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The past month has seen a barrage of election subversion stories that, taken individually, were alarming, but viewed together reveal a deeply disturbing new playbook emanating from the Trump administration ahead of the midterms. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick talked with election law gladiator Marc Elias, chair of Elias Law Group and founder of Democracy Docket. Their discussion, edited and condensed for clarity here, highlights a very clear pattern when it comes to Trump and voting: a project that seeks to normalize violence and to test drive the shattering of how elections are typically run. The work of the coming nine months? Keep a close eye on the encroaching lawlessness, don’t normalize election subversion, and organize now to protect your friends and neighbors.

Dahlia Lithwick: When Steve Bannon pledged last week that ICE is going to “surround the polls”—that the federal government is going to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to patrol polling stations during the midterms—is he trolling, or something we should be taking literally and seriously? 

Marc Elias: I don’t think he’s trolling us, I think he’s quite serious. I think Donald Trump wants to maintain optionality here. Trump has put federal paramilitary forces in a number of American cities. Everyone’s focused on Minneapolis, but let’s be clear, it’s not only Minneapolis. Part of it is because he obviously has an anti-immigrant agenda he wants to pursue, but he also wants to normalize the idea of seeing people with flash-bang grenades and tear gas breaking windows and dragging people out of cars, and telling U.S. citizens that they’re being put in databases, and grabbing U.S. citizens and throwing them in the back of vans. Trump wants to normalize all of that because that has a number of side benefits, none so great as potentially using those same forces and same tactics around the midterm elections—not to go after noncitizens, and not even specifically focused on being right around polling places, but just more generally making it more intimidating to vote, making it more inconvenient to get to polling locations, and in its most extreme form, yes, surrounding polling locations and intimidating people or preventing voting altogether.

So I guess the follow-up is just my lawyerly question, which is: Of course it’s not lawful to deploy federal troops or armed federal law enforcement to polling places. The Brennan Center is very clear—it’s a crime for anyone in the military to interfere with elections. So doesn’t this discussion begin and end with the fact that you just can’t?

It doesn’t, for two reasons. First of all, we began the administration with people thinking, Oh my God, what if he puts the military at the polls? And I think Donald Trump has figured out that he’s better off with paramilitary forces than the actual U.S. military. The military........

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