Maya Angelou’s often-quoted advice — When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time— is quoted so often because it’s so obviously true.

On Jan. 6, 2021, President Donald Trump showed the world who he is: someone willing to undermine, interfere with and ultimately attempt to overthrow any election result that doesn’t go his way. And he’s been showing us that, again and again, ever since.

Trump’s escalating power-grabs will continue until a Congress is seated that’s willing to rein him in. This year’s midterm voters can make that happen, but only if they start — now— organizing, mobilizing and educating friends and fence-sitters about just how dangerous to democracy this president truly is.

The latest demonstration of that danger has come in Trump’s recent remarks about “nationalizing” America’s elections.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump said in a podcast released Monday. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

It's unlikely Trump will or can follow through. Like his 2022 call for “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” in support of his phony election-fraud claims, this one would run headlong into the plain language of that document, which puts the states in charge of the ballot.

But there are other ways to “take over” elections. And Trump is testing them all.

That’s the whole point of his unprecedented campaign to get Missouri, Texas and other red states to redraw their congressional districts when there’s no new census to base it on. We know his goal with this “ re-gerrymandering” campaign is to skew the midterms for the GOP, because he says it publicly.

That scheme may yet backfire. Missouri’s re-gerrymandering stunt is facing a voter referendum that could well scuttle it. California’s redrawn map — an understandable Democratic response to the map wars that Trump started — was just upheld by the Supreme Court.

There is also Trump's militarization of blue cities — and only blue cities.

While many Americans have taken to the streets to protest, many more undoubtedly are cowering indoors, unnerved by the sight of masked agents with paramilitary weaponry and attire stalking their streets. And anyone who suggests that only illegal immigrants have anything to be afraid of should ask the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

After what we’ve all seen these past months, can anyone seriously dismiss the likelihood that the whole point of this deeply un-American deployment is to intimidate blue-state voters into staying home?

Is that an alarmist suggestion? Tell it to Steve Bannon, the former White House adviser who still holds sway with Trump. He said on his podcast Tuesday: "You're damn right we're gonna have ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) surround the polls come November.”

The administration is pursuing other schemes as well. Trump continues attacking the concept of mail-in voting, arguing (baselessly, as always) that it’s rife with fraud.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently offered an assist in a Metro East case, ruling that candidates can challenge the validity of late-arriving mail-in ballots, even those sent on time and held up only because of slow mail service. Ponder that — and then ponder Trump’s continuing project to gut the U.S. Postal Service of resources.

Then there was the recent FBI raid of Fulton County, Georgia’s, 2020 election ballots. An expression of Trump’s continuing inability to accept his 2020 loss, the raid was attended by national intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, for no reason that the administration has explained. Could it be that intimidating election officials is easier if the president’s top spy is on the premises?

History shows that the party in the White House generally loses ground in the midterms. Polling and early elections indicate that pattern will likely hold this year.

History also predicts that if and when Republicans lose one or both chambers of Congress in November, our sitting president won’t accept those results. Trump will do whatever he can, legal or otherwise, peaceful or otherwise, to overturn them. He will falsely cry “fraud” with zero evidence, or he will concoct some phony national emergency to justify halting the peaceful transfer of power.

Anyone who had made such a prediction prior to Jan. 6 could reasonably have been dismissed as an alarmist. But anyone today who dismisses this possibility is simply being naive.

On that day and in the five years since, Donald Trump has repeatedly shown us exactly who he is. For the sake of our democracy, it’s urgent that we believe him.

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