Episode Details

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. While you were watching America bet forty billion dollars on football through prediction markets, which are legally not gambling because somebody renamed them.

This week: the president made a stadium swear an oath to cheat, ICE is coming to your polling place, the Pentagon is reading troops’ medical files to find the trans ones, Border Patrol is pulling your bank statements to decide who gets pulled over, and the Interior Department found a way to run the Park Service layoffs a judge already blocked. Let’s get into it.

I Swear to Cheat

Thursday night in Dallas, the president closed out his own midterm convention by asking a stadium full of Republicans to raise their right hands and swear an oath, not to the country, to him.

Here it is.

“I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States, that loves us so much he can’t even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends. I’ll do it any way, I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do.”

He wrote that. He read it out loud, in pieces, slowly, so that thousands of American citizens could repeat it back to him on camera fifty-three days before a federal election. And somewhere in the middle of walking them through election fraud he stopped to describe himself as a man who loves this country so much he cannot physically breathe. My dude, that’s a cardiac event, and there is a doctor at Walter Reed who would very much like to hear about it.

Then he wrapped up with the incentive structure. “You know what happens if you don’t vote? You go to hell.” So the offer on the table is eternal damnation if you stay home and a federal charge if you show up the way he just described. Gavin Newsom had the line of the night:

“Trump just replaced the Pledge of Allegiance with a pledge of allegiance to himself.”

ICE Patrolling Polling Places?

And he’s sending help, because on September first Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin confirmed that ICE officers can walk into your polling place to serve warrants and run immigration enforcement.

Congress outlawed armed federal agents at polling places more than a hundred and fifty years ago, back when the men who fought the Civil War were still alive to explain why. Denver, a group of watchdogs and the lawyers at Democracy Forward sued over it Thursday, in a case called LULAC versus DHS.

Notice that nobody at Homeland Security is promising arrests at the polls. They don’t need arrests. They need you to walk up to the church basement, see two guys in vests, and decide today is not the day.

Pentagon Searching Service Member’s Medical Records for Sleeper Trans Troops

The Pentagon spent this week going through service members’ medical records hunting for trans troops to throw out.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense is running electronic health records for anyone with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, a past diagnosis, or symptoms it has decided are “consistent with” one, and then notifying that person’s commander to start separation. Several hundred people outed in two months, according to SPARTA Pride and attorney Priya Rashid at the National Institute of Military Justice. That number includes cadets at the service academies and in ROTC. Kids.

Rashid says the search is also flagging people who aren’t trans at all, troops who happened to get a certain procedure or diagnosis while being treated for something else entirely. The database can’t tell the difference and nobody down the chain is checking.

And in May of last year a senior defense official stood at a Pentagon podium and said the department was “committed to protecting both their privacy and their medical data.” Then this August the Army issued an internal order specifically forbidding commanders from searching health records for soldiers with gender dysphoria. Excellent rul