Donald Trump's Justice Department took a major step toward subverting elections this fall. On Monday, it quietly announced that it will deploy 1,000 election monitors at polling places during this year's midterm elections.

The news came a day after Attorney General Todd Blanche floated taking the DOJ's fight for state voter data to the Supreme Court. These two events are surely connected, and how they are resolved will directly impact how free and fair the midterm elections end up being.

The last few months have been a series of humiliating defeats for Trump and his hand-picked DOJ. The Department has seen high-profile criminal cases collapse and has suffered embarrassing reversals in court.

Blanche was forced to abandon the bogus slush fund he negotiated to secure the votes necessary to be confirmed as attorney general. The DOJ lost in the Supreme Court on the president's signature issue — birthright citizenship.

Then there are the repeated failures to enact the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Trump has not only staked his political credibility on its passage but clearly sees it as essential to Republican victories.

Against that backdrop, the DOJ's signature election litigation initiative has turned into a complete debacle. By the time Blanche told Kristen Welker that the Department might bring the voter file cases to the Supreme Court, the DOJ was 0-22. By the end of Monday, it was 0-23.

It is into this maelstrom that Harmeet Dhillon announced the DOJ would deploy 1,000 election monitors. While the DOJ has historically sent election monitors to places where minority voters and the disabled have suffered discrimination, the proposed deployment is much larger — and far more ominous.

At one level, this can be explained as a needed diversion from the narrative that Trump is losing in the courts. But to dismiss it as simply a short-term PR stunt ignores how it fits into Trump's broader plan to subvert elections he is nearly certain to lose.