This October, more than 100 politicians and local and state election officials around the country received envelopes in the mail with an unidentified white powder. They included the Arizona secretary of state; several members of Congress from the California delegation; the Washington secretary of state’s electoral office; and election offices in Louisiana, Ohio, and Oklahoma.

No one was hurt — and it’s not been made public whether the powder contained a biological or pharmaceutical substance capable of harming the recipients — but the effort to intimidate people who are vital to the smooth running of the voting process was a clear signal that, this election season, malign actors are looking for any and every way to gum up the works.

Secretaries of state from both parties condemned the attacks. The FBI, U.S. Capitol Police, and U.S. Postal Service opened investigations. But, from the president, there was only a cavernous silence.

For a man who loves the sound of his own voice to the extent that Donald Trump does, and who weighs in on everything from soccer game red cards to the physical appearance of candidates on the campaign trail, this refusal to issue even the mildest of rebukes against those attacking the electoral system’s guardians was particularly telling. If silence speaks a thousand Truth Social posts (to mangle the old adage), Trump’s refusal to publicly condemn the attacks on elected officials was extraordinary.

Instead, all week Trump and his enablers in the “Justice” Department focused on circulating their highly suspect allegations of fraud, announcing the arrest of 28 noncitizen California residents for illegally voting, and claiming that agents have arrested 113 people around the country since the summer on similar charges. No matter that this is a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of noncitizen voters that they have previously claimed are on voter rolls; by sowing the seeds of doubt about the integrity of voter rolls, they are setting the scene for their likely post-election strategy should the electorate send GOP candidates packing around the country in November. Some of Trump’s advisers have, apparently, even urged him to declare martial law to root out electoral “fraud.”

With Trump ramping up pressure on election officials, the Justice Department also announced that it was seeking to toss out tens of thousands of California ballots, suggesting that they were cast by voters flagged by the Justice Department and Homeland Security’s citizenship-check systems. Voting rights groups, along with California officials, pointed out that these systems are notorious for producing false positives. In an interview with MS NOW, California Attorney General Rob Bonta accused the administration of trying to bully election officials into “disenfranchising voters,” adding, “it’s wrong.”

Days later, infuriated by California’s refusal to bend the knee, Trump went on a social media blitz, promising — with multiple exclamation points — long prison terms for California’s elected officials.

There’s a pattern of Trump-sponsored intimidation and violence here. The polls suggest that Trump and the GOP’s popularity with voters is in the toilet. In these circumstances, most political figures would be humble enough to listen to the electorate and try to address its concerns; Trump, by contrast, simply ratchets up the anger dial and punches yet more holes in the fabric of civil society, targeting institutions that make elections and the peaceful transfer of power possible in the United States.

Within Trump’s dwindling band of die-hard loyalists, that fury is playing out in odiously violent ways. During a rally in Ohio last week, two men attending Trump’s rally attacked a woman wearing a “Release the Epstein files” T-shirt. One grabbed her and pushed her down while the other jumped on her, punched at her face, pulled her hair, and put her in a headlock. The president looked on, paused his speech menacingly, and then launched a verbal fusillade against the woman (whom he misidentified as a man), describing her as “scum,” accusing her of being a “paid protester,” and calling her a “fat guy” who “needs to go on a diet.”

In short, the president of the United States, in the full media spotlight, openly mocked a woman’s physical appearance while she was being physically assaulted by his right-wing mob. There’s simply no precedent for this among modern American presidents — apart from previous examples of such obnoxious behavior by Trump himself — and no corollary in stable democratic nations today.

You don’t have to look far to find ever more examples of Trump’s embrace of violence for violence’s sake. The president mused, again, this past week, about having people who leak military secrets shot — although it is unclear whether he included in this group his own “secretary of war,” Pete Hegseth, who infamously leaked military secrets on a Signal chat last year.

One presumes, however, that Hegseth gets a free pass from the boss for his malfeasance, not least due to his efforts to out-Trump Trump on the violence spectrum, pushing for grotesque spectacles like a livestreamed firing squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), by contrast, is firmly in Trump’s crosshairs, with the full power of the federal government now being brought to bear against her in an effort to prove that her family committed immigration fraud decades ago, to denaturalize and then deport her. Again, as Barack Obama pointed out in responding to this, there’s really no precedent for raiding the home of a member of Congress, especially based on “evidence” this flimsy, within 60 days of an election. In fact, all the precedent runs in the opposite direction; historically, the feds have gone out of their way not to put thumbs on the scales in this way on the eve of voters having their say at the ballot box.

Time after time, Trump has used the most racist and inflammatory of language against not only Omar but also the entire Somali American community, whom he says “cheat like hell.” He is flinging wild, scapegoating accusations at entire ethnic groups not only stateside but also overseas: Witness both Trump’s and Vice President J.D. Vance’s leap to conclusions — with no evidence to back them up — that non-white, non-Christian immigrants were to blame for France’s recent spate of urban riots, as if (the evidence of hundreds of years of violent French uprisings, known as jacqueries, notwithstanding), white, Christian, French citizens were somehow incapable of rioting of their own volition.

There’s a throughline here. Trump’s vision is increasingly incompatible with a multiracial, multicultural vision of democracy, and increasingly beholden to the notion that absolutely anything is justified so long as it secures his hold on power. Looking for anyone and everyone to blame for his failures, he appears willing to do and say and tolerate things that ought to be far outside the bounds of the acceptable.

Maybe Trump will have a revelation before the election and urge extremists not to threaten public officials and not to ratchet the political temperatures up even higher. And maybe pigs will, indeed, learn to fly. So long as this authoritarian man occupies the White House, expect the war on democracy to be coordinated from within by the U.S. president and his mob of fascist supporters.

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