🔥EPISODE 17: The Blueprint Was Always Real

On May 8, 2026, an FBI agent sat down with Robert Kehoe, the deputy administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, and asked him to explain how elections work in Wisconsin. Kehoe explained. He also, according to sources with knowledge of the conversation, debunked a number of false claims. A career FBI agent, doing his job, interviewing a career election official, doing his. Under normal circumstances, that would be the end of the story. These are not normal circumstances.

Wisconsin is not the beginning of this story. It is the latest stop on a tour. Federal investigators seized hundreds of boxes of 2020 election materials from Fulton County, Georgia in January. The FBI issued a grand jury subpoena for voting records in Maricopa County, Arizona in March. Puerto Rico got a visit too. And now Wisconsin… a state where Trump lost by 21,000 votes, where a recount he paid for confirmed he lost, where court rulings confirmed he lost, where a state audit confirmed he lost, and where a conservative review confirmed he lost. The facts have been counted, certified, audited, and litigated into the bedrock. They are not in dispute. The FBI is not in Wisconsin because there are new facts. The FBI is in Wisconsin because the President of the United States, six years on, still cannot let it go; and more importantly, because making election officials fear the knock on the door is the whole point.

That point was made explicit in March of this year, when Trump stood at a podium inside the Department of Justice - a department now wholly stripped of any pretense of independence - and told the crowd that the people responsible for administering the 2020 election "should go to jail." He named specific lawyers. He signed an executive order days later threatening "accountability" for attorneys who challenged his efforts to overturn the results. His appointed interim U.S. Attorney for D.C., Ed Martin… a man who spoke at the Capitol on the eve of January 6th, urging "die-hard true Americans" to work until their "last breath" to "stop the steal," promptly announced a special unit to investigate election crimes and confirmed it was already open for business. The Brennan Center for Justice put it plainly: the message being sent is not subtle. Those who resist election subversion face consequences. Those who participate in it have the administration's support.

Robert Kehoe went home. The Wisconsin Elections Commission issued a careful statement about routine discussions with federal officials and the limits of what they could confirm. The state's election officials are, per reporting, bracing. That's the design. You don't have to prosecute anyone if the threat alone is enough to make the next crop of election workers think twice about certifying results the President doesn't like. In 2020, Brad Raffensperger stood his ground when Trump called and demanded he "find" 11,780 votes. The question hanging over 2026, and over 2028, is whether the next Brad Raffensperger will hold… or whether, staring down a weaponized DOJ and watching colleagues get subpoenaed and box-seized, they'll decide it isn't worth it.

Meanwhile, the map itself is being surgically altered. Beginning in the summer of 2025 - in what analysts are already calling one of the largest coordinated mid-decade redistricting efforts in modern American history - Republican-controlled states began redrawing congressional maps at Trump's explicit request and with his explicit rationale. He told CNBC that Texas owed Republicans five more seats. He told Republicans that if they gerrymandered the right districts and eliminated mail voting, it would erase Democrats' chances entirely. At a conference of Republican lawmakers in March of this year, he said passing the SAVE Act would "guarantee the midterms." Then, in a moment of almost comical self-awareness, he added, "I'm not doing it for this reason at all." Texas got its new map. Florida followed. Missouri. North Carolina. Ohio. Tennessee's Republican governor signed legislation this week eliminating the state's only Democratic congressional seat - the one held by Rep. Steve Cohen, who described the proposed map as "insane" for jamming together constituents living more than 200 miles apart. Trump has now openly called on states to redraw maps before November, declaring the byproduct would be "more than 20 House Seats in the upcoming Midterms."

The corrupt Supreme Court handed him the legal scaffolding in its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted a key protection of the Voting Rights Act that had guaranteed communities of color the right to fair congressional representation. The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, held that states have broad freedom to draw district lines - including to intentionally advantage one party… and narrowed Section 2 of the VRA to the point where dismantling majority-minority districts in the South becomes considerably easier. Republicans called it a color-blind approach to redistricting. The rest of us can look at the map and see which communities stop having representation. Trump immediately called on all states, including those already holding primaries, to redraw their maps to comply with the ruling — a legally dubious demand, given that the ruling applied specifically to Louisiana and courts traditionally decline to alter district lines in the shadow of an election. The traditional expectations, as the Council on Foreign Relations drily noted, may not apply in 2026.

None of this exists in isolation. The gerrymandering skews the map. The SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and remains stalled in the Senate only because of the filibuster Trump wants abolished, chokes the registration rolls. People not paying attention will say what’s the big deal, you should have to show ID to vote. Great. But that real ID from the DMV? That doesn’t show citizenship and wouldn’t be accepted if the SAVE Act passed. A birth certificate or passport would be needed. Do you have yours within easy reach? The executive order Trump signed in March targeting mail-in voting and directing the Postal Service to function as a de facto election enforcement agency drew immediate legal challenges, with the Brennan Center describing it as a car crash meeting a train wreck, and election law experts noting that even if it weren't unconstitutional it couldn't possibly be implemented in time for November. The DOJ is suing nearly two dozen states for voter registration data; including confidential information that state officials say is protected by law, and a DOJ official admitted in court that the plan is to run that data through the DHS's SAVE system to screen for noncitizens. The same SAVE system that has been documented to inaccurately flag American citizens. The voter rolls get purged. People who have the right to vote get removed. And because a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that nearly half of Americans now believe large numbers of noncitizens are voting - a belief manufactured by years of deliberate, baseless propaganda - there is a constituency for all of it. Pay no attention to the fact that the percentage of voters that are non-citizens stands at around 0.0004% - if one in a trillion does it, Hair Führer wants to overturn an election. 

Then there's the question of what happens on Election Day itself. Trump ally Steve Bannon said on his podcast that ICE's airport deployments are "perfect training" for the fall of 2026. DHS Secretary-designate Markwayne Mullin refused at his confirmation hearing to rule out sending uniformed officers to polling places in the event of a "specific threat." His predecessor, Kristi Noem, gave the same non-answer. A draft executive order circulated Trump allies that would declare a national emergency and assert broad federal authority over elections. The administration's official position, conveyed in a call to secretaries of state, is that ICE won't be stationed at polls. When CNN asked one source on that call for their reaction, the source said: "I'll believe it when I see it." At least eight states have introduced or passed legislation trying to keep federal agents away from polling places. One source on the call told reporters that the "mere threat" was already doing its work. In communities with large Latino populations - and 11 of the 34 seats identified as competitive by Cook Political Report have at least 20 percent Latino voters, with three of the new Texas districts over 70 percent Latino - a uniform outside a polling place doesn't need to make an arrest to accomplish its purpose.

All of this was written down. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a 900-page document.

In July 2024, Donald Trump posted to Truth Social that he knew "nothing about Project 2025." He had not seen it, had no idea who was in charge of it, and — unlike his very well received Republican Platform — had nothing to do with it. He described attempts to tie him to the document as "pure disinformation." After winning the election, he told Time magazine in December 2024 that he didn't "disagree with everything in Project 2025, but I disagree with some things." He then explained, with the self-awareness of a man hiding a body in plain sight, that he had "specifically didn't want to read it" so that he could credibly claim he hadn't, and that "the only way I can say I have nothing to do with it is if you don't read it." By the fall of 2025, he was boasting in public about meeting with "Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame." His press secretary, KKKaroline Leavitt, who is an instructor for Project 2025's Conservative Governance 101 training program, issued a statement after his first wave of appointments saying, "President Trump never had anything to do with Project 2025." Three of the chapters of the document were written by people he appointed to run the agencies those chapters described.

The Heritage Foundation's Kevin Roberts, who previously worked on Trump's 2016 transition team and who described his organization's role as "institutionalizing Trumpism," called the 2024 election illegitimate before a single vote was counted. Heritage's executive Mike Howell said any result other than a Trump victory would have been fraud. These are the authors of the agenda being implemented by the United States government right now. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose office studied Project 2025 and prepared legal responses to every potential action before the inauguration, put it bluntly: "The existence of Project 2025 was the Trump administration telling us exactly what they were going to do and sending it to us in writing." By January 2026, his office estimated that roughly half the document had been implemented. Other trackers placed implementation of specific policy domains, such as public lands, fossil fuel policy, and reproductive health restrictions, above 70 to 80 percent.

The elections chapter of Project 2025 is not abstract. It is a checklist. Move prosecution of election-related offenses from the DOJ's Civil Rights Division… staffed by attorneys who specialize in voting rights law and the history of disenfranchisement… to the Criminal Division, whose attorneys are trained in criminal enforcement and whose prosecutorial posture toward a provisional ballot or a voter registration drive is categorically different. Gut CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, removing its authority to counter election-related disinformation -including disinformation seeded by hostile foreign governments - and stripping its ability to help state and local election officials with security infrastructure. Require localities to share sensitive voter registration data as a condition of receiving federal election grants, giving the federal government leverage over the very officials it wants to pressure. Raise campaign contribution limits so money flows faster and less visibly. Grant the federal government access to state voter rolls for aggressive purging. And use the Enforcement Acts of 1870… statutes written after the Civil War specifically to protect Black Americans from the Ku Klux Klan… to prosecute the election officials who help voters exercise their rights.

Project 2025 names names. It specifically identifies Pennsylvania's then-Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar as someone who should be investigated and prosecuted, for the act of directing that voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected could still cast provisional ballots. That is a practice that exists explicitly so that eligible voters are not disenfranchised by technicalities. Project 2025 calls it a federal crime. When the Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney announces a special election crimes unit, and when the president publicly demands that election officials go to jail, Robert Kehoe in Wisconsin does not need to have read page 583 of the Mandate for Leadership to understand what the subtext is.

Christopher Krebs ran CISA. Trump had appointed him. After the 2020 election, Krebs declared it the most secure in American history; because by every auditable metric, it was. Trump fired him for it. In the spring of 2025, Trump signed a presidential memorandum directing the DOJ to review all of Krebs's actions at CISA, revoke his security clearances, and investigate whether he had "falsely and baselessly denied" that the 2020 election was rigged. The message was delivered without ambiguity: the price of telling the truth about an election is paid in years, not days.

That is the system that is being built. Not improvised. Not stumbled into. Designed, documented, staffed, funded, and executed on a timeline that predates the 2024 election by years. The 2020 state-by-state investigations create a chilling effect on future certification. The SAVE Act and the mail-voting order suppress the electorate. The gerrymandering tilts the structural playing field. The Callais decision opens the South to minority vote dilution that would have been illegal two years ago. The ICE deployment threats activate fear in specific communities in specific competitive districts. The DOJ special unit stands ready to prosecute anyone who tries to make it easier to vote. The filibuster is targeted for elimination so none of this requires 60 Senate votes. And the man running the Office of Management and Budget… who coordinates all of this, who controls the budget levers, who wrote the chapter on the Executive Office of the President in Project 2025 and reportedly authored the playbook for Trump's first 180 days… is Russell Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 fame.

The countdown is not a metaphor. It is a schedule. And it is ticking. 

If this piece made you angrier, better-informed, or both — that's the point. Democracy doesn't defend itself. Find us at buymeacoffee.com/unfugginbelievable and keep the lights on.