Losing your wife to own the liberals: Sounds like a parody of a Donald Trump voter, but it's turning out to be the story of Bradley Bartell, a Wisconsin man whose wife, Camila Muñoz, is being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Muñoz is a Peruvian immigrant who overstayed a visa, after being trapped in the country during the pandemic. She met Bartell while working illegally in the U.S., but because she married an American and is working on a green card, the couple thought it was safe to go on their honeymoon in Puerto Rico. Now she is sitting in a Louisiana detention center, having been arrested at the airport.
Initially, much of the reaction to this story was framed in terms of "regret," with some outlets claiming Bartell is "questioning" his vote. It's an understandable error. It should be that someone would regret taking an action that led directly to his wife being arrested. Careful reading of the story shows, however, that all Bartell would commit to was saying, "It doesn’t make any sense," without ever saying if he was reconsidering the wisdom of voting for a man who promised to deport everyone like Muñoz, starting "day one." I took to Bluesky and warned people that there was no evidence that Bartell had learned a lesson, gently predicting he would stand by Trump.
Note what is not said: that he regrets his vote or that he will vote differently in the future. Losing your wife to own the libs. Dark, but here we are. www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...
— Amanda Marcotte (@amandamarcotte.bsky.social) March 17, 2025 at 3:16 PM
On Wednesday, that prediction came true, with Bartell telling Newsweek, "I don't regret the vote," even as he asked people to donate to GoFundMe to raise cash for Muñoz's bond. He twisted himself in knots to argue that this wasn't Trump's fault, insisting, "He didn't create the system, but he does have an opportunity to improve it. Hopefully, all this attention will bring to light how broken it is." This is, of course, delusional. ICE is acting Trump's orders, which his press secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified in January: "If an individual is overstaying their visa, they are therefore an illegal immigrant residing in this country, and they are subject to deportation." Bartell would have seen that, if he read the USA Today story about his and Muñoz's plight, but I'd bet he didn't. USA Today is the hated "mainstream media," and MAGA refuses to trust it, even if it has useful, fact-based information, such as how deadly serious Trump is about this deportation agenda.
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None of this is to single Bartell out. On the contrary, the reason it was so easy to predict how he would react is that this is typical of most Trump voters, whose devotion to the MAGA cult reliably outstrips what should be more pressing concerns, such as the safety of their families. We saw this during the pandemic, as Republican voters — unable to admit liberals could be right about anything, including the germ theory of disease — refused to take precautions and even rejected the vaccines that Trump himself had authorized research funding for. The result was also predictable: death rates from COVID-19 among Republicans swiftly outpaced those of Democratic voters.
Being willing to admit you're wrong is hard for most people. In June 2017, I first wrote about the decades of psychological research showing that "buyer's remorse" makes people feel bad about themselves. Most everyone has, at one point or another, tied themselves in rationalization knots to avoid uttering the phrase, "I was wrong." Republicans have been swimming in decades of propaganda telling them liberals are the most loathsome people on the planet, making it all that much harder to admit that liberals were right all along. In addition, the personalities most attracted to Trumpism are hostile to critical thinking and attracted to "my way or the highway" attitudes that make no room to listen to disagreement.
In the years since, Trump and MAGA leaders have employed tactics familiar to anyone who's watched a documentary about cults. The term "Trump derangement syndrome," applied to anyone who criticizes Trump, functions like "suppressive persons," the Scientologist phrase for outsiders. It doesn't just warn members against listening to reason, but contains a threat: this is how you'll be labeled if you leave the fold. Cult members are under a deluge of conspiracy theories and disinformation, degrading their ability to think rationally and making them more dependent on the cult leadership. Above all, they are soaked in an "us vs. them" mentality, told constantly that outsiders are trying to destroy them.
Last month, NPR ran a 3-part series by journalist Zach Mack, about his failed efforts to de-radicalize his father, who had grown addicted to wild MAGA conspiracy theories prophesizing mass arrests of Democrats and the collapse of American cities. In the course of the series, his father loses both his wife and daughter, who end their relationship with him rather than put up with the nonsense. It's an audio format, so the listener gets to hear his father talk about all this, and what's striking is how gratingly arrogant his dad is. He drips contempt for people who are skeptical that an electromagnetic pulse will soon wipe out New York City, or disbelieve Barack Obama is about to be tried for treason. Mack's father's main complaint is he doesn't get the "respect" he feels he deserves. It swiftly becomes clear that preserving an image of himself as someone who knows better than all the annoying liberals matters more to him than anything — even if it costs him all his money and his entire family.
The quotes from Bartell's interview showcase a similar preoccupation. "I've received a lot of hateful messages, plenty of people saying we deserve this. And a lot of other insults," he complains. One would think that Bartell has bigger things to worry about than being miffed that people are less than gracious about how wrong he is and how right they are. Or that he might consider whether his critics have a point, that voting away his wife's safety was a poor decision. But this need for ego preservation is so strong, especially with loyal Trump voters, that these considerations don't even rate.
Rebecca Watson at Skepchick released a sobering video on this topic a few weeks ago, explaining why it's not as simple as "be nice to Trump voters suffering from their choices, and maybe we can win them over." She agrees that "a lot of Trump voters were victims of an elaborate scam," but notes that doesn't mean they're about to wake up. "I've been studying scams for several decades," she explains. "One of the most obvious ways to know if someone is going to get scammed is knowing that they already got scammed before."
As she explains, even if someone does come around to rejecting the current scam they're in, they have rarely addressed "the root problem that allowed them to be scammed." My research on the topic led me to the same conclusion. Once in a blue moon, a person is willing to do the hard internal work that leads to real, sustainable change. Most people who are radicalized, however, are lost forever. Even if they give up the current cult or conspiracy theory, they will almost always jump right into another.
There are plenty of people who can say, "I was wrong" or "I'm sorry." People who have that skill, however, tend to be empathetic, self-aware, and curious — all traits that prevent ever having voted for Trump in the first place. People who are attracted to Trumpism often have personality flaws, especially thick-headedness, that interfere with ever learning a lesson, no matter how serious the consequences.
Not that readers should give up all hope. Joe Biden won in 2020, by a small but crucial margin of persuadable swing voters. The bad news is most of these folks are low-information voters, which is why they were suckered by lies and social media noise into sliding back to Trump in 2024. The good news is that most of them didn't like Trump that much to begin with, and voted for him impulsively and even reluctantly. That means their ego isn't as wrapped up in the vote as the more hardcore MAGA people. Many may even "forget" they voted for him when that prospect becomes more embarrassing. Trump has only been in office for a few months, but he's already slipping with those voters rapidly in approval ratings. Think of these folks like people who get audited by a Scientologist once, on a lark, but are weirded out by the process and never go back. Not everyone who encounters a cult is sucked into it forever. The key is focusing on those who never put more than a toe across the threshold, instead of those who walked all the way in and shut the door behind them.
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