Donald Trump is already telling us he’s going to try to steal the 2026 election, and the fact that he’s saying it now, months in advance, is the whole tell.Back in February, he stood up and declared that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” floated taking over the vote in 15 states his party doesn’t control, and returned to the lie he’s been pushing for a decade, that mail-in ballots are crawling with fraud.They aren’t. Americans have voted by mail for more than a century and a half, and the Brennan Center has shown over and over that you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit mail-ballot fraud.The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open.The measures themselves are extraordinary. This spring, Trump signed an executive order trying to seize federal control over how states run their elections, and when the courts blocked most of it, his administration found a back door through, of all places, the Post Office.The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that 23 Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.Steve Bannon went on his podcast and promised that “we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” and when reporters asked the White House to rule it out, the press secretary wouldn’t. More than forty-eight million Americans voted by mail in 2024.These men want the power to decide whose ballot gets carried to the mailbox and who feels safe enough to show up in person.If you’re wondering why they’re working this hard to keep you from voting, the answer slipped out of Todd Blanche’s mouth this spring.Standing on a stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Dallas, the man who’d been Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer and who now runs the Justice Department as acting Attorney General told the crowd, “[E]verybody’s afraid that the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted.”He meant it as a rallying cry. What he actually delivered was a confession: you don’t spend your evenings bracing for an indictment unless some quiet part of you already knows what you’ve done.A reckoning is coming for the people breaking the law for this president, and they can feel it.And now the White House is even discussing completely blowing up the Constitution and the right of habeas corpus, which dates back to the year 1215 when the British elite forced King John to sign the Magna Carta on the plain at Runnymede. As the New York Times reported:“Suspending habeas corpus was one of two radical ideas [Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen] Miller had been pushing that alarmed [White House Staff Secretary Will] Scharf. The other was invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to enforce the law on American streets as protests grew against deportation sweeps.”Todd Blanche, in particular, has every reason to be worried: he knows who Trump really is, and what he’s capable of.He’s the lawyer who defended Trump in the New York hush-money trial that ended in 34 felony convictions, and in the federal cases over January 6th and the classified documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago.He’s also the guy who’s now hiding three million Epstein documents and cut the cushy, puppy-filled deal with Ghislaine Maxwell for keeping her mouth shut.Now he presides over a Justice Department that he and Trump have remade into a personal instrument of vengeance, complete with a Hitler-like 60-foot banner of Trump’s leering face on its façade, and the president has just nominated him to hold the office permanently.So when Blanche says out loud that he’s afraid, he isn’t being paranoid. He’s being a good lawyer, reading the room, and the room he’s reading is called “history.”It reminds me of two lawyers I learned about when we lived in Germany, because the men doing Trump’s legal dirty work today are walking a road that better-dressed men walked 90 years ago, and, as a result, we know exactly where it leads.The first is Hans Frank, who started out as Adolf Hitler’s personal attorney, defending Hitler and his Nazi thugs in court all through the 1920s the way Blanche once stood behind Trump at the defense table.When Hitler took power, Frank was rewarded.