Trump’s Minnesota Invasion Appears to Be Linked to This Unhinged Claim

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s invasion of Minnesota by his de facto secret police force is tied to his conspiracy theory that he won the state in all three of his elections, critics said, and that obsession explains his attorney general’s demand that the state hand over its voter data.

Like the fictional Captain Queeg wrecking the USS Caine in search of lost strawberries, Trump now appears to be wrecking Minnesota in part to find evidence that he had been robbed of victory there in 2016, 2020 and 2024.

“It’s hard to imagine that the denial of the election didn’t motivate their animosity, at least in part, that resulted in the rise of ICE and the tragedies that followed,” said Norm Eisen, Barack Obama’s White House lawyer who worked with the House during Trump’s first impeachment trial for trying to extort Ukraine. “All this is a mixture of falsehoods made by witches.”

When asked if the crackdown in Minneapolis was the “retribution” Trump had promised against the state, his White House did not deny the claim.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of the election, and that includes completely accurate and up-to-date voter lists, free of errors and illegally registered non-citizen voters,” spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said.

In fact, Trump’s own words over the years suggest a link between his decision to send thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents to a state with a relatively small population of illegal immigrants and his desire to punish Minnesotans for their votes.

“I thought we won in 2016,” he told state party members in St. Paul on May 17, 2024, while running to regain the presidency. “I know we won it in 2020.”

Earlier this month, he told oil industry executives gathered at the White House that he would not allow the FBI to share evidence with local police following the Jan. 7 murder of mother Renee Good, 37, by an ICE officer because state officials had stolen her election victories there.

“They are corrupt officials,” he said. “I feel like I won Minnesota. I think I won it three times… But I won Minnesota three times, and I didn’t get credit for it. I did so well in that state. Every time, people were, they cried every time afterward. That’s a crooked state.”

On January 13, Trump even promised in a social media post that “JUDGEMENT DAY OF GAMES AND TRIBUTION” was approaching for Minnesota.

“Trump’s obsession with claiming that Minnesota won cannot be separated from his administration’s aggressive and illegal ICE tactics against Minnesotans.”

– Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin

In fact, Trump never won Minnesota. It came closest in 2016, when third-party candidates won substantial numbers of votes there and nationally. That November he lost the state to Democrat Hillary Clinton by 1.5 percentage points, or 44,593 votes. Four years later, despite a serious effort to win the state, he lost to former President Joe Biden by 7.1 points, or 233,012 votes. And in 2024, he lost to former Vice President Kamala Harris by 4.0 points, or 137,947 votes.

“Minnesota voters rejected Donald Trump three times, a fact he either willfully ignores or his aging, confused brain cannot remember,” said Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin, a Minneapolis native and former state party chairman there. “Trump’s obsession with claiming that he won Minnesota cannot be separated from his administration’s aggressive and illegal ICE tactics against Minnesotans, nor from his Justice Department’s effort to extort the state into turning over its voter lists.”

Marc Elias, an election lawyer defending the Democratic states that Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, is suing for voter data, said it was obvious that the three losses still anger Trump.

“He’s obsessed with Minnesota because he can’t believe that an overwhelmingly white state in that part of the country didn’t vote for him. He can’t imagine how that could be true. And so he’s going to punish them the same way he’s going to punish other blue states,” Elias said in a Tuesday podcast. “He is punishing those states by sending federal officials, federal officials to terrorize the population, make neighbors disappear, force doors without a court order.”

rthur Maiorella/Anadolu via Getty Images

On Saturday, just hours after ICU nurse Alex Pretti became the second American citizen protesting Trump’s immigration increase in Minneapolis to be shot and killed in two and a half weeks, Bondi demanded, among other things, that Minnesota hand over its voter data in exchange for Trump withdrawing his secret police.

“Delivering on this common sense request will ensure better free and fair elections and increase confidence in the rule of law,” he wrote.

Elias said the administration’s lawsuit shows the real motive behind the ongoing “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis: obtaining voter data that could help Trump suppress Democratic votes in the midterm elections later this year.

“To accomplish all of this at scale, he will need unredacted state voter files. That would allow him and Bondi to identify which voters to target, which ballots to discard, and against whom to file false claims of voter fraud,” he wrote in a Monday newsletter.

Trump’s history of claiming that the election he lost was actually stolen from him dates back to his first race as a political candidate. Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses in 2016. Trump immediately accused him of cheating.

Even after winning that fall’s general election and the presidency, Trump was so upset about losing the popular vote to Clinton by 3 million that he began claiming that illegal immigrants had cast multiple votes by putting on a new T-shirt and hat between visits to polling places — a conspiracy theory he learned from a professional golfer friend.

He ordered the creation of a task force to investigate and put then-Vice President Mike Pence in charge. The group disbanded a few months later after discovering nothing to substantiate Trump’s claims.

Marc Short, a senior Pence adviser at the time, said lying about a stolen election has worked for Trump over the years, as evidenced by many Americans who today overlook or even justify his actions leading up to January 6, 2021.

Short said he doubts Trump truly believes he won Minnesota in any of the three elections, but he predicted Trump will continue to claim that he did. “He’s going to keep saying that because it’s hard to argue that it hasn’t been effective in changing people’s minds about the stolen election,” Short said.

On Wednesday, Trump’s FBI raided election offices near Atlanta looking for documents related to the 2020 election. Trump also lied about winning Georgia and even demanded that state officials “find” enough votes to overtake Biden before the Jan. 6 election certification.

In a speech to an international audience in Davos, Switzerland, last week, Trump repeated his lies about the 2020 election and appears to have foreshadowed the FBI’s search. “It was a rigged election. Now everyone knows they found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It’s probably breaking news, but it should be. It was a rigged election,” he said.