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.

In August 2025, he posted on Truth Social: "Remember, the States are merely an 'agent' for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do."

On Jan. 6, 2026 — five years to the day after the violent insurrection in Washington, D.C. — he floated the idea of canceling the midterms to House Republicans. "I won't say cancel the election, they should cancel the election," he said, explaining that the press would call him a dictator.

About a week later, he told Reuters that "we shouldn't even have an election." The White House insisted he was joking — their version of telling us not to take Trump literally.

In early February, he said on Dan Bongino's podcast that "Republicans ought to nationalize the voting" and "take over the voting" in at least 15 places. The next day, at an Oval Office bill signing, he again falsely claimed that "a state is an agent for the federal government in elections," adding, "If they can't count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over."

The day after that, he told NBC News that if states can't run elections honestly and on time, "then something else has to happen." Asked whether he would accept the results if Republicans lost, he answered conditionally: "I will, if the elections are honest."

In August of this year, Real America's Voice host Wayne Allyn Root urged him to declare a national security emergency to impose voting rules. Trump replied that "stranger things have happened." Asked recently by TIME about declaring a national emergency, he said, "I don't rule anything out or in. We'll see."

Just as Trump's voter suppression gave way to post-election challenges in 2020, I expect him to run the same playbook in 2026. The courts remain a check, and we will keep using them. But inside his administration, there are no guardrails left.

After the 2020 election, Trump considered sending the military and federal agents into states like Georgia to seize voting equipment and ballots. He did not do it because those around him — including lawyers at the Justice Department and the White House — resisted. Today, he says he should have.

If Republicans suffer devastating defeats in the midterms, Trump will no doubt face a similar choice. This time, however, there will be no one in the room to object.

His senior staff will find him a pen to sign the order. Attorney General Todd Blanche will order champagne to celebrate.

Nor can we count on the legacy media to sound the alarm and speak out with moral clarity. Too many of their owners are beholden to Trump. Those who are not largely live in fear of raising his ire.

Lawyers like me will play a critical role, as we have in the past. I helped lead the effort that defeated Trump more than 60 times in court after the 2020 election. My law firm has defeated his Justice Department in election cases more than 25 times this year alone.

But we all have a role to play, and it starts with voting.

Early voting is already underway in many states and thanks to successful litigation, mail-in voting is widely available. The more seats Democrats win and the larger their margins of victory, the harder it will be for Trump to execute his plan.

The weeks before the election will be critical. The weeks after may be even more so. Trump has told us exactly what he intends to do. This time, we need to be prepared to take him literally.