Is it panicky, inflammatory, or just plain pointless to take statements such as these seriously? A decade ago, in the America of the Before Times, this would have been a ridiculous discussion, given that it is “not constitutional or legal” to federalize elections as Trump wants, as the Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg put it this week. But we live in the post-January 6th world, so the better question to ask is this: With a President who is already the first in our history to try to overturn the results of an election he decisively lost, what more will it take for us to finally acknowledge that, when he says this stuff, he actually means to follow through with it?