This month, Trump dismissed the remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan federal agency created to help states administer elections, currently leaving precisely no one in a position of authority for polling-place workers to contact should anomalies arise in November.

Next, the president delivered a national address in which he claimed there was evidence of foreign meddling in the 2020 election by a relatively unfamiliar culprit: China. Whatever its stated purpose, the assertion seemed designed to cast a pall on the elections four months hence. The following day, Homeland Security chief Markwayne Mullin declared that balloting overseers in every state could face jail if they failed to cooperate with the administration’s efforts to change election policies.

These recent actions, while ominous, are only the latest salvoes. Lawmakers, election experts, legal scholars, columnists, and journalists have been shouting from the rafters that Team Trump has been busy laying track. Former Democratic senators Richard Gephardt and Tim Wirth, who have set up the civic group Keep Our Republic, have gone so far as to call these activities nothing less than a “rolling coup,” one that has been slow, strategic, and incremental. Jonathan Alter, a veteran political analyst, has used the same phrase on his Substack. Michael Tomasky, in a new essay in The New Republic, asserted, “It Can Now Be Plainly Said: Trump Is Planning a November Coup d’Etat.”

Those on Capitol Hill have been sounding their own alarms. In April, Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) put Postmaster General David Steiner’s feet to the fire at a public hearing. “Now we have this new rule,” she warned, “that states have to turn over their voting rolls…You are a pawn in this…. You are being used as part of a much bigger story that this president is trying to play out, where he does not believe that elections that he loses are valid elections.” Steiner deflected direct pressure on whether the agency would immediately withhold ballots, noting it was only a proposed regulation and that the USPS would act “in accordance with whatever rule is in effect at that point in time.”

In June, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), expressed concerns that incoming DNI chief Pulte had the potential to interfere with the balloting process. As Warner told CNN: “You’ve got a guy who [is] loyal only to Trump, and he’s going to have all 18 [intelligence-related] agencies to oversee…. What he could do is take a single piece of intelligence that may not be corroborated or make something up and say, ‘Country X is going to interfere or is sending people to encourage noncitizens to vote,’ and [have] that be used as an excuse for Trump to bring in ICE, federal troops, close down elections, seize polling stations.”

Also in June, Slotkin, Senator John Hickenlooper (D-CO), and several lawmakers presented the Protect Our Polls Act to prevent men and women in uniform from monitoring or influencing the act of voting. “President Trump has made it clear he’ll win elections by any means necessary,” Hickenlooper noted. “He already sent the military into our cities to intimidate Americans. The polls are next. We need to pass these safeguards into law before November.”