Donald Trump upped the ante on his hostility toward American election law this week, insisting that he supports a federal takeover of elections. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” the president said on Monday.

A variety of Republicans expressed discomfort with the declaration, which Trump repeated on Tuesday and Wednesday, pointing to the inconvenient fact that what the president wants is at odds with the U.S. Constitution, which he ostensibly swore to uphold. But one of the president’s allies enthusiastically endorsed the radical gambit. The New Republic noted:

The chief strategist during the president’s first term has a grim vision for the 2026 midterm elections, and it involves armed federal agents.

‘You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,’ Steve Bannon said on his War Room podcast on Tuesday.

“We’re not gonna sit here and allow you to steal the country again,” Bannon added. “And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”

For now, let’s not dwell on the obvious fact that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. Let’s instead note that the podcast host went on to say that he wouldn’t be satisfied with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents surrounding local voting precincts in November: Bannon also wants to see the deployment of active-duty military personnel.

“President Trump has to nationalize the election. You’ve got to put not just, I think, ICE, you’ve got to call up the 82nd and 101st Airborne [Divisions] on the Insurrection Act,” he told his listeners. “You’ve got to get around every poll and make sure only people with IDs, people … actually registered to vote and people that are United States citizens vote in this election.”

There is no federal law that requires Americans to show identification to participate in their own democracy, but Bannon envisions a model in which U.S. troops enforce a de facto voter ID law at local voting precincts nationwide.

All of this should be taken with a grain of salt. Bannon is not currently a White House official, and he’s earned a reputation as a blowhard who says outrageous things to get attention. He may talk about these deployments as if they’re a certainty, but there’s no reason to assume that Bannon has any idea what he’s talking about in terms of likely future developments.

But it’s also true that we’re dealing with highly unusual circumstances, in which the incumbent president, who’s already tried to seize illegitimate power once, is peddling radical and unconstitutional ideas about how elections should be administered.

Just as importantly, Trump has already deployed FBI agents to raid an elections office in Georgia, seizing ballots and voting records as an extension of a discredited conspiracy theory, while his Justice Department continues to wage an aggressive campaign to acquire voter rolls from states that Democrats won in 2024.

So when a prominent presidential ally uses his conservative media platform to talk about ICE agents and military troops being deployed to local voting precincts, we’re no longer at a place where it’s easy to shrug off such rhetoric as ridiculous.

A few months ago, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker appeared on MS NOW and said he was concerned about the Republican administration deploying federal personnel to polling locations under the pretense of “protecting the vote.” With Bannon endorsing this exact scenario, it’s probably best not to look away too quickly.