The “partisan split” of Americans showed up in a big way at Fourth of July celebrations and backyard barbecues last week, but the media, while noting or even complaining about it, rarely mentions exactly why it’s happening.
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A few weeks ago, Louise and I were having coffee with an old friend who’s known us since the early days of the radio show, and somewhere between the second cup and the muffins she said something that’s been rattling around in my head ever since. Her sister, a three-time Trump voter, had finally called — after months of silence — and demanded to know why our friend had stopped returning her calls.
“It’s just politics,” the sister said. “Why are you taking this so personally?” Our friend, who is queer and married, listened for about 30 seconds and then said, very quietly, “Because you voted for the people who want me to disappear, and you knew that when you did it.”
Then she hung up. She told us she felt awful about it for about an hour, and then she felt nothing at all, and the nothing was almost worse than the guilt would’ve been.
I’ve heard variations on that story dozens of times in the past year, and apparently so have a lot of other people, because a piece making the rounds on Daily Kos a few weeks ago by the writer Vyan put words to something that’s been building in millions of American households since January of 2016.
The piece is bracing and worth reading in full, but the core observation is one that the right-wing media ecosystem genuinely can’t process: their voters are suddenly discovering that their daughters and sons and nieces and old college roommates no longer want to come to July 4th, Thanksgiving, and other holidays.
They’re treating this as some inexplicable “progressive cruelty,” as if the rest of us simply woke up one morning and decided to be petty.
Greg Gutfeld did a whole monologue on it on Fox “News.” The framing, of course, is that you’re the unreasonable one for refusing to “look past” a single political choice your father or your uncle made:
“Can’t you just love them anyway? Why are you being so hateful?”
Here’s the thing they can’t quite bring themselves to say out loud, because saying it out loud would require admitting what they actually did: they didn’t vote for lower egg prices, although that’s the cover story most of them have settled on by now.
They voted for a man who descended an escalator in 2015 and called brown-skinned Mexicans rapists, who described non-white immigrants as “vermin” who were “poisoning the blood of our country,” language historians of fascism noted at the time was lifted almost verbatim from Mein Kampf.
They voted for him again in 2024 knowing exactly who he was, knowing what he’d promised to do, knowing that Stephen Miller had spent two years describing on podcast after podcast a deportation operation that would, in Miller’s own words, require building “very large staging facilities” and deploying the military against the civilian population.
They knew.
The Heritage Foundation published a 900-page blueprint to, in my words, “Make America White Again.” Miller did the interviews. JD Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler” before he became his running mate, and then ran with him anyway, and the voters knew that, too.
So what they got is exactly the hate and racism they voted for, and now, 17 months into the second Trump administration, more than 675,000 people have been deported, the ICE detention population has swelled to over 68,000 — a 70 percent increase over where it stood at the end of the Biden years — and people are dying inside those facilities at a rate this country has never seen before.
The Kaiser Family Foundation tracked 46 deaths in ICE custody between January 2025 and March 2026, with annual deaths roughly tripling from the 11 recorded in 2024 to 33 in 2025, and 2026 already on pace to exceed even that.
The ACLU now estimates someone is dying in immigration detention roughly every six days, and a CNN investigation a few weeks ago found that at least a dozen of those deaths were directly attributable to medical neglect, understaffing, and the cascading failures that happen when for-profit concentration camp operations double the detained population without doubling the doctors.
Three of the six deaths in a single recent month were suicides. The administration’s response has been to point out that the death rate, expressed as a percentage of the swollen detained population, comes to 0.009 percent, which is the sort of statistic you cite when you’ve already decided the people doing the dying aren’t quite people.
And Miller isn’t slowing down. He’s spoken openly about a vision of removing as many as 100 million people from the United States, a number that mathematically can’t just describe the undocumented, because there aren’t 100 million undocumented people in this country and there never have been.
That number describes naturalized citizens, mixed-status families, the U.S.-born children of immigrants, and anyone whose skin is dark enough that their presence Miller and his ideological allies consider an affront to what they keep calling “Heritage Americans,” aka “white people.”
Since the law changed in 1965 and we ended racial immigration quotas, the majority of immigrants to America have not been white, but white people (from South Africa, for G-d’s sake) are all the Trump administration now encourages to come into the US.
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Too many Black and brown people have already arrived from “s—hole countries,” they say, and it’s time for them to leave. Stephen Miller’s white supremacist project to ethnically re-engineer the country runs faster every week.
If you’re a white person who voted for this administration and you’re now telling your gay nephew or your Korean-American daughter-in-law or your Mexican-American grandkids that you don’t see what the big deal is, you’re asking them to make peace with the fact that the people running the country have, on the record, in their own voices, described a future in which they don’t exist here.
The economic case the administration likes to make is that all of this cruelty is somehow “necessary” because immigrants are “draining the country.” But that, in particular, is simply an establishing lie.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022 alone, and that in 40 states they pay a higher effective state and local tax rate than the top one percent of households living alongside them. Every million undocumented people deported represents about $8.9 billion in lost annual tax revenue, money that funds the schools and hospitals and roads in the very communities now cheering ICE on.
And the criminal rationale, the one that animates every Fox “News” chyron about “foreign rapists,” collapses just as fast: ICE’s own fiscal year 2025 enforcement data shows 127 sexual offense arrests in a country where the FBI logged roughly 127,000 reported rapes by US citizens, and the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network estimates closer to 443,000 actual incidents of sexual violence every year.
Meanwhile, Trump has issued an executive order labeling Americans dissenting from his racist, fascist, so-called “Christian” policies as domestic terrorists, and they’ve begun investigating, prosecuting, and imprisoning people for being anti-fascist, or “antifa” when the organization doesn’t even exist.
We’re dismantling due process, abandoning habeas corpus and the Fourth Amendment, and building concentration camps against a population that accounts for less than a tenth of one percent of the sexual violence in this country. The numbers don’t support the policy, though, because the economics were never the point, other than the number of Black and brown people arriving on our shores since 1965.
This is why people are walking away from their relatives and didn’t show up for July 4th picnics, and why the people walking away aren’t, in fact, “being petty.”
When someone you love votes for a candidate who has promised, in plain English, to do something cruel and unconstitutional and historically catastrophic, and then he does exactly that, and they still defend him, the relationship isn’t being broken by your refusal to overlook it.
The relationship was broken when they cast the vote. You’re just the one acknowledging the damage.
Gutfeld and his colleagues want to frame all of this as “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” as a kind of emotional incontinence on the left. But there’s a much older word for refusing to extend warmth and intimacy to people who’ve signed off on the persecution of your neighbors and those who stand for democracy against authoritarianism, and it’s not derangement.
It’s conscience.
The Germans who quietly stopped inviting their Nazi-sympathizing brothers-in-law to dinner in 1934 weren’t being dramatic. They were doing the only honest thing left to do, and most of them, looking back from the rubble in 1946, wished they’d done it sooner and louder.
We’re not in 1934 yet. The midterms are five months away. The country still has somewhat functioning courts (other than SCOTUS), a free press that’s bruised but breathing, and the kind of organized opposition that can flip a House and possibly even Senate majority if enough of us show up.
Look up the local organizations doing rapid-response work for detained families through groups like the Detention Watch Network.
And when the MAGA friend or relative in your life asks why you’ve gone quiet, you don’t owe them a fight and you don’t owe them an apology. You owe them, if you choose to give it at all, the truth: that you saw what they helped build, and you’ve decided you’d rather associate with someone else.
The rest of this year is going to demand more of us than ever before. Pretending otherwise is no longer an option.
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