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What is happening in Fulton County is a warning to America | Jamil Smith

What in the hell were FBI agents doing in an election facility in Fulton county, Georgia, last week? They surely weren’t investigating a crime. Nor were they serving the public.

Justifying President Trump’s Big Lie about winning the 2020 election may seem like his own lost cause – but like his Confederate forebears, he is weaponizing it, damage be damned. Not even his subsequent election victory has quieted Trump’s appetite for more power, earned or otherwise.

As their ICE compatriots in Minnesota were laying siege to the Twin Cities, the FBI removed ballots and election records from a majority-Black jurisdiction that helped deliver Trump’s defeat in Georgia more than five years ago. He lost – and has admitted as much. Nevertheless, he persists.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was present in Fulton county at Trump’s request. Upon that revelation, what could have been explained as routine oversight became a piece of suspicious political theater. Lacking any evidence of fraud, the objective could not have been law enforcement. It was power – and a reminder of who is presumed suspect when elections produce the “wrong” result.

A movement that still believed in persuasion would be making an argument to voters; this one is preparing to manage them. Days after the Fulton county raid, Trump openly called for Republicans to “nationalize” elections in multiple states, recycling the false and long-debunked claim that undocumented immigrants – including Somalis in Minnesota – had helped Democrats steal past contests. Republican leaders largely responded with careful hedges, if at all, gesturing toward states’ authority while sidestepping the real issue: elections are being questioned not because of evidence, but because of outcomes.

The pattern is familiar because history insists on rhyming. What connects the Fulton county raid, the administration’s immigration enforcement abuses and the systematic removal of Black history from public institutions is erasure. Depressing the vote is perhaps his most potent tactic. Power is the point. Operationalizing bigotry to erase people, their rights and their histories is simply the cost of doing business.

That logic sharpened last week, when Trump allies and a faction of Senate Republicans openly floated ending the legislative filibuster to force through a new, Orwellian voter-suppression bill – the Make Elections Great Again Act – that appears far more extreme than last year’s Save Act: tightening proof-of-citizenship requirements, restricting mail voting and badly undermining third-party registration drives.

Supporters insist such measures are necessary to “protect” elections, despite the fact that noncitizen voting is already illegal and vanishingly rare. Opponents warn that scrapping the filibuster to pass them would dismantle yet another democratic safeguard while accelerating the most significant rollback of voting rights in generations.

Trump’s demands are not meant to withstand scrutiny, much less survive a court challenge. They are meant to justify intervention – to render ballots provisional, to discard some outright and to condition Americans to view their neighbors as intruders in a democracy that belongs to them, too. Considering the administration’s directive to strip allusions to Black history, trans people and anyone else they consider politically inconvenient, suppressing the vote is merely part of a larger project.

Elders have often told children what the civil rights advocate Marian Wright Edelman once said: “You can’t be what you can’t see.” I always preferred “if you can’t see it, be it” – but for too many who find themselves at the margins of Trump’s America, visibility in law, history and politics is inseparable from power and belonging.

When leaders and institutions work to erase your presence or your story from the American narrative, they are not merely stripping legal protections. They are teaching you to see your place in this nation’s past, present and future as conditional. Fulton county is but the most recent reminder.

In the Jim Crow South, officials relied on ostensibly legal mechanisms – poll taxes, literacy tests and arbitrary purges of voter rolls – to nullify Black political power. Fulton county echoes that logic. The county was repeatedly audited and found clean, yet federal agents descended under the banner of national security, signaling that a Black-majority electorate is inherently suspect. Black voters were legally present, but treated as adversaries. Today, they are scrutinized for the same offense: participating fully in their own democracy.

The consequences are manifesting. On former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino’s Monday program, Trump said that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting” in at least 15 states. Even by his standards, the remark signaled an escalation as the specter of federal election interference grows.

Once again, Trump justified the proposal with the racist fiction of widespread undocumented voting – a claim debunked beyond exhaustion, and deployed not to safeguard democracy, but to constrict it.

If Republican leaders ever had an opportunity to confront this authoritarian turn, this was it. Instead, they offered equivocation or silence. Few if any Republicans were as forthright in their opposition as Don Bacon, the Nebraska congressman who plans to retire at the end of this term – writing that his consistent opposition to federalizing elections won’t change. The lack of concern of the House speaker, Mike Johnson, over Trump’s remark, on the other hand, functioned less as caution than as permission.

The historical echoes are unmistakable. During Reconstruction and its collapse, federal power was alternately used to protect Black voters and to enforce outcomes favored by white supremacist elites. Later, vague claims of fraud greenlit “oversight”. Trump’s desire for Republicans to control state elections belongs in that lineage: federal force framed as a remedy for allegedly illegitimate outcomes rather than demonstrable harm.

Fulton county is not an aberration. It fits a broader playbook – immigration raids, the erasure of Black history from public spaces and attempts to revoke temporary protected status from Haitian immigrants.

On Monday, Judge Ana C Reyes halted that effort, writing that the administration’s actions were “substantially likely” motivated by “hostility to nonwhite immigrants”, and that constitutional obligations had been disregarded.

Voter suppression limits access. Voter depression discourages participation. Dehumanization makes exclusion feel justified. Together, they do more than tilt outcomes – they hollow democracy out from within.

Fulton county is a warning. The machinery long used to suppress Black and immigrant political power is being recalibrated for national use. The method is relentless. The stakes are immediate.

To strip people of their voice in democracy is to attempt their disappearance. If, as Edelman warned, “you can’t be what you can’t see,” then the American project will not survive if it silences its own people and attempts to render them invisible.