These awful maladies plague red states — and Trump wants to emulate them

Turn on your local billionaire-funded right-wing media (it’s ubiquitous, after all) pretty much any day of the week and you’ll hear a similar rant, uttered with the same grinning certainty:

“ICE is going to surround the polls this November, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

They’re not floating it as an idea or something up for debate. They’re not raising it as a question of legality or even practicality. They’re promising it, celebrating it, and daring those of us who believe in democracy to try to stop them.

Steve Bannon says it nearly every broadcast. Hate-monger Jesse Watters applauds it on Fox “News” in prime time. Professional victim Ben Shapiro calls it reasonable. Newsmax, owned by two billionaires and Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al-Thani, hosts commentators who treat it like a done deal.

They’ve decided, in the open and on camera, with a swaggering confidence that no Republican will dare stand against them, that armed, masked thugs will stand at the entrance to your neighborhood polling place this fall, just like the Klan did in our great-grandparents’ generation in the South. Especially if you live in a neighborhood with a lot of Black and Hispanic voters.

And if you or some of your neighbors are frightened enough to turn around and avoid the building or even simply stay home, well, that’s precisely the point of this awful echo of some of the worst of America’s history.

The 150+ billionaires who bankrolled Donald Trump’s return to the White House now own the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House, and enough of our nation’s media to make their threat feel like it’s simply inevitable. As I’ve pointed out before, they’ve spent decades and billions of dollars building a media and think-tank infrastructure to keep working people confused, divided, and willing to believe whatever bullshit they’re fed.

But what these wannabe fascists don’t own yet, at least not completely, is your right to vote. And, looking at the prospect of a Blue Tsunami, that’s exactly what hard-right Republicans are working to fix before November.

“You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon announced on his podcast back in February, and he’s been repeating it in variations ever since.

Fox “News’” Jesse Watters thinks it’s a splendid idea. Ben Shapiro is fully on board. Newsmax hosts have been cheerleading it for weeks. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche — formerly Trump’s criminal attorney — stood at CPAC and asked, with feigned innocence, why anyone would object to armed, masked goons menacing people by standing outside polling places. You know, just like in the 1920s and the 1880s in the Deep South.

They’ve wrapped the whole scheme in the claim of “election integrity,” which is the same language every authoritarian in history has used when he decided the wrong people were voting too easily. It was the underlying logic and rationalization for Jim Crow in previous generations.

The real target of this obscene scheme isn’t some mythical army of illegal voters: as the Heritage Foundation discovered, they literally don’t exist in any meaningful way. Their real target is you, particularly if you’re not a straight white man, and the one of the several tools they’re planning to use is raw, naked fear.

And it’s not like they don’t know exactly what they’re doing. The Heritage Foundation’s own voter fraud database, assembled by people who have every political incentive to find a crisis, has documented exactly 68 cases of noncitizen voting going back to the 1980s. Sixty-eight cases across four decades in a country of 330 million people having cast billions of votes.

And when Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security conducted an internal review specifically to build the legal and political case for this “emergency,” they came back with the same answer: there is no evidence of widespread fraud. None.

The “crisis” Republicans have been using to justify making it hard to vote since the 1960s is entirely fictional. The emergency was cynically manufactured by rightwing operatives including William Rehnquist and proclaimed in 1980 by Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich. But the armed thugs they want to plant at your polling place will be very, very real, and their effect on who decides to show up and vote will be very, very real, too.

What they’re proposing is also, not incidentally, a federal felony.

Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 592 — a law written in the aftermath of the Civil War by horrified legislators who’d personally watched armed and officially deputized members of the Klan threaten Black voters with nooses and at gunpoint — makes it a crime punishable by up to five years in prison and the loss of any elected or appointed position to deploy armed federal personnel to any polling location, anywhere in America:

“Whoever, being an officer of the Army or Navy, or other person in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States, orders, brings, keeps, or has under his authority or control any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both; and be disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust under the United States.” (emphasis added)

That law has been on the books for more than a century because the people who wrote it understood that the moment we let the government sanction terror at voting locations, we no longer have a real democracy. Which, of course, is exactly the point of these rightwing fascists.

The cruelty of the scheme becomes even clearer when we consider how closely what ICE has been doing resembles previous generations’ experience of the Klan. A 2025 Supreme Court “shadow docket” ruling written by Pillsbury Doughboy imitator Brett Kavanaugh in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo says ICE can profile Americans based on how dark their skin is, where they work, or how they talk — the so-called “Kavanaugh Stops” — and what’s followed has been a wave of well-documented harassment of brown-skinned U.S. citizens.

A 20-year-old American citizen named Mubashir Khalif Hussen, for example, was stopped by masked ICE agents while walking from work to lunch in Minneapolis, shackled, and violently dragged off to a federal building — as he repeatedly protested that he was a US citizen and carried in his pocket the proof of it — before being threatened, humiliated, and ultimately released. He repeated “I’m a citizen, I’m a citizen” the entire time, but the agents, hungry for their bonuses and high on functional Vice President Stephen Miller’s racism, didn’t care.

A ProPublica investigation found more than 170 cases of U.S. citizens beaten, shackled, or dragged off at raids and protests, and that’s probably just the tip of a very large, very deep iceberg.

According to the Cato Institute, 73 percent of people booked into ICE detention since October 2025 had no criminal convictions whatsoever. You don’t need a scientific study to know what happens to Latino voter turnout when an ICE thug is the first thing you see when you walk up to cast your ballot.

The Brookings Institution found around 75 percent of Latinos across the country can speak Spanish well enough to be flagged under ICE’s “Kavanaugh Stop” profiling criteria, making enormous numbers of Latino citizens vulnerable to harassment and detention based on nothing more than how they sound. Not to mention that Brett Kavanagh’s diktat allows for harassment and arrest based on the color of their skin.

And Republicans know it. That suppression of the vote isn’t an incidental side effect of this GOP plan. It is the plan.

And what gets suppressed along with those votes is everything that working people in this country depend on to survive.

This — in addition to trying to keep Trump, his grifter family, and his toadies out of jail — is also the most recent way Republicans are going after FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society programs that built the modern middle class.

Research from the Economic Policy Institute documents how the states with the most aggressive voter suppression are also the same states with the lowest wages, the weakest labor protections, and the highest rates of poverty.

Red states with aggressive voter suppression have, in fact, the highest rates in the nation of:

— Spousal abuse
— Obesity
— Smoking
— Teen pregnancy
— Sexually transmitted diseases
— Abortion (at least before Dobbs; now it would be “forced births”)
— Bankruptcies and poverty
— Homicide and suicide
— Infant mortality
— Maternal mortality
— Forcible rape
— Robbery and aggravated assault
— Dropouts from high school
— Divorce
— Contaminated air and water
— Opiate addiction and deaths
— Unskilled workers
— Parasitic infections
— Income and wealth inequality
— Covid deaths and unvaccinated people
— Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”)
— People on welfare
— Child poverty
— Homelessness
— Spousal murder
— Unemployment
— Deaths from auto accidents
— People living on disability
— Gun deaths

That’s not a coincidence, and, for social scientists, it’s not a mystery. When working people can’t vote union rights evaporate, so corporate bosses don’t have to negotiate with their workers. When working people can’t vote, the minimum wage stays frozen, healthcare gets stripped, unions get busted, and social services are cut to pay for tax cuts so the morbidly rich keep all the money they’ve made from the labor of the people at the bottom.

Research from Equitable Growth has gone even further, showing a direct causal link between higher voting rates and higher minimum wages, more generous state support programs, and lower income inequality overall, which is why Blue states consistently have the highest standards of living in the country.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, by breaking down barriers that kept Black workers from the polls, actually reduced the Black-white wage gap. When five corrupt, racist Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted key provisions of that Act in 2013, the racial wage gap got worse again.

The ballot box isn’t just a civic ritual. For working people, it’s the democratic lever that moves everything else. It’s how you get a raise, keep your healthcare, and make the people who write the rules answer to the people who must live under them.

That’s why what Bannon, Trump, and his billionaire backers are doing is so nakedly corrupt. They know that if Black, Latino, and young voters, along with hourly workers and people in the communities ICE is currently terrorizing, all show up in November, the GOP will experience an electoral bloodbath.

When their congressional allies lose their majority, the billionaires’ and Trump crime family’s looting gets interrupted. Two years of ruinous tariffs, Medicaid cuts, tax giveaways to the morbidly rich, and the demolition of every federal agency designed to protect workers rather than owners all face a reckoning. Trump’s lickspittles — including his Attorney General — face prison, just like over 40 of Nixon’s aides and his Attorney General did.

That’s what they’re in an absolute panic about. That’s what armed, masked thugs at the polling place are designed to prevent.

I’ve spent enough time studying the history of authoritarianism, both in literature and in countries I’ve visited or worked in, to recognize what this moment represents. Every Putin-, Orban-, and Trump-style strongman who’s converted a democracy into an authoritarian state started by making “certain people” afraid to participate.

Today’s Republicans aren’t even original in their obscene threats of implied violence at the polling places. For almost a century after the Civil War, this was completely normal in the previously Confederate South.

And as the Klan taught previous generations of Americans, intimidation also doesn’t need to be legal to work. The chilling effect lands the same way whether or not the statute books say it’s permissible, which is exactly why they’re planning this in open defiance of federal law, and exactly why we have to name it for what it is: an attack on our constitutional right to determine our own leaders and thus our own nation’s future.

Call your member of Congress (202-224-3121) and demand they go on record opposing any deployment of ICE or other armed Trump goons to polling places. Let them know it’s a federal crime that should be enforced, and any federal official — including the president — who pushes it must “be disqualified from holding any office” and lose their job.

Check your voter registration right now at vote.org and make sure nothing has changed since the last time you looked, particularly if you live in a Red state.

Then bring every person you know to the polls this November, because the people trying to scare us away from the ballot aren’t just doing it for fun; like previous generations in the South, they well understand the vote’s power better than most of the people who take it for granted. It’s well past time the rest of us caught up.

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.