WHY I DON'T HATE THE TRUMP VOTER WHOSE WIFE COULD BE DEPORTED

This USA Today story is getting a lot of attention:

He voted for Trump. Now his wife sits in an ICE detention center.

Bradley Bartell and Camila Muñoz had a familiar small-town love story, before they collided with immigration politics.

They met through mutual friends, had a first date at the local steakhouse, married after two years and were saving to buy a house and have kids. Muñoz was already caring for Bartell's now 12-year-old son as her own.

But last month, on their way home to Wisconsin after honeymooning in Puerto Rico, an immigration agent pulled Muñoz aside in the airport.

"Are you an American citizen?" asked the agent. She answered no, she wasn't. She's from Peru. But she and her husband had taken the legal steps so that one day she might get U.S. citizenship.

Millions of Americans, including Bartell, had voted for President Donald Trump's promise to crack down on "criminal illegal immigrants." But eight weeks in, the mass deportation effort has rapidly expanded to include immigrants whose application for legal status in the country is under review.

Muñoz came to the U.S. legally, on a temporary visa. She overstayed that visa at the height of the COVID pandemic. She has applied for a green card. Bartell thought she wouldn't be a Trump target.

"I knew they were cracking down," he said. "I guess I didn’t know how it was going down."

He imagined the administration would target people who snuck over the border and weren't vetted.

But his wife, "they know who she is and where she came from," he said. "They need to get the vetting done and not keep these people locked up. It doesn’t make any sense."

I'm seeing a lot of responses like this:

I don't want to defend Bartell, but I think his bewilderment is understandable, and isn't entirely his fault.

In part, Bartell did what a lot of people do: he encountered a con artist named Donald Trump and fell for the con. Trump has spent his life trying to make people believe that his entirely selfish acts -- by which I mean literally everything he does -- will actually be awesome for the people he's conning. Bartell is hardly the first person to be fooled.

But beyond that, I think Bartell accepted the common belief that Republicans are decent people acting in good faith to strengthen America and improve the lives of ordinary people, driven by an ideology that's centrist and commonsensical. Bartell is a white man from Wisconsin. I think the majority of white American heartlanders believe this. (It's not clear whether he shares the equally common belief that Democrats are ideologically extreme weirdos who actively seek to harm the country and make ordinary Americans' lives miserable.)

The belief that Republicans care about America and sincerely want to make the country better is so widespread that even many Democratic politicians fall for it. Here's Chuck Schumer in his recent New York Times Magazine interview:

Look, I talk to a lot of these Republican legislators. I’ve worked with them. Some of them are Trump devotees. But many of them don’t like him, don’t respect him and worry about what he’s doing to our country. Right now he’s so popular they can’t resist him. I mean, so many of them came to me and said: “I don’t think Hegseth should be defense secretary or R.F.K. should be H.H.S. But Trump wants him. He won.” The Republicans would like to have some freedom from Trump, but they won’t until we bring him down in popularity. That happened with Bush in 2005. It happened with Trump in 2017. When it happens, I am hopeful that our Republican colleagues will resume working with us. And I talk to them. One of the places is in the gym. When you’re on that bike in your shorts, panting away next to a Republican, a lot of the inhibitions come off.

Which, of course, recalls this, from 2012:

Republicans and the right-wing media equate Republicanism and Americanism while demonizing Democrats as extreme, which is what you'd expect. Regrettably, many Democrats and liberal commentators do the same thing, fixating on the areas where some Democrats, or those perceived to be allied with Democrats (e.g., academics), might be out of step with ordinary Americans, all while ignoring or downplaying the long-standing extremism of the GOP (on taxes and economic inequality, on guns, on the minimum wage, on abortion, and now, increasingly, on free speech, on the need for a government social safety net, on social services like the post office, and, in the Trump era, on due process and the rule of law). I'm talking to you, Gavin Newsom and John Fetterman, but not just you.

Donald Trump talked like an extremist all through the Biden years, and yet, as Adam Serwer says above, anyone who anticipated the extreme acts that have imprisoned Camila Muñoz and others, based on Trump's own promises to act in an extreme fashion, or who anticipated his other assaults on the rule of law, was deemed to be a hysteric. That's a failure to take Trump seriously, but it's also a failure to take people like Stephen Miller and the authors of Project 2025 seriously.

It should be understood that America's Republican Party isn't analogous to the Tories in Britain or the Christian Democrats in Germany -- it's analogous to Nigel Farage's Reform party in Britain or AfD in Germany. But the GOP is still almost universally discussed as if it's a party with mainstream ideas. That notion trickles down to people like Bradley Bartell, and they vote accordingly.