This Week in Tyranny: An Oath to Cheat, ICE at the Polls, Medical Files Used to Purge Troops

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 CheatThursday 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 TroopsThe 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 rule. Very principled. So the Secretary of Defense’s office does the searching itself and mails the names down the chain.Every one of these people volunteered. They passed the physical, they raised their right hand for the actual oath, and then they went to the only doctor they have coverage for, the military’s. The file they were promised was confidential is now the evidence against them. The government is trying to hold one of these separation hearings this Tuesday.CBP Has Your Bank Records, Giving Names to Local CopsBorder Patrol, meanwhile, has been reading Americans’ bank activity and handing the names to local cops so those cops can go find a reason to pull them over.404 Media got the name of the units, which had never been public. Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams. PITT. Not to be confused with The Pitt, one of the greatest shows on television, I hope they clean up at the Emmys tomorrow night, but back to the Border Patrol PITT.Kyle Olson was driving across Montana. A PITT team ran his finances. A local officer stopped him and told him his license plate was “a little bit obstructed.” That was the reason he was given. It was not the reason he was stopped. He learned that months later when the real one turned up in discovery, in a Homeland Security memo. CBP was asked what financial activity it monitors and whether it bothers getting a warrant, and declined to answer, citing operational security. We can’t be told whether it’s legal, because telling us would compromise the operation, which is the one they are running on us.Jake Laperruque at the Center for Democracy and Technology put it plainly: “Genuine probable cause cannot be synthetically generated.”Park Service is Restructuring, Not Laying People Off 😉Last fall, during the forty-three day shutdown, the Interior Department tried to cut staff out of the Park Service’s regional offices, and a federal judge stopped it.So this week the Washington Sun got hold of Interior’s draft plans from August, and the same cuts are back but with a new term. It isn’t layoffs anymore. It’s a reorganization. All four hundred and thirty-three park sites move to a “hub and spoke” model, where certain hub parks will set priorities, leadership and direction for the spoke parks that now report to them.An Interior executive told the Sun the plan was developed “very hush hush,” which is a senior federal official describing his own government in the vocabulary of a middle schooler.Interior is legally required to notify Congress before it reorganizes. It has been planning this since July. It has not notified Congress. And the meeting where superintendents were finally going to learn what’s happening to their own parks got postponed indefinitely, so they can read about it here with the rest of us.The Park Service has already lost about a quarter of its permanent workforce in two years. These are the people who come get you off the mountain when you’ve made a bad call at altitude. Next summer there will be fewer of them. The crowds aren’t going to be smaller.Speed roundJimmy Kimmel interviewed Texas Senate candidate James Talarico and then couldn’t put it on television, because Trump’s FCC went after ABC, its affiliates and the show, over who Kimmel books as a guest. He put the interview on YouTube instead, so go watch it there. Link with my sources. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez noted this is the second time in a matter of months that a late night host has had to bury an interview.Joe diGenova, the MAGA lawyer Trump hired to speed up the investigation of everyone who ever investigated him, quit Thursday and told the New York Post why. “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.” By Friday he was telling the AP he’d been taken out of context and there was plenty of evidence, which is what it sounds like when someone remembers who signs the checks.And the Alexander brothers, convicted this year of running a sex trafficking operation, have paid Alan Dershowitz half a million dollars to chase them a pardon. That’s the same Dershowitz who defended Jeffrey Epstein and then defended Trump at his first impeachment. Half of it went out as a retainer and the rest came on an invoice, itemized, filed, in writing, because nobody involved has any reason to think a paper trail is a risk anymore.That’s your week in tyranny. Welcome to the golden age.SOURCEShttps://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6083597-trump-midterm-pledge-vote-convention/https://democracyforward.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/LULAC-v-DHS.pdfhttps://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2026/09/pentagon-searching-medical-records-to-identify-transgender-troops/https://www.404media.co/a-secretive-dhs-predictive-policing-unit-is-analyzing-americans-financial-habits-and-pulling-them-over/https://washingtonsun.com/agencies/trump-quietly-plan-national-parks-runhttps://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6084344-jodigenova-trump-investigation-resigned/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/nyregion/dershowitz-alexander-brothers-pardon.html Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe