Steve Bannon, an enthusiastic advocate of authoritarianism, dropped the mask this week. On his War Room podcast, while interviewing far-right lawyer Mike Davis, Bannon said plainly what the Trump administration has been dancing and weaving around for months:
“We can use this as a test run, as a test case, to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm elections.”
There it is. Not a conspiracy theory. And definitely not liberal hand-wringing. The man himself, in his own words, explaining exactly what’s going on at airports across the country right now.
I’ve been writing and talking about authoritarian playbooks for decades, including in my book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class, and they almost always follow the same predictable script.
First, you exploit (Reichstag Fire, 9/11) or manufacture (“Border invasion,” Iran attack) a crisis. Use that to change the laws to give yourself more power as you flood public spaces with your militarized enforcers under the cover of “helping.”
Then you normalize it. Have you noticed how stories about ICE brutalizing and killing people have gone from the front pages to occasional mentions on social media?
Then you expand it. ICE has gone national, massive databases of protesters are being organized, and Trump this weekend came right out and said that his next target will be Democrats, who he called America’s “greatest enemy,” using the “Democrat Party” slur that Joe McCarthy suggested Republicans should always use:
“Now with the death of Iran, the greatest enemy America has is the Radical Left, Highly Incompetent, Democrat Party!”
Hitler didn’t march his stormtroopers into polling places on day one. He put them on street corners first, just like Trump is doing. By the time Germans understood what was happening, the intimidation and threats of violence or imprisonment were already baked into daily life, and questioning what was happening felt like questioning the natural order of things.
As you can see, what’s happening in American airports today is simply a chapter of that same playbook.
The crisis, of course, was manufactured. TSA agents are working their second or third round of missed paychecks because Trump and Republicans in Congress refuse to fund the Department of Homeland Security.
More than 400 TSA officers have quit since the shutdown began, according to their union. Callout rates at some airports have hit 55% in recent days. Lines at JFK, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson, and George Bush Intercontinental have stretched three hours or more, right in the middle of spring break travel season.
And why hasn’t this been fixed? Because, as Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana admitted on Fox News just yesterday morning, Trump killed the deal. Kennedy and Ted Cruz had actually worked out a two-step plan with Senate Democrats to reopen DHS and get our TSA agents paid. It would have worked just fine.
“Senator Thune submitted that to President Trump,” Kennedy said. “As is his right, he said no. No deals with the Democrats. So we’re back to square one.”
Senate Republicans have now blocked legislation to pay TSA agents at least seven separate times.
So the chaos in our airports isn’t an accident. It’s the setup for the end of free and fair elections and the final installation of a fascist state here in America. Create the crisis, then ride in to “save the day” with your loyal and violent enforcers as the solution.
And notice who those enforcers are: ICE agents, funded not through the normal appropriations process that’s stalled but through the $75 billion Trump locked into his “One Big Beautiful Bill” last year, fully paid while TSA workers go broke.
The agents can’t run X-ray machines, as border chief Tom Homan himself admitted. They’re not trained for airport security or to help people efficiently get to their airplanes.
What they are trained for, as Bannon crowed about on his podcast, is looking for brown-skinned people and checking their IDs. And that, Bannon said explicitly, is “perfect training for the fall of 2026.”
Bannon’s rightwing guest Davis was enthusiastic, saying ICE should be at polling places because “if you’re an illegal alien, you can’t vote.”
That claim sounds reasonable until you realize that noncitizen voting is, as Democracy Docket, the Cato Institute, and numerous academic studies have documented, virtually nonexistent. It’s a naked lie Republicans have been pushing since the 1960s to justify suppressing the vote of minorities and women.
The Heritage Foundation’s own election fraud database, after years of searching, found only a tiny handful of cases — fewer than 30 over several decades — in a country that cast billions of votes over that time period.
This has nothing to do with illegal voting, and Steve Bannon and Donald Trump both know it. As does every elected Republican and the very well paid professional propagandists at Fox “News.” It has everything to do with stopping legal voting by Americans who might vote the “wrong way.”
And it doesn’t stop at airports. The Fulton County FBI raid in late January exposed another piece of this apparent puzzle. Armed federal agents showed up at the Fulton County Elections Hub in Georgia and carted away over 700 boxes of 2020 ballots, as well as voter rolls and voting machine tabulator tapes.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was personally present, saying she was there at Trump’s personal direction. The affidavit used to justify the warrant cited claims about the 2020 election that have already been investigated, audited, litigated, and debunked repeatedly. Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts put it plainly:
“Every audit, every recount, every court ruling has confirmed what we the people of Fulton County already knew: Our elections were fair and accurate and every legal vote was counted.”
Georgia’s ballots were hand-counted three times after the election six years ago. There’s nothing to find, because nothing untoward happened.
But that’s not really what the raid was about either, was it? It was about setting up a rationale for future election interference.
About sending a message that the federal government can roll into any county in America, flash a warrant, and in a clear violation of the Constitution walk out with your election infrastructure. It was about demonstrating raw power, and about laying the groundwork for stealing this fall’s contest.
What comes next, Bannon has now told us directly: ICE surrounding polling places in November to scare away Black and brown voters and intimidate anybody else afraid of being the next Renee Good or Alex Pretti.
Trump himself has told reporters he thinks Republicans should “take over the voting in at least 15 places.” When pressed by reporters, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt admitted that she “can’t guarantee” that ICE agents won’t be at polling places this fall.
Newly confirmed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, during his confirmation hearing, also refused to rule it out, saying he’d only deploy ICE if there was a “specific threat,” without explaining that that could mean pretty much anything.
So imagine walking up to your polling place in November, having driven past ICE vans parked outside, seeing heavily armed immigration agents in black gear and wearing masks standing near the entrance.
You’re a citizen. You know you have the right to vote. But your neighbor is undocumented. Or your cousin is. Or you’ve been at an immigration rights protest. You don’t know if your name is on one of the many lists you’ve read about. You don’t know what “specific threat” means. And you think: maybe I’ll just come back later. Maybe it’s not worth it.
That’s voter suppression in its most raw and brutal form. That’s the way Vladimir Putin would do it. And that’s what this invasion of our airports is for.
Federal law under 18 U.S.C. § 594 prohibits “intimidating, threatening, or coercing any person with regard to voting or attempting to vote.” The law under 52 U.S.C. § 20511 prohibits certain federal and state officials from acts of fraud in connection with federal elections.
Deploying federal law enforcement at polling places for the purpose of intimidating voters as Bannon is bragging they’re setting up now is not some obscure, gray area of American law. It’s blatantly illegal. But the Trump regime has made clear, over and over again, that it considers itself above the law. And there’s no way Ka$h Patel’s FBI is going to investigate ICE or even itself.
I’ve been doing this long enough to remember when suggestions like the ones Bannon is making would have ended a political career before lunch. Now they’re bragged about on a podcast with millions of listeners, and the White House doesn’t deny them. That’s how normalization works.
That’s exactly how it worked in the 1930s, when European democracies looked at what was coming and kept telling themselves “it can’t really happen here.”
But it can happen here: It is happening here.
What you can do right now is simple but urgent. First, check your voter registration at vote.org and make sure you’re still on the rolls, especially if you live in a red state where Republican-led purges are removing voters by the hundreds of thousands.
Second, contact your senators, both of them, and demand they go on record about whether they support ICE agents at polling places. Make them say it out loud. Ditto for your member of the House of Representatives. (202-224-3121)
Third, support the organizations fighting this in court. Democracy Docket is doing extraordinary work on exactly these cases, and Fulton County’s lawsuit seeking the return of their ballots is one battle in a much larger war.
And fourth, talk to everyone you know. Not just the people who already agree with you, but your neighbors, your coworkers, your family. Because the goal of all of this, the airports, the raid, the threats, is to make you feel like resistance is futile.
It isn’t. But only if we act like it isn’t.