Back in 2024, even if you weren’t repulsed at the GOP’s horrifying plan for rounding up dark-skinned individuals (and you should have been), taking just two minutes of serious thought would have informed you that deporting millions of people en masse would require a fascistic approach to civil liberties.
And yet some people are still surprised.
For example, a septuagenarian Trump voter in Texas is loudly proclaiming to media outlets that Trump is “destroying families,” which again, is not news to anyone who has been paying even a micron of attention. This white conservative now says he regrets his vote because ICE had the temerity, the gall, and the chutzpah to arrest his fiancé, a Latina who no criminal record.
She has lots of company in ICE detention centers, which are chockablock with innocent people who got nabbed by armed masked men with insecurity issues. But until his girlfriend was handcuffed, this guy was all for stuffing people into vans and shooting unarmed citizens.
The shocker isn’t that people like this exist. The ICE armada is so massive that many shortsighted, easily duped supporters of this policy were bound to get caught up in its jackbooted thuggery. Eventually, authoritarianism comes for everybody.
No, the mystifying aspect is that these buffoons are willing, even eager, to go on camera to simultaneously reveal their selfishness, disdain for humanity, and obliviousness that borders on the delusional or idiotic. Hey, if I had fucked up this badly, I would keep it to myself.
There is also the disturbing truth that thousands of Latino activists have been pointing out the cruelty of ICE’s gestapo tactics, with limited media coverage. But one old white guy shouts, “I got something to say about this,” and everybody listens up.
But speaking of people who should have known better, please note that one-quarter of Latino voters who supported Trump in 2024 now say “they would not vote for him again.”
This is a high percentage of regret, although still far short of the 100% who should apologize on a daily basis for their groveling before white supremacy.
For those three-quarters of Latino GOP voters who are still MAGA supporters, they might want to listen to the conclusion of political experts who say, “Trump has now passed from being a stubborn narcissist to a cocooned authoritarian.” This phrase refers to “leaders who have become so trapped by their own self-regard, so isolated from the outside world, so imprisoned within their own sense of infallibility that they refuse to consider any arguments or information that conflicts with their beliefs.”
This means that “Trump’s irrationality could create other, even more perilous situations” because “like other authoritarians before him, the president has retreated, irrevocably, behind the walls of his own Forbidden City of the mind—a place where he is the emperor, his judgment is always right, and his commands must always be obeyed.”
So if that regretful Trump voter in Texas is waiting for our cocooned authoritarian of a president to apologize, he will be waiting until approximately the end of time.
Until then, it’s only going to get worse.
