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 turn over its voter data.

Like the fictional Captain Queeg tearing the USS Caine apart in search of the missing strawberries, Trump appears now to be ripping apart Minnesota in part to find proof that victory had been stolen from him there in 2016, 2020 and 2024.

“It’s hard to imagine that election denial did not motivate his animus, at least in part, that resulted in the ICE surge and the tragedies that followed,” said Norm Eisen, a lawyer in Barack Obama’s White House who worked with the House during Trump’s first impeachment for trying to extort Ukraine. “The whole thing is a witch’s brew of falsehoods.”

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

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.

Indeed, Trump’s own words through the years suggest a link between his decision to send thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers into 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, as he ran to regain the presidency. “I know we won it 2020.”

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

“They’re crooked officials,” he claimed. “I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all 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 ― the people were ― they were crying every time after. That’s a crooked state.”

On Jan. 13, Trump even promised in a social media post that “THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION” was coming for Minnesota.

In fact, Trump has never won Minnesota. He came closest in 2016, when third-party candidates drew a substantial number of votes there and nationally. He lost the state that November 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 that he either willingly ignores or his addled, aging brain can’t remember,” said Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin, a Minneapolis native and the former state party chairman there. “Trump’s obsession with claiming he won Minnesota can’t be separated from his administration’s aggressive and unlawful ICE tactics against Minnesotans, nor his Department of Justice’s effort to extort the state into handing over its voter rolls.”

Marc Elias, an elections lawyer who is defending Democratic states that Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, is suing to obtain voter data, said it was obvious that all three losses still enrage Trump.

“He’s obsessed with Minnesota because he cannot 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 in the same way that he’s going to punish other blue states,” Elias said in a Tuesday podcast. “He is punishing those states by sending in federal officers, federal officials to terrorize the population, to disappear neighbors, to break in doors without warrants.”

On Saturday, just hours after ICU nurse Alex Pretti became the second U.S. citizen protesting Trump’s immigration surge in Minneapolis to be gunned down in two and a half weeks, Bondi demanded, among other things, that Minnesota turn over its voter data in exchange for Trump pulling back his secret police.

“Fulfilling this common-sense request will better guarantee free and fair elections and boost confidence in the rule of law,” she wrote.

Elias said the administration’s demand shows its true motive behind the ongoing “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis: to get its hands on voters’ data that can help Trump suppress Democratic votes in the midterms later this year.

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

Trump’s history of claiming that elections he has lost have actually been stolen from him goes back to his very first contest as a political candidate. Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses of 2016. Trump immediately accused him of cheating.

Even after winning the general election that fall and the presidency, Trump was so upset by losing the popular vote to Clinton by 3 million that he began claiming that illegal immigrants had each cast multiple ballots by putting on a new T-shirt and hat in between return 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 was disbanded some months later after uncovering nothing to substantiate Trump’s claims.

Marc Short, a top Pence aide at the time, said lying about stolen elections has worked for Trump over the years, as evidenced by so many Americans today overlooking or even justifying his actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021.

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

On Wednesday, Trump’s FBI raided election offices near Atlanta in search of documents related to the 2020 election. Trump has also lied about winning Georgia, and even demanded that state officials “find” enough votes for him to surpass Biden ahead of that 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. Everybody now knows that 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.