Dystopian Hypotheticals?
While he was a chief strategist during President Trump’s first term before the two had one of Trump’s classic bro breakups, podcaster and far-right influencer Steve Bannon has no official role in the Trump administration or White House this term. But his authoritarian visions so often are in lockstep with the insidious mind of Stephen Miller that he’s not not a useful narrator of Trump’s dictatorial imaginings.
In the wake of Trump’s calls to “nationalize” voting this week, congressional Republican leaders mildly observed that it is, in fact, a state’s right to administer its own elections in this country — though House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) in his own roundabout way also seemed to agree with Trump’s various fever dreams about widespread voter fraud in blue states, which Johnson thinks, someone should maybe do something about. Even the White House attempted to walk back Trump’s “nationalize” remarks, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt telling reporters that Trump was actually referring to the SAVE Act — an ominous-for-voting-rights piece of legislation that far-right House members were trying to get tied to a government funding package this week until Trump was able to convince them to back off with promises to get Senate Republicans to bypass the filibuster and force Democrats to use a “talking filibuster” to pass it — something that Senate Republicans do not seem to have actually agreed to do, at least not yet.
“What the president was referring to is the SAVE Act, which is a huge, common-sense piece of legislation that Republicans have supported, that President Trump is committed to signing into law during his term,” Leavitt said Tuesday.
But many of Trump’s conspiracy theory-prone allies have been running with the idea of federalizing elections ever since Trump gave them the runway for it, including a few members of Congress and Bannon.
During Tuesday’s episode of his War Room podcast, Bannon outlined his vision, which, as I alluded to above, should not necessarily be taken as literal White House policy. But it mirrors concerns that Democratic officials have been sounding the alarm about for months. Bannon suggested that the administration should send in ICE agents to “surround the polls” in the upcoming midterms, supposedly as a means to prevent the election from being stolen. He also proposed invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in the Army to monitor election administration.
“We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon said. “We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”
“President Trump has to nationalize the election,” Bannon continued. “He has to put, not just, I think, ICE, but you’ve got to call up the 82nd and 101st Airborne on the Insurrection Act. You’ve got to get around every poll and make sure only people with IDs, people are actually registered to vote, and people that are United States citizens vote in this election. Full stop. We will not accept anything less.”
This is the exact set of dystopian circumstances some Democratic officials have been warning about in recent weeks.
Before the Supreme Court ruling on the National Guard deployment in Chicago, Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker warned that Trump may try to take over elections in the upcoming midterms.
“I fear that what they’re going to do is deploy these folks eventually to polling places and say they’re protecting the vote,” he said during an interview with MSNOW in October.
In the months since the Supreme Court ruling, Democrats have raised the alarm about the Trump administration sending in ICE agents to swarm the polls, similar to how the administration flooded Minneapolis with agents under the pretext of a crackdown on fraud there, which, at the time, was actively being investigated by federal prosecutors.
“What I fear, beyond the potential for Trump to try to interfere in a major way in our elections is, one of the biggest ways he can interfere, is having these roving ICE bands show up at polling stations,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) said in an interview last week. “And not just in the fall, at primary polling stations. We in Virginia may try to change our maps to deal with redistricting, they show up there, that would chase away lots of potential voters.”
Former Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee penned an op-ed this week, offering a similar warning.
“Think about the private voter suppression army he has entirely at his disposal, an organization purportedly in existence to deal with immigration, but which could be used for Trump’s best survival tool, the suppression of votes in Democratic precincts in competitive districts and states,” he wrote.
The dystopian hypotheticals as outlined by Dems and whispered into the ears of those closest to Trump are becoming less and less speculative each time Trump digs his heels in on one or another of his various authoritarian aspirations, whether it be flooding a blue city with federal agents, relitigating his 2020 loss in Atlanta, or demanding election administration, left to the state by the Constitution, be co-opted by his political allies.
— Nicole LaFond
WaPo Lays Of a Third of Staff
In a devastating blow to journalism dealt by the hands of a billionaire owner, the Washington Post laid off one-third of its staff on Wednesday, completely stamping out its sports section, as well as a chunk of its foreign desk and its books vertical in a destructive cut of reporters and personnel that has been expected for weeks. Per the Associated Press:
Bezos, who has been silent in recent weeks amid pleas from Post journalists to step in and prevent the cutbacks, had no immediate comment.
The newspaper has been bleeding subscribers in part due to decisions made by Bezos, including pulling back from an endorsement of Kamala Harris, a Democrat, during the 2024 presidential election against Donald Trump, a Republican, and directing a more conservative turn on liberal opinion pages.
— Nicole LaFond
SCOTUS Rejects GOP Challenge to New CA Maps
In a win for Democrats, the Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a Republican challenge to California’s Democratic-favoring redistricting proposal, allowing the state’s new congressional maps to be used while litigation around them continues in lower courts.
Last month, a panel of federal judges rejected a request by the Trump administration’s DOJ and the California Republican Party to block California’s new map. The panel rejected the Republican argument that the new maps were racially gerrymandered.
Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling was expected given an earlier ruling regarding Texas’ gerrymandered maps, but far from guaranteed.
As previously reported for TPM, in December, the court ruled that Texas’s maps were partisan, but not racially gerrymandered, pointing to previous opinions finding that a partisan motivation was acceptable but a racially motivated one was not. In a concurring opinion on the Texas map, Justice Sam Alito specifically mentioned California, writing, “the impetus for the adoption map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”
— Khaya Himmelman
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