Why Too Many GOP Voters Still Love ICE

While an increasing number of Americans view ICE's cruel and brutal immigration  occupation of American cities with growing revulsion, one demographic continues to cheer on the brutality: white MAGA voters.   Some within the groups almost enjoy seeing non-whites - and those they view as "libs" - being abused, mistreated and deprived of any due process protections.  Somehow, they close their eyes to the murder of American citizens like Renee Good and Alex Pretti and only too happily believe the lies spewed by the Felon's regime, seemingly believing that the cruelty and brutality they celebrate will never impact them directly.   The phenomenon reveals, in my view, that support for the Felon and his damaging policies by these voters never involved economic fears or concerns about inflation and high prices.  Instead, the underlying impulse for voting for the Felon and cheering on the depravity of ICE operations has always boiled down to racism and a hatred of those deemed "other." Much of the MAGA parks itself in church pews each week while utterly ignoring Christ's gospel message and displaying a Pharisee-like hypocrisy.  A piece at Salon looks at this troubling reality of the hate and racist motivation still far too prevalent through out MAGA. Here are excerpts:

The Trump administration’s thuggery continues to grow and expand. In the aftermath of Alex Jeffrey Pretti’s killing on Saturday in Minneapolis at the hands of federal agents, hundreds of people almost immediately began to protest at the site where he was held down and shot at least 10 times. Federal law enforcement agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection rained flash bangs and tear gas down on the crowd. They grabbed protesters and beat them. Witnesses described the scene as dystopian, and they had trouble believing that American citizens engaged in peaceful protest would be treated this way by their own government.

In the middle of the mayhem, an elderly man stood his ground. “They f**king killed him!,” he screamed. “I’m 70 years old, and I’m f**king angry!”

Immigration has long been one of Donald Trump’s most popular issues. A new poll conducted by POLITICO shows that 49% of Americans support Trump’s mass deportation campaign. According to the results of a nationwide New York Times/Siena poll, his support continues to collapse, with only 41% approving of his performance as president. 

But while tens of millions of Americans are outraged by the growing cruelty of the Trump administration, including his mass deportation campaign, many tens of millions of others are cheering it on. Ninety percent of Republicans expressed support in a recent CBS/YouGov poll. The breakdown on racial lines is stark: A majority of white Americans support the president’s immigration policies, while a majority of non-whites oppose them.

[A] new report by the Public Religion Research Institute reveals something even more troubling about Trump’s MAGA base and the extremes to which they will go to support his mass deportation campaign and larger project to Make America White Again and creating what would be a de facto police state in America.

• For example, a majority of Americans (61%) agree that “immigrants, regardless of legal status, should have basic rights and protections such as the ability to challenge their deportation before a judge in court.” But only 37% of Republicans agree with this basic principle of American democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. 
• A majority of Republicans also support arresting and detaining immigrants who do not have a criminal record. Most Americans and the vast majority of Democrats (88%) oppose such a policy. 

·   Republicans, by a large majority (69%), also support putting “illegal immigrants” in internment camps until they can be removed from the country. 

·     Predictably, a majority of Republicans also want “illegal aliens” to be sent to foreign prisons, or gulags, in such countries as El Salvador, Rwanda and Libya without due process. A majority of Americans (68%) and an overwhelming majority of Democrats (90%) oppose such inhumane policies.

Ultimately, for Trump’s MAGA followers and the larger anti-democracy right-wing, the man screaming at the site of Alex Pretti’s killing is music to their ears. They see dystopia as a utopia. This warped vision of unlimited power, the silencing of critics and ability to impose their beliefs on those deemed to be the Other serves their goal of ending the country’s pluralistic democracy and replacing it with a White Christofascist plutocracy ruled by a very small number of powerful White men. This new America would be a union of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Jim and Jane Crow, and technofeudalism. Rank-and-file MAGA followers and other members of the right-wing will not live better material lives in this world, but they will enjoy the psychological wages of being told they are inherently superior over the Other as their need for social dominance is validated. 

This moral inversion further reveals a society in the grips of fascism, authoritarianism and the culture of cruelty. But the GOP is experiencing little if any cognitive dissonance between their expressed family values and Christian morality and their support for the cruel, antisocial policies of the Trump administration — and the great harm they are causing huge swaths of the public. For them, power, domination and control are what ultimately matter. 

There will be many more Alex Prettis, Renee Goods and other people whose names are not yet known in the months and years ahead as the machinery of Trump’s mass deportation campaign gets up to full speed. But Pretti’s killing, as Walz said in a press conference on Sunday is an inflection point, a reckoning.

“I’ve got a question for all of you: What side do you wanna be on? The side of an all-powerful federal government that can kill, injure, menace, and kidnap its citizens off the streets? On the side of a nurse at the VA hospital who died bearing witness to such a government? Or the side of a mother whose last words were, ‘I’m not mad at you.’”

The American people are divided, living in the same country but not the same reality. Tens of millions will answer Walz’s question in ways that may rock and break Americans of conscience — especially mainstream liberals and centrists.

Democrats and other pro-democracy voices cannot assume that the increasingly not-so-silent majority who oppose Trump’s policies on immigration will give them a victory in the upcoming midterm elections. There remains a deep base of support for Trump’s policies — and their cruelty. The Democratic Party needs to stake out a firm, unequivocal moral position and then lead from there. One of the first steps toward this will be for Senate Democrats to vote against funding for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security — or at least imposing severe limits and strict oversight — and explaining in clear direct language how this will be a vote about the country’s character and the type of people we Americans want to be.