In Texas last week, a man wore a Make America Great Again hat inside a polling location in San Antonio. Asked to remove it, the man allegedly ended up throwing several punches at a 69-year-old election worker.

Fortunately, the local precinct worker wasn’t seriously injured, and the suspect was arrested. But the incident served as a timely reminder about the kind of conditions election workers are facing in the United States this year. The New York Times reported on the “rising wave of threats to election workers.”

“Our elections are made possible by the hard work and patriotism of election workers in communities across the country who are also our neighbors, relatives and friends, and they deserve to do this important work without being subjected to threats,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement last week. “The fact that election workers need to be worried about their security is incomprehensible and unacceptable.”

That’s true, but these are nevertheless the circumstances we find ourselves in as Americans in 2024. NBC News published a report last week noting that election officials nationwide are ramping up their security measures at polling places, “from beefing up law enforcement presence to donning bulletproof vests to deploying drones for surveillance amid an increasingly hostile environment.”

A few days earlier, The Wall Street Journal published a report out of Maricopa County, Arizona, where the local election headquarters “has become a fortress.”

It’s difficult to fully appreciate the degree to which Donald Trump has poisoned American politics, but these reports are a good place to start.

As Rachel noted via Threads, highlighting the report out of Arizona, “Pop this in the time capsule for when it comes time to tell future generations about how awesome the Republican Party’s Trump years were.”

Steve Benen

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”