Earlier this year, The New York Times asked Donald Trump whether he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after the 2020 election. His answer was chilling: "Well, I should have."

Trump is telling us what he plans to do in this year's midterms. He is trying to rig the elections and subvert their results. While we have been able to stop him so far, there is no guarantee that we will continue to prevail in the weeks ahead.

Yet despite the obvious signs of Trump's plan, too many reporters and pundits downplay it. They adhere to the false neutrality that has come to dominate legacy media coverage over the last decade.

No phrase captures this attitude more clearly than the admonition to take Trump seriously but not literally. The suggestion is that only out-of-touch elites pay attention to his actual words. Real voters — and those in the media who claim to speak for them — know to focus on his vibes.

When it comes to voting and elections, this advice has been catastrophically wrong. In 2020, Trump's words before the election were prophetic about what he would do afterward. His refusal to concede foreshadowed the attack on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump is once again in power, and he is again telling us his plan. He has weaponized the entire federal government — including the Department of Justice and the U.S. Postal Service — to make voting more difficult.

He is threatening to deploy federal agents at the polls and to disrupt voting. And he is reaching for every other tool of election rigging: partisan gerrymandering, restrictions on voter registration, attacks on mail-in voting and the use of bogus lists to purge eligible citizens from the rolls.

But most dangerous is what he has been saying for more than a year about the counting, tabulation and certification of election results. Despite what the U.S. Constitution says, he has repeatedly claimed the power to direct this process.

This is not a new idea. It has been his plan all along.