Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are being poured into hiring stormtroopers who report only to Trump, so they can fill concentration camps with people arrested without due process.
The cost for acquiring two warehouses alone was $172 million. A third in El Paso, Texas, could be among the largest jails of any kind in the country if completed as envisioned, with 8,500 beds. The deals mark the latest turn in [Trump’s] plan to use as many as 23 warehouses for detaining thousands….
The latest numbers suggest nearly a billion dollars will be burned in 2026 for Trump to politically target and occupy urban areas with his troops, to detain hundreds of thousands of innocent voters in these camps.
Journalists also now face federal retaliation for any reporting, even without charges. In one high profile case a journalist was detained despite it being a direct violation of a judge who refused to allow it.
Lemon, now an independent journalist, was taken into custody by federal agents on Thursday night while in Los Angeles covering the Grammy Awards, according to his lawyer Abbe Lowell. …a magistrate judge who reviewed the evidence… [excluded] Lemon. The government challenged that decision, but an appeals court suggested prosecutors take the case to a federal grand jury – a panel of citizens that evaluates if there is enough evidence to charge someone in a case.
The Trump social media account grotesquely celebrated this by posting shackle/chain emojis next to the Black journalist’s name.
Concentration camps growing, detaining and censoring the press, pushing memes about shackling innocent Black men with chains. That’s Trump.
“Mentally, I have never been worse,” Wael said in the video. “My father was always my hero, my safe place. He did everything for me, 24 hours a day, and ICE took him for no reason.”
Wael was pronounced dead at the hospital, having never been reunited with Maher.
“Up until Wael’s last conscious moment, he continued thinking and talking about his father.”
The father had done nothing wrong, had no crimes, had no missed papers or appointments. He had been checking in with the ICE field office in Dallas every year to retain his legal status. For thirty years, he was compliant. Then ICE suddenly criminalized him as an “alien”—with foreseeable lethal consequences for his disabled son.
His son died a preventable death while his father was detained. Now ICE refuses to let the father attend the funeral.
What happened to Wael Tarabishi is Hannah Arendt’s concept of Nazi administrative murder: death caused not by direct violence but by bureaucratic machinery operating with deliberate indifference. ICE didn’t shoot Wael. They simply removed his 24/7 caregiver, detained him through an interminable process, and let the obvious and predictable biological consequences unfold.
Trump is announcing that disabled people’s lives are contingent on state approval of their care relationships. Under Hitler’s T4, the state decided disabled people were unworthy of the resources required to sustain them. What’s structurally identical is that Wael’s life depended entirely on a care relationship the state could sever at will, with full knowledge of the consequences. The Trump machinery didn’t pull a trigger in this case, it applied deadly paperwork.
The denial of funeral attendance is a further cruelty-as-function. It demonstrates Trump wields power beyond death, that he controls grieving itself.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
The Minneapolis killing of Pretti, an ICU nurse for veterans, fits within this pattern. Pretti was trying to help a woman who had been violently knocked to the ground by federal agents.
Pretti was kind, he helped others. ICE killed him for it. Wael was cared for; they detained his kind father so he would die. The enforcement pattern reliably destroys care relationships.
Care workers are more likely to intervene to protect others—exactly what Pretti did, what Wael’s father did. The gratuitous cruelty serves the same function that Nazi bureaucratic cruelty served: demonstrating total power over victims to deter others through witnessed suffering. The pattern of posthumously transforming victims into aggressors through disinformation—Miller called Pretti “an assassin”—served Nazi SA/SS operations similarly. It’s beyond cover for crimes; it’s a warning to others who might dare to intervene or show compassion.
What distinguishes fascism from ordinary state violence is the systematic quality and ideological targeting. The pattern isn’t random. It’s the well-known tactic of destroying social bonds and care networks to replace them with loyalty to the dictator alone.
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”:
Manufactured crisis (“If the political situation is stable, destabilization must be created in an artificial way”)
Security force deployment to create leverage
Election infrastructure capture (USAID spent $1.5 million computerizing Georgia’s voter rolls before the Rose Revolution)
Propaganda framing the target government as illegitimate
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Element
Foreign Operations (Documented)
Minnesota 2026
Security force deployment
Military/paramilitary assets create instability and leverage
ICE/CBP occupation; two civilian deaths; “chaos” cited as justification
2000-2005: Color revolutions systematize the model—security force pressure, election infrastructure capture, crisis manufacture, constitutional cover
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
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:
Alex Pretti kneels on the ground, helping a woman shoved down by Trump stormtroopers, his back to the half dozen of them approaching to execute him.
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:
Voter data with SSNs and identifying information for swing state voters
Processing infrastructure (SAVE) to flag voters for removal
Legal precedent for federal override of state election administration
Coercion mechanism (demonstrated in Minnesota) for non-compliant states
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.
