of public hysteria that we saw in the wake of one of the country’s greatest disasters.
Which is why the Trump administration’s rhetorical strategy also taps into another kind of dividing logic — the all-powerful force of partisan polarization.
The Trump administration’s rhetoric doesn’t just attempt to link their opponents in general to gang members and terrorists. They also attempt to link judges and other nonpartisan authorities to Democrats. At a Wednesday press briefing, for example, press secretary Karoline Leavitt referred to the judge who weighed in on the legality of the El Salvador deportations as a “Democrat activist.”
The idea here is to assimilate a question of basic legal principles into a familiar partisan script — Democrats vs. Republicans. And by invoking the polarizing power of partisan politics, they portray what is really a fundamental clash over the rule of law as yet another spat between the two parties.
There’s substantial evidence that this approach could really work to legitimize Trump’s policies.
Eminent Holocaust historian Christopher Browning has written several essays in the New York Review of Books that document what he calls “troubling similarities” between interwar Germany and America today. One of Browning’s key points is that the rise of Nazism was, in large part, a cautionary tale about “hyperpolarization.” The German center-right elite hated the left parties so much that they preferred Hitler, who was extreme even to their tastes — and were willing to hand him exceptional powers to crack down on civil liberties in service of crushing socialism and communism.
While Browning focuses his ire on conservative elites — he compares Sen. Mitch McConnell to Paul von Hindenburg, the German president who made Hitler chancellor — social science tells us that polarization can have a similar effect on ordinary voters.
In a 2020 paper, political scientists Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik published a paper testing the effect of polarization on citizens’ views on democracy. Using unusually high-quality data, Svolik and Graham were able to show that vanishingly few Americans — roughly 3.45 percent — were willing to vote against a candidate from their preferred party even if that candidate engaged in clear anti-democratic behavior.
This, they argue, is a function of polarization. When you hate the other side enough, the policy stakes of elections feel really high — and voters are willing to overlook even egregious abuses of power.
“In sharply divided societies, voters put partisan ends above democratic principles,” they write.
This analysis was critically important to understanding why Trump could win in 2024 even after the stain of January 6. Today, it helps us understand how Trump’s rhetorical strategies hope to numb Americans — and especially fellow Republicans — to an assault on their fundamental liberties.
