Monday night, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker came right out and said it. Trump sending troops into American cities has nothing whatsoever to do with crime or policing but, instead, is all about stealing the 2026 election:
“Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans,” Pritzker said bluntly. “None of those states is Illinois.”
In fact, the cities with the highest crime and homicide rates are Memphis, Tennessee and St. Louis, Missouri respectively, both in Red States.
So, if this isn’t about crime, why is Trump working so hard to get Americans used to heavily armed troops — who aren’t trained in policing but can be very effective at crowd control — in our Blue cities?
The simple answer is that he and his cronies are terrified of suffering Richard Nixon’s fate (40 of his senior officials were indicted; many went to prison including his Attorney General and White House Counsel). That’s why they’re planning to steal the 2026 and 2028 elections by any means necessary, and the troops are part of their plan.
Because they know that one of the most common causes of people pouring out into the streets — including in ways that brought down authoritarian governments — was the regime in power stealing an election.
Governor Pritzker said it clearly and emphatically:
“This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections.”
Let that roll around in your head: “Militarize our cities, and end elections.”
Pritzker is no wild-eyed leftie or crazed conspiracy theorist. He’s the billionaire heir to the Hyatt fortune so he knows the billionaire circles Trump travels in well. He’s the governor of America’s 6th largest state, with a population larger than 170 nations or 87% of all UN member states.
He’s an attorney who knows the law, and a successful businessman who’s founded multiple companies, including backstopping tech companies, starting a venture capital operation, and building a private equity firm from scratch. He was elected in 2022 with the highest vote share of any Democratic governor anywhere in the nation in over 60 years.
And he’s watching what Trump is doing, far better, apparently, than our national mainstream press. He’s tracking Trump’s executive order giving the president the power to direct the military to seize voting machines (and thus nullify their votes) in Blue cities that may swing states away from the GOP. And Trump’s Executive Order to end mail-in voting.
Trump’s statement this week that Americans “want a dictator,” was almost certainly cribbed from his mentor, Vladimir Putin. His new order for the National Guard to work with ICE (eventually, presumably, to work for ICE, Trump’s personal secret masked police force) to create a “Rapid Reaction Force” to deal with civil disturbances reveals his end game.
Its mandate is to assist “local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law.”
It appears to be modeled almost exactly after the Rosgvardiya National Guard rapid reaction force Putin created in 2016 to put down anti-Putin and pro-Navalny protests; today the Rosgvardiya numbers over 600,000 men under arms. Putin probably told him about it in the car in Alaska, as this EO came right after that meeting.
READ: 5 Takeaways From DC’s Organized Resistance to Trump’s Military Occupation
Additionally, Trump‘s executive order essentially invites Proud Boys and other white supremacist militia into the tent to help with election intimidation efforts. It creates “an online portal for Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience” who National Guard leaders “shall each deputize the members of this unit to enforce federal law.”
As Alec Karakatsanis of the Civil Rights Corps, wrote on X, this will “permit random fascist vigilantes to join soldiers.” It’s a 21st century echo of the GOP’s Operation Eagle Eye, which enlisted white men to threaten people of color at voting polls in the 1960s and 1970s, or Hitler’s SA, the Sturmabteilung.
So, what sort of civil disturbance is it that Trump’s anticipating putting down with his Rapid Reaction Force?
Here’s a partial list of countries where a recent stolen or apparently stolen election caused citizens to pour out into the streets to challenge the regime in power:
Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Serbia, Ukraine, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Panama, Philippines, Georgia, Mozambique, Serbia, Malawi, Hong Kong, Comoros, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mauritania, Tunisia, Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, and Peru.
Stolen elections and the protests they provoke are one of the most common features of countries that are in the process of sliding from democracy into authoritarian fascism and strongman rule.
And if you think Trump doesn’t believe people will turn out in the streets — sometimes violently — to demand the overturn of a stolen election, just remember January 6th. If you truly believed that an election had been stolen in broad daylight, might you have been among those protestors, too? Given that example, you can add the United States to the list above.
And Trump definitely doesn’t want Americans — particularly Democrats — out in the streets protesting a stolen election again (unless Republicans lose so decisively he can’t steal the election, in which case he’ll try to repeat January 6th).
Make no mistake: this is what Trump’s militarization of Blue cities is all about. If he can confiscate enough voting machines, refuse to count enough votes, intimidate enough voters, and disqualify enough mail-in ballots to invalidate Democratic majorities in a few dozen big cities, he can flip as many Blue states to Red as he wants. And keep the GOP in power forever.
And he has to; in his mind he has no choice.
After Merrick Garland finally got off his ass following two years of worried thumb-sucking, just the smallest and most tentative efforts to hold Trump to account for a tiny percentage of the many crimes he committed both in and after his first term would have sent him to prison for the rest of his life.
Trump knows this well. He was arrested and mug-shot photographed in Georgia, convicted of fraud and what a judge called “rape” in New York, and was looking at dozens of other lawsuits and potential criminal and civil charges that are all on suspension since his election as president last year.
He can’t go back. His life and his fortune literally depend on his holding power and never allowing Democrats to have subpoena ability in the House or Senate again, at least as long as he’s alive.
It might explain why he just appointed 2020 election denier/activist and Cleta Mitchell protégé Heather Honey to a senior position in the DHS where she’s charged with “overseeing” the 2026 and 2028 elections, particularly, as Miles Taylor points out, the overseas mail-in votes that tend to trend Democratic. As ProPublica noted:
“Honey has led at least three organizations devoted to transforming election systems in ways championed by conservatives, such as tightening eligibility requirements for people to be on voter rolls. Members of Honey’s Pennsylvania Fair Elections, a state chapter of Mitchell’s nationwide Election Integrity Network, have challenged the eligibility of thousands of residents to be on voter rolls.
Honey has also been involved in numerous other efforts to transform elections around the country, including a successful push to get many states with Republican leadership to pull out of a bipartisan interstate partnership to share data to make voting more secure.”
He’s getting ready.
After all, Trump is the man who cheered as his followers killed three police officers and smeared feces on the walls of America’s Capitol while trying to overturn the 2020 election. He’s the guy who routinely lies to the American people while threatening and castigating reporters who dare call him out on it. He’s the one who openly admires Putin, Orbán, Erdoğon, Kim, Xi, and pretty much every other tinpot and major dictator in the world.
And the people who work for him — looking at the fates of John Mitchell, John Dean, G. Gordon Liddy and others who were busted for following the illegal and unconstitutional orders of a corrupt president — are equally emphatic that they’re never going to spend a day in a federal prison, either.
So, get ready because Trump’s already well more than halfway down the road toward fascism and, in his mind, there’s no stopping until America’s democracy is buried under the old Rose Garden and our dissenters are as quiet and terrified as are those few still remaining in Russia, Hungary, and Turkey.
If Democratic governors and mayors are going to stop Trump from having his armed forces pre-positioned to help Republicans steal the 2026 elections, they need to get an infusion of Pritzker’s and Newsom’s courage and begin to seriously fight.
A coalition or interstate compact — formal or informal — will be absolutely necessary to resist Trump’s armed forces. Perhaps even a sort of soft succession, openly defying Trump’s illegal orders and threatened violence.
Governors are not without resources, as both Pritzker and Newsom have pointed out; they just need to use them. Let your state’s governor know!
This article was originally published at The Hartmann Report and is republished here with permission.
