There is naturally a lot of uncertainty surrounding how, exactly, Donald Trump will react to an adverse midterm election result. But one thing you can take to the bank, and I wrote about it at New York. Democrats should be prepared for what’s coming.

There’s naturally a lot of speculation in legal and journalistic circles about what exactly Donald Trump might do to change, deny, or challenge the midterm losses his party is widely expected to suffer a little over a month from now. One of those potential tactics, per the Guardian, should come as no surprise:

“Election experts have warned Donald Trump’s administration could use the crucial hours and days after November’s midterm elections to disrupt the results after struggling to enforce a crackdown on voting. With less than six weeks remaining until polls close, and control of US Congress in the balance, the post-election ‘counting window’ is seen as as a particularly vulnerable moment by former US federal government officials.”

It’s easy to conjure up a scenario wherein Trump exploits this window. In 2018, he joined congressional Republicans in claiming that mail ballots undermining early GOP leads in key midterm races represented likely ballot-box stuffing by Democrats. This conspiratorial suggestion turned out to be a dress rehearsal for a far more serious phenomenon in 2020, when Trump claimed victory in the wee hours of Election Night with vast numbers of ballots — particularly mail ballots, which take longer to process than in-person ballots — still uncounted. This “red mirage” stunt, essentially an effort to call the election from the White House while Republicans held an early lead, was much-predicted by observers who at the time were often mocked as paranoid. But Trump not only launched this playbook right on schedule, he also made it the cornerstone of an election-denial crusade that culminated in the Capitol Riot of January 6, and which he is still pursuing nearly six years later as a foundational myth of the MAGA movement.

If anything, Trump has become even more adamant about mail ballots representing prima facie evidence of fraud since he tried to reverse his 2020 defeat. He’s tried to restrict or even ban mail ballots via both executive order (thwarted by the courts) and legislation (the infamous SAVE America Act blocked by Senate Democrats). His most audacious bid for a preemptive strike on mail ballots was his scheme to give the U.S. Postal Service the power to refuse to deliver ballotsthat don’t pass a hastily contrived test for proof of citizenship. It was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court just a couple of weeks ago. He still rants regularly about the subject, as does his domestic policy chief Stephen Miller.

All of this evidence, combined with so much precedent, suggests that a premature Trump victory claim during the 2026 counting window, followed quickly by vague allegations of fraud, is all but certain. The only development (other than an unlikely GOP win) that might make such Election Night lies difficult would be a Democratic wave so high and deep that there is no early GOP lead to begin with.

Perhaps to deal with that contingency, Trump has also been flirting with an additional specter — the idea that foreign governments may tamper with election machines in a manner that makes even the early counts suspect. That could be used to justify some sort of federal intervention before the results can be certified. This was, indeed, a major subtheme of Trump’s bizarre July 16 prime-time speech fanning multiple election conspiracy theories, during which he claimed there was concrete evidence that China meddled with the 2020 election.

In reality, Trump’s claims involved warmed-over proof of occasional foreign-government efforts to test the security of election systems but no evidence at all that they succeeded or had any impact on election results. Still, this could supply him with a way to claim a rigged election even if there aren’t any early GOP leads to mischaracterize. But more importantly, the notion of foreign-government election tampering could provide a pretext for a federal takeover of election machinery or ballots in the guise of dealing with a national security threat. What makes that especially alarming is that it might happen well before the states can certify the results. State certifications of Joe Biden’s win — which Trump tried and failed to reverse in Congress with the aid of a mob — represented the weak spot of Trump’s 2020 gambit. So preempting them altogether could produce a constitutional crisis with no clear path to resolution.