This story was originally published on Truthout on Feb. 05, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
On February 3, as Donald Trump was doubling down on his push to “nationalize” elections, Steve Bannon, MAGA’s version of Rasputin, promised his War Room podcast audience that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents will be deployed to swarm polling places during the upcoming midterm elections.
“You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon warned ominously. “We’re not gonna sit here and allow you to steal the country again.”
To be absolutely clear, neither Donald Trump’s nor Bannon’s proposals are remotely legal (or predicated on fact). The law prohibits intimidating voters where they are casting ballots — and it’s hard to see how the presence of armed, masked agents from a paramilitary outfit that has shown no compunction at kidnapping and killing people would have any other purpose. And the Constitution gives states control over their own elections’ processes, thus directly contradicting Trump’s desire, articulated in an interview with conservative media personality Dan Bongino, for the GOP to “take over” the elections systems of at least 15 states.
Yet Bannon and Trump are deadly serious. For them, any election that doesn’t go their way is illegitimate, and both are willing to use their vast media platforms to agitate for armed interventions at polling places. Both are, apparently, also indifferent to democratic norms, and are willing to push the constitutional system to the breaking point to get their way in the midterms.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) responded to Bannon’s fiery rhetoric by denying that ICE would be swarming polling stations in November, but it said that if ICE were targeting particular individuals, it might arrest them near polling places. Critics of ICE were hardly mollified by this, and by mid-week, many were calling for any congressional funding deal for DHS and ICE to include specific prohibitions on the agency operating at or near polling sites.
The Department of Homeland Security responded by denying that ICE would be swarming polling stations in November, but it said that if ICE were targeting particular individuals, it might arrest them near polling places.
Had Bannon been simply speaking off the cuff, it might have been possible to dismiss his threat to polling stations as being simply War Room hyperbole. But the timing of his words, coming after weeks in which Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric around “stolen elections” and “fraud” at the polling place, suggests that Trump strategists are mounting a coordinated effort to undermine confidence in November’s elections.
Trump recently declared that he regretted not ordering National Guard personnel to seize ballot boxes after the 2020 election. After stewing about this for more than five years, last week, the president ordered the FBI to head to Fulton County, Georgia, to raid elections offices in pursuit of “evidence” that the 2020 election was riddled by fraud. Astoundingly, the FBI agents were accompanied by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — who subsequently acknowledged that Trump ordered her to be present during the raid. Even more astoundingly, Gabbard then called Trump on her cell phone, left him a message, and, when he called her back, had him directly talk with the agents on the ground. It was, she told journalists later, a brief call, akin to a pep talk from a coach.
Remember the outrage when the Clintons met up with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac of an airport during the 2016 presidential campaign, as Hillary Clinton was being investigated for her use of a private email server? Remember the voices from the GOP calling for investigations and demanding to know whether the Clintons had pressured Lynch to drop the investigation? What Trump did in talking to the FBI agents in Fulton County was orders of magnitude more inappropriate — essentially using the full weight of his office to push agents into finding evidence of a crime that numerous investigations and prior court cases have not been able to identify — and yet the GOP leadership in Congress has remained utterly silent about it.
As growing numbers of people call for “ICE out of our cities,” soon enough they may need to raise the demand “ICE out of our polls.”
The past is, of course, often prologue to the future. Trump’s willingness to sic the Department of Justice and the FBI onto elections officials in Georgia, and to seize ballots from that election (and Pam Bondi and Kash Patel’s willingness to go along with this sordid venture) suggests that he would have no qualms about ordering the seizure of ballot boxes in November if he thinks that the GOP is heading toward defeat. After all, Trump knows that without a Republican majority in Congress, the protection that they have offered him for the past year will vanish and, in all likelihood, he will face a third impeachment.
An increasing number of Democrats have begun sounding the alarm about this very scenario, suggesting a serious concern that Trump simply will not accept election results that go against him. Recent attempts by the Department of Justice to access state voter rolls in Democratic-majority states have only fueled this concern. To date, the administration has sued 24 states in an effort to get them to turn over sensitive voter data.
In this context, Bannon’s endorsement of voter intimidation is akin to throwing oil on a fire. MAGA’s master strategist, the man who boasted about “flooding the zone with shit” to keep the media and political opponents off-balance, is proclaiming that Republicans are prepared to interfere in the midterms through voter intimidation if necessary. As growing numbers of people call for “ICE out of our cities,” soon enough they may need to raise the demand “ICE out of our polls.” To preserve what’s left of fair and free elections, it is imperative that voters not let themselves be intimidated by these authoritarian tactics.
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