Steve Bannon has clarified the real target of Trump’s ICE/Gestapo Wave of terror:  the 2026 election.

Nationwide polls and early special elections indicate a likely massive public rejection of the Trump madness.

But this regime won’t tolerate any outcome that would hand Congress to the Democrats.

So it’s launching a Gestapo attack on the electorate.  

From Hitler’s Nazis to advanced totalitarian states to fascist juntas in Third World nations throughout history, the agenda is clear:  crush democracy.

The ICE killings and terror from Minneapolis to Los Angeles to Charlotte to many other cities, campuses and rural reaches throughout the US are anything but random.  They are the early stage of a coordinated dictatorial assault on the mid-term vote scheduled for November.

Trump has fantasized about cancelling that election altogether.  If he could, he would.

 But America’s popular and institutional resistance might run too deep.

 So Trump’s Opus Dei consiglieri Steve Bannon has clarified the strategy that’s within their grasp:  come November, they’ll have ICE surround every American polling place.  

The overall MAGA attack will in fact be twofold:  terrorize potential voters of color, and disenfranchise women.

The nationwide ICE murders and mass assaults on “immigrants” have been straightforward.  Citizens of color are to Trump/MAGA what Germany’s Jews were to Hitler:  scapegoats for failure, and the pretext for a totalitarian reign of terror.  

In the early 1930s, Jews were just 1% of the German population (500,000 in 50,000,000).  Their presence as an electoral force was nil.  Once Hitler abolished democracy altogether, his anti-semitic rampage boiled down to pure hatred and terror.

By contrast, the US is an historically diverse nation.  Citizens of African. Hispanic, Asian, Indigenous and other minority descent are at the brink of becoming a national majority (if they aren’t already).

Trump had been making inroads into the Hispanic electorate.  But polls now show a massive revulsion.   MAGA can hope to win in 2016 only by disenfranchising tens of millions of voters of color.  

So the ICE attacks on “immigrant” communities throughout the nation are essential to a MAGA dictatorship.  Bannon’s order to surround the mid-term polling stations with the ICE Gestapo is essential to a fascist coup.

That strategy is accompanied by Trump’s attack on mail-in voting.  

Ironically, the majority of mailed-in ballots have historically leaned Republican.  But the MAGA/Bannon calculation clearly involves forcing the electorate as a whole to come in person to the polls, where voters of color can be physically terrorized by the ICE Gestapo.

The other major target for disenfranchisement is women.  The female electorate is now heavily anti-Trump.  Women also now constitute a majority of the electorate.  

Without a de facto reversal of the 19th Amendment (which some MAGA fanatics explicitly demand) women voters are highly likely to help deal Trump a heavy mid-term defeat.

So the MAGA crusade now wants strict identification papers in which current legal family names match directly with birth certificates.

This often impossible demand stands ready to disenfranchise tens of millions of women whose married married names that don’t match birth records.  Passports, birth and marriage certificates can be rare documents to have.  An ICE/Gestapo entrenched in election boards at polling places will have the de facto power to rob tens of millions of women of their right to vote.

In election after election, the Democratic Party has flailed loudly about protecting the right to cast ballots and have them fairly counted…and then failed miserably to do so.

Steve Bannon has now made it clear that a core MAGA strategy for the November mid-terms will be to trash mail-in voting while besieging the polling places with the ICE Gestapo.  

At the same time the MAGA/Bannon terror attack means to deny the ballot to tens of millions of women.

In a nation increasingly infuriated by Trump’s dictatorship, only massive disenfranchisement can keep him in power.

The Bannon/MAGA junta is not shy about using the ICE Gestapo to do just that.

Who will stop them?

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Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman co-wrote (with Steve Rosenfeld) What Happened in Ohio about the theft of the 2004 election.  Bob wrote The Fitrakis Files; Harvey wrote Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth.  Most Mondays at 5pm ET they join eco-democracy activists via https://grassrootsep.org/upcoming-zooms/