Donald Trump is both a flagrant liar and a transparent crook. It’s an unusual combination.

Trump lies constantly. He lies to protect himself, to aggrandize himself, to display and parade himself, and for a thousand other reasons—all centering around himself and his desperate need for constant self-glorification.

But here’s the thing. It’s so obvious in every instance why Trump lies. They aren’t clever lies, his volleys of falsehoods. They’re dumb diversions and brute evasions, you can see the wheels wobbling and turning in his mind as he finds the way out of his latest predicament. Basically, Trump is such a bad liar he doesn’t really earn the name. More properly, he’s a bullshitter (which is a very terrible thing to have in a president who launches the country into war nobody wanted).

So one must take Trump at his word when he lies. Think of that. He’s telling you something, In that sense, he always means what he says, even when the words are ludicrous, even when they are deranged, even when he’s making stuff up.

Trump has told us repeatedly that he wants to “take over” the voting this fall.

His press secretary, when asked, pointedly refused to guarantee that armed DHS agents will not be stationed at polling places in the United States of America. His Pentagon, asked about deploying federal forces to the polls, responded to a Democratic request under the Freedom of Information Act with a six-month estimated completion date —conveniently scheduling the answer for just before Election Day. The DNC is now suing to pry loose the plans, if plans there are.

And the FBI subpoena that arrived in Arizona on Tuesday, demanding records from the long-debunked, half-mad 2020 Maricopa County “audit,” should send a cold wire of fear through every American who still believes elections are the thing that makes us. That subpoena was not a fishing expedition. It was a declaration of intent.

And it follows federal raids on state and local voting facilities in Fulton County, Georgia and Puerto Rico. The pattern is not difficult to read. Trump is salting the ground. He is building, piece by rotten piece, an apparatus of doubt—the audits, the raids, the loyalists installed in election offices—so that when November comes and the results don’t please him, the pretext will be there, waiting.

Trump long ago showed himself to be the absolute worst kind of American politician: He will never accept the result of an election he does not win, or if he is not on the ballot, cannot call a victory. This is not opinion. It is one of the few fixed stars in the Trump cosmology, as reliable as his vanity and his cruelty.

Through the alchemy of his broken, ferocious personality—and with his extraordinary instinct for rhetoric that seizes the viscera of his audiences—he has become the dominant political figure of our era. We live in the Era of Trump. And he is using every instrument of presidential power to ensure that the Era of Trump does not end at the ballot box.

Like many reporters, I have covered a lot of elections. I have driven through Iowa in the dead of winter and watched a farmer in a diner weigh his choices with the seriousness of a judge (Iowans loved going first). I have stood in school gymnasium polling places and watched people in their eighties shuffle forward to vote, as they have shuffled forward for sixty years, because it is what you do. I have watched results come in from counties nobody can find on a map, and felt, every time, the great shaggy beast of the American republic making up its mind. It is, I’ll confess it without apology, one of the most beautiful things I know. Laugh if you want.

That beauty is now under direct assault. Not from foreign adversaries, not from abstract forces—but from the President of the United States, who has made clear he views elections as things that either confirm his genius or require his intervention.

So what do we do?

First: know the law. Federal statute prohibits troops or federal officers from interfering with or even appearing in an official capacity at polls. The Constitution reserves election administration to the states. Trump’s earlier executive order on voting has been largely blocked by the courts. The law is on our side. Support the organizations enforcing it—the ACLU, the Brennan Center, Issue One, Democracy Defenders Action, the lawyers already in the trenches.

Second: show up in overwhelming numbers. The most reliable counter to election manipulation is a margin so large it cannot be finessed. Every additional vote makes the theft harder. Volunteer. Drive people to polls. Do the unglamorous work.

Third: watch. Election protection programs need observers at polling places across the country. If federal agents appear anywhere near a voting site this November, that needs to be documented, immediately, and loudly.

And finally: don’t let the noise do its work. The audits, the subpoenas, the raids—they are designed to make you feel that the whole enterprise is too corrupt to bother with. That is precisely what Trump wants. The farmer in the Iowa diner is not corrupt. The eighty-year-old shuffling toward the ballot box is not corrupt. The system, for all its strain, holds—but only as long as enough people refuse to let go of it.

They are coming for the midterms. The question is whether we’ll be ready.

—Terry