Such is the transformation of this small town down the road from Sun Valley in the Northern Rockies, where yellow ribbons were once wrapped around trees along Main Street and “Bring Bowe Home” stickers were plastered on car bumpers. The ribbons and stickers are mostly gone, and the five years that Hailey stood behind its hometown kid when he was held by the Taliban have given way to a distrust of outsiders and a bitterness about the hostile tenor of American politics.

There is a “mob mentality that’s been created and is being created,” said Lawrence Schoen, the commissioner of Blaine County, where Hailey is. People in town have heard the demands of Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican and a former prisoner of war, that Sergeant Bergdahl be punished. People have also heard Donald J. Trump, a Republican presidential candidate, regularly call Sergeant Bergdahl “a dirty, rotten traitor” who should be executed or simply pushed from an airplane without a parachute.

The valley that surrounds Hailey is a relatively affluent and liberal sliver in a deeply conservative state, which added to the sense of being under siege in the immediate aftermath of Sergeant Bergdahl’s release.

“There’s some really ignorant people who live some places in the West,” said Fritz Haemmerle, the mayor. “They’re very right wing, they’re very militant, they’re very uninformed and they’re people with guns and with an attitude.”