As a historian of disinformation, especially of both World Wars and after, I can’t help but compare tactics deployed by America overseas to the recent “voter” focus of Trump’s stormtroopers.

Minnesota is currently experiencing the domestic deployment of destabilization and election-capture techniques developed by U.S. military and intelligence services over seven decades of foreign interventions.

The playbook is public and extensively documented in declassified CIA records, academic studies, and post-Cold War analyses. It’s what you study if you are interested in being a historian of regime change tactics like disinformation.

What makes the Minnesota operation so Trumpian is the inversion: techniques designed by America to overthrow foreign governments are being applied by Trump to capture election infrastructure and undermine the 2026 midterms.

This is not metaphor. The structural elements align precisely. The playbook is more obvious than you might think, you just have to like history. Although, to be fair, it’s also being said out loud now.

“I’m not sure what gave [Trump] the indication that at this point in time, what’s happening to my state, that I’m interested in Venezuela,” [Minnesota Governor] Walz continued. “But he told me how well that went, which really was strange to me was, he saw an operation in Venezuela, against a foreign nation, in the same context he saw an operation against a U.S. state and a U.S. city.”

How the U.S. Aimed to Overthrow Governments

OG Postwar Regime Change: Italy 1948

The nascent CIA’s first-ever covert action was electoral interference. Facing strong left-wing leaders in post-war Italy, the Truman administration authorized an operation that became, in the words of the CIA’s own chief internal historian, “a template for what the agency then did in many, many countries.”

The template included:

• Massive covert funding to right-wing parties
• Propaganda and scare campaigns to frighten voters
• Grassroots initiatives manufactured to appear spontaneous
• Media acquisition and influence operations

The operation worked and a lesson was recorded: ballots don’t need to be stuffed like 1850s Kansas if you can control the infrastructure around them in the 1950s.

Refinement: 72 Cold War Operations

America attempted to change foreign governments at least 72 times after Italy. The techniques grew and evolved:

• British Guiana (1964): The U.S. plan was explicit—“change the electoral rules, then work to ensure [the target’s] party could not win an election.” The CIA orchestrated strikes, bombings, and ethnic violence while U.S. diplomats delayed independence until electoral systems could be restructured.
• Chile (1970-73): When Salvador Allende won democratically, the CIA spent millions to destabilize his government, funded opposition media, and supported the eventual military coup. A senior CIA official later defended the interventions as preserving “the democratic constitutional order”—the constitutional language that always accompanies authoritarian capture.
• Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958), Brazil (1964): Each operation refined the model of using security forces, economic pressure, propaganda, and electoral manipulation in combination.
• Panama (1989): The CIA paid Manuel Noriega around $200K/year to “disappear” left-wing leaders and ship drugs into America—until a sudden unexplained plane crash killed the Panamanian President and Noriega consolidated power. He remained useful until the former CIA director who handled him became American President and wanted him gone. After massive military invasion of the country, Delta Force failed a dozen times to assassinate him, so they negotiated his surrender instead.

Maturation: The Color Revolution Model

By the 2000s, regime change had been systematized into what analysts discuss as “color revolutions”:

1. Manufactured crisis (“If the political situation is stable, destabilization must be created in an artificial way”)
2. Security force deployment to create leverage
3. Election infrastructure capture (USAID spent $1.5 million computerizing Georgia’s voter rolls before the Rose Revolution)
4. Propaganda framing the target government as illegitimate
5. Constitutional/legal cover for extra-constitutional action

The formula worked in Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005). U.S. officials publicly celebrated democracy promotion while classified assessments acknowledged the covert dimensions of regime change.

Minnesota 2026: Foreign Playbook Turned Against US

1. Security Force Deployment as Leverage

   Foreign template: Deploy military or paramilitary forces to create instability, then use their presence as bargaining leverage.

   Minnesota: Thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents occupy Minneapolis—a city 1,500 miles from the southern border with no unusual immigration patterns. Within weeks, federal agents have shot and killed two people: Renee Good and Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen and nurse. The occupation creates the very “chaos” cited as justification for demands.

   Attorney General Pam Bondi’s letter to Governor Walz explicitly links the two: comply with federal demands and she can “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota.” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon called this “an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and security.”

   This is the color revolution model inverted: instead of deploying assets to pressure an authoritarian regime into concessions, the federal government deploys assets against a democratic state government to extract control of election systems.

2. Voter Infrastructure as the Strategic Target

   Foreign template: Gain access to or control over voter registration systems before elections.

   Minnesota: The DOJ is demanding complete voter rolls including names, addresses, partial Social Security numbers, and driver’s license numbers. This demand extends to roughly two dozen states—all states Trump lost in 2020.

   The infrastructure already exists to weaponize this data. The Department of Homeland Security has built a system called SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) that cross-references voter rolls against immigration databases. Tens of millions of records have already been processed. The system has produced no evidence of the “widespread voter fraud” claimed as justification—but in one Texas county alone, 15 of 84 voters flagged as “noncitizens” were false positives (an 18% error rate).

   An 18% false positive rate, applied to millions of voters in swing states before a midterm election, is the simple mechanism.

3. Crisis Manufacture

   Foreign template: “The first and basic condition is political instability in the country, which is accompanied by a crisis of the current authorities. If the political situation is stable, destabilization must be created in an artificial way.”

   Minnesota: There was no immigration crisis in Minnesota requiring federal intervention. The “emergency” was manufactured:

   • Claims of massive welfare fraud in the Somali community (investigations ongoing, no mass convictions)
   • Claims of voter fraud (no evidence found despite years of searching)
   • Federal agents deployed in numbers appropriate for border operations, not interior enforcement

   The occupation itself generates the instability: protests erupt, federal agents kill civilians, national media coverage creates the impression of chaos, and the federal government demands concessions to restore order it disrupted.

4. Constitutional Cover for Extra-Constitutional Action

   Foreign template: Frame coups and interventions as “preserving the democratic constitutional order” or “election integrity.”

   Minnesota: Every demand is framed in legal language—”Enforcing federal election law,” “Election integrity,” “Common sense solutions.”

   But federal judges are not fooled. A California court dismissed the DOJ’s voter data lawsuit as “unprecedented and illegal.” An Oregon judge signaled the same. The Kobach Commission in 2017 found no fraud before being disbanded. The legal framework is a legitimacy facade over an extra-legal power grab.

5. Target Selection

   Foreign template: Target governments not aligned with U.S. interests or identified as obstacles to strategic objectives.

   Minnesota: The DOJ is suing approximately two dozen states for voter data, which just happens to be all states Trump lost in 2020. This is blunt targeting. Minnesota is a swing state with competitive 2026 Senate and House races. Control of Congress depends on states exactly like Minnesota.

   The targeting is strategic, not administrative.

Structural Comparison

The Precedent Chain

1. 1947: National Security Act creates CIA
2. 1948: Italy operation establishes election interference template
3. 1953-1989: 72 regime change operations refine techniques
4. 2000-2005: Color revolutions systematize the model—security force pressure, election infrastructure capture, crisis manufacture, constitutional cover
5. 2017: Kobach Commission (domestic dry run)—requested voter data from all 50 states, 44 states refused, commission disbanded after finding no fraud, pattern established: claim fraud to demand data and plan purges, failure mode identified: no coercion mechanism
6. 2026: Minnesota operation—same data demands, added coercion via armed federal occupation, explicit quid pro quo (Bondi letter), pre-built processing infrastructure (SAVE), lawsuits against non-compliant states

The 2017 Kobach Commission failed because states could simply refuse.

The 2026 operation fills in what Kobach always said was missing: the crushing arm of the law, like how South African apartheid worked. Armed Trump stormtroopers on the ground create explicit linkage between compliance and creating chaos that only they can “end.”

The “Competent Complicity” Problem

Color revolutions and regime change operations require skilled professionals who understand their actions serve no legitimate stated purpose yet execute them anyway. This is the most dangerous form of institutional capture: competence in service of illegitimate ends.

Foreign operations: CIA officers understood “election integrity” was pretext. State Department officials provided diplomatic cover knowing the democratic rhetoric was instrumental. Military and intelligence personnel executed operations while maintaining plausible deniability.

Minnesota 2026 operations:

• ICE agents know their occupation of Minneapolis is not standard immigration enforcement
• DOJ attorneys file lawsuits courts are rejecting as “unprecedented and illegal”—and continue filing
• DHS personnel operate SAVE knowing the false positive rates will disenfranchise legitimate voters
• Federal judges rule against the administration; operations continue anyway. Over 300 courts have rejected Trump’s stormtrooper tactics

The system doesn’t require true believers, and it certainly doesn’t want to be popular. The more unpopular the stormtroopers, the more they feel unleashed to commit random violence and spiral aggression. It requires professionals who follow orders while understanding the orders serve purposes other than stated.

What’s Actually Being Built

Seven years of searching have produced no evidence of the mass fraud claimed, because it’s not about that anyway. Just like a year of “releasing” Epstein files has produced nothing. The goal is total control over narrative and physical spaces, to disable state election infrastructure before November 2026.

If successful, the administration will have:

1. Voter data with SSNs and identifying information for swing state voters
2. Processing infrastructure (SAVE) to flag voters for removal
3. Legal precedent for federal override of state election administration
4. Coercion mechanism (demonstrated in Minnesota) for non-compliant states
5. Propaganda framework (“election integrity”) to legitimate purges

This is the opposite of election security. Cities are far less safe, America is far less safe, wherever the stormtroopers go. It is not unlike describing the sentiment after Boogaloo, Proud Boys, KKK, or Nazi marches. But this is highly tactical as well, pushing American election capture using techniques developed, tested, and refined over seventy years of foreign interventions.

Sources

Declassified/Official

• National Security Archive: CIA Covert Operations in British Guiana (2020 release)
• CIA Freedom of Information Act Reading Room
• Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity documents (released via FOIA litigation)

Academic/Analytical

• David Levin, Partisan Electoral Interventions by the Great Powers (2019)
• Foreign Affairs: When the CIA Interferes in Foreign Elections (2020)
• NPR: In ‘Rigged,’ A Comprehensive Account of Decades of Election Interference (2020)
• Brennan Center for Justice: Tracker: Justice Department Requests for Voter Information

Contemporary Reporting

• DL-Online: MN Sec. of State Rejects Feds’ ‘Ransom’ Request (January 2026)
• Washington Post: Bondi Presses Minnesota for Voter Data as Administration Escalates Pressure (January 2026)
• Democracy Docket: Bondi’s ‘Blackmail’ Letter Deepens Concerns Over DOJ’s Motives (January 2026)
• Common Cause: Lawsuits Nationwide to Protect Voter Privacy and Election Integrity

Pattern Recognition

• PONARS Eurasia: Russian Foreign Election Interventions Since 1991
• Insight Intelligence: Colour Revolutions: The Most Sophisticated Warfare Method
• PRIO: Re-examining the ‘Colour Revolutions’
• NPR: Database Tracks History of U.S. Meddling in Foreign Elections
• ProPublica: Election Commission Documents Cast Doubt on Trump’s Claims of Voter Fraud
• Rolling Stone: Kobach and Trump’s Spectacular Voter-Fraud Failure
• Union of Concerned Scientists: Pseudoscience on Trial: The Spectacular Fall of President Trump’s Voter Fraud Thesis

The question nobody seems to want asked in print: what would it actually take to win against fascism in America?

Not to resist. To win.

The question has ugly answers, due to the ugliness of Trump wanting to get as ugly as possible, which is perhaps why journalists avoid it.

We shouldn’t look at wrestling a big dangerous pig in the mud and think an article about stain remover for white socks is going to be our strategy.

What many seem to avoid saying: Trump is at war with America.

His team keeps saying they are waging war, calling innocent citizens domestic terrorists. Even those who defend innocent citizens being attacked by Trump are called domestic terrorists. Their war rhetoric is not by accident. They’re not stupid. “War on Christmas“, remember?

In the early 1920s, Ford’s Dearborn Publishing Company released a four-volume set of essays penned by Ford and a handful of aides called The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. […] In a sense, this was the first shot fired in the “War on Christmas” wars and a blueprint for how these arguments would play-out for the next century. At no point has Christmas or anyone’s right to celebrate it been under attack, yet this endures as a way to attack…

Trump wants his followers to believe they are fighting a very particular kind of war in America. A war that Henry Ford wrote about. Meanwhile the American “resistance” acts like a moral witness campaign, which is what you do to feel good about losing. You end up starving to death holding nothing but receipts, while Trump gorges himself.

Let’s be honest about the dangers, because this is the exact reason why we study the rise of fascism in the 1930s so carefully and thoroughly.

This is why it’s appropriate to make the parallels to Henry Ford and his disciple Adolf Hitler: by the time you’re organizing food deliveries to families in hiding and don’t let children outside, you’ve already lost the phase of the conflict where winning was still within democratic norms.

The SPD after the Nazis seized control kept publishing newspapers, organizing workers, believing that exposing the Trump-like brutality would matter in 1933. They were documenting their loss of democracy in real time while calling it a resistance.

Imagine measuring water rising inside the Titanic and saying shovel coal, pump faster. There’s a certain level of situational awareness that predicts whether you are calculating actual survival paths.

The Atlantic, for example, published a sedative disguised as a stimulant. It makes readers feel something is being done in America about Trump. That evidence of courage is being recorded, that some community is holding, that the arc is bending. You finish reading and feel… what? Inspired? Reassured some good guys exist?

Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong:
The pushback against ICE exposed a series of mistaken assumptions. By Adam Serwer

Has a Holocaust movie ever been made that didn’t include a positive angle somewhere about survival or a glimmer of humanity? We cannot culturally process atrocity without a redemptive frame. Schindler has to save some. The boy in striped pajamas has to represent innocence. We’re narratively incapable of confronting “and then it just got worse, and worse, until external force stopped it.”

I have two degrees in it. Go figure.

That need for positive emotional release, as displayed by The Atlantic, is the risk of obliterating signs of actual dangers. It substitutes for the harder but honest recognition that Minnesotans have been losing, badly.

Alex Pretti was unmistakably good. A real American hero serving his country, and he was publicly executed for it.

And that was right after Renee Good, also an innocent citizen, was publicly executed.

ICE killed as many people last year as the four prior years combined.

Tens of thousands are in detention already, with ICE concentration camp plans underway to detain hundreds of thousands without due process.

Families are hiding.

Children are being sent away and shielded from the horrors of ICE.

Three hundred forty-seven district court judges ruled against the administration’s detention policies, yet it didn’t amount to a hill of beans because Trump implemented a “Schutzhaft” court bypass method from… 1933 Germany.

The state brings guns and shoots people who dare to carry them. The resistance has whistles.

And the Atlantic piece frames all this disparity as victory because Bovino got fired after months of wearing a literal Nazi uniform while parading thousands of Trump stormtroopers through cities, beating, detaining and killing innocent people?

That’s the definition now of victory? At this rate by next year the definition will be a slice of bread on the table.

Let me tell you some Minnesota history that almost never gets told. I’ve personally confronted Nazis in Minnesota, I’ve spent decades working on this subject. Here’s some of what needs to be said.

The Silver Shirts came to Minneapolis in the late 1930s planning rallies, organizing, building the same momentum that their German counterparts had used. What stopped them wasn’t an ACLU or public solidarity or moral witness.

Nope. None of those made the difference.

It was Meyer Lansky’s networks coordinating with local Jewish communities to show up at Nazi rallies and beat them bloody. Repeatedly. Until organizing a fascist rally meant your people would end up scared for their lives and in the hospital.

The Office of Strategic Services (later, the CIA) in fact employed the Syndicate in some covert operations. During World War II, the Syndicate helped with the invasion of Sicily and in protecting the Eastern waterfront against German sabotage. Some of the Syndicate’s major drug traffickers were used as informants and assassins in the Cold War. As one White House official described the government’s relationship with Lansky, “The government turned to him because hiring thugs was what government and business had been doing for a long time to control workers, and because it could conceive little other choice in the system at hand.”

This is the history that doesn’t fit the narrative. American fascism in 1930s Minnesota wasn’t defeated by democratic norms or courageous nonviolent resistance. It was defeated by private organized pro-democratic violence that the state permitted through selective blindness.

Berman learned that Silver Shirts were mounting a rally at a nearby Elks’ Lodge. When the Nazi leader called for all the “Jew bastards” in the city to be expelled, or worse, Berman and his associates burst in to the room and started cracking heads. After ten minutes, they had emptied the hall. His suit covered in blood, Berman took the microphone and announced, “This is a warning. Anybody who says anything against Jews gets the same treatment. Only next time it will be worse.” After Berman broke up two more rallies, there were no more public Silver Shirt meetings in Minneapolis.

The Jewish community in the 1930s didn’t write articles about the Silver Shirts. They busted heads and broke bones until organizing fascist rallies became physically dangerous. That history is so uncomfortable to tell precisely because it’s instructive. It’s also almost impossible to find evidence, for a good reason.

So what’s the 2026 connection? Reversal. They threatened to “ice” the Nazis. Now ICE is the Nazis.

The state holds a monopoly on legitimate violence. When the state becomes fascist, any effective resistance is illegitimate by definition – the fascist state controls what “legitimate” means.

That’s the trap.

Trump understands this. That’s why he fraudulently pre-labels innocent nurses and moms as “domestic terrorists” so his troops can murder them before they’ve done anything. Hegseth fraudulently invokes “enemy within” and “wartime footing.” They’re building bogus justification frameworks now, so everyone sees any level of resistance is already authorized for extrajudicial execution.

In 1930s Minnesota, the state looked away while communities defended themselves against people who talked like Trump. That selective blindness made extralegal defense against Nazism possible.

Now? The guys in masks with guns ARE the state. The Klan, Nazis, Boogaloo and Proud Boys operate wearing federal authority masks. The institutions that might have looked away have been captured. There’s no third party. There’s no one to appeal to. Trump talks about governors and mayors like they are just one button-press away from detention or assassination.

Nonviolent resistance works when there’s a third party appeal, a conscience to shock, an institution to intervene, an ally with power. When the state itself is the aggressor and also controls the narrative, all the valor means little more than defeat.

What’s the theory of change that isn’t just “bear witness until something external comes to our rescue”?

The next six months will tell. If Trump continues trying to lower his popularity before summer to invoke military dictatorship and cancel fall elections, you will see how and why The Atlantic was wrong to spin sugary tales of success.