Donald Trump is proposing to violate the U.S. Constitution by calling for Republicans to “nationalize the voting” in upcoming elections. That doesn’t bother the president, who is constantly repeating his debunked claims that the 2020 presidential election results were doctored and he really won.

In truth, he lost. But he doesn’t care about the truth. This comes weeks after the president discussed the idea of canceling elections outright.

The Constitution’s Article I says: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” Couldn’t be clearer.

But despite Trump lacking the power to cancel or otherwise directly modify elections doesn’t mean he can’t do a lot of damage. Even with his already high unpopularity with the public, Trump still sets the marching orders for a lot of GOP officials around the country, who are either true believers or cowards terrified of displeasing Trump. Some of these people are, unfortunately, secretaries of state, election board members, and other officials that actually could try to act on Trump’s convenient delusions and interfere with elections.

Trump also has demonstrated that he’s perfectly willing to use the might of the federal government well outside any reasonable or even legal scope in order to pursue his grievances and consolidate his power. That’s what the federal agent occupations of blue cities have been about, and it’s why more than five years on from his 2020 election loss in Georgia, Trump had federal agents raid a Fulton County election office to seize ballots, obsessed as he is with the lie that the election was stolen from him.

Present at that raid, for reasons that remain unclear, was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a top intelligence official whose purview absolutely does not include domestic criminal investigations even when these have merit.

In fact, it is against the law for foreign-facing intelligence services to be involved in such U.S. law enforcement, yet Gabbard not only was present but reportedly personally helped oversee the raid at the behest of Trump, who apparently spoke to the agents involved directly via a phone call to Gabbard.

This is in itself a form of election interference, less direct than any effort to cancel elections but still intended to undermine faith in elections and, perhaps to start building a precedent for this kind of action to eventually have federal agencies impede active elections.

It’s not hard to imagine Trump try to send U.S. forces to heavily Democratic areas before or during elections under the guise of ensuring that ineligible voters don’t participate — something that happens so rarely it is statistically nonexistent — with the goal of dissuading participation from nonwhite or naturalized citizens in particular.

It’s a true tragedy that in the span of about a half century, the federal government has gone from a committed defender of a universal right to vote — hard fought and hard won by the Civil Rights movement — to an active threat to free and fair elections.

Before Trump it would have been hard to imagine that the president himself would seek to subvert elections in the United States and that officials at the local, state and federal levels would have to act to stop it. But Trump already tried to mount a coup on Jan. 6, 2021. The fact that it failed absolutely does not mean his efforts always will.

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