On Sunday afternoon, I stood for three hours in a block of Midtown Manhattan—33rd Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues—surrounded by thousands of Donald Trump supporters. Every half hour or so, the herd shuffled forward 15 or 20 feet before the police barriers up ahead closed again. Whenever we moved, a chant of “USA! USA!” broke out, only to die as soon as progress stopped. Madison Square Garden, where Trump and an all-star MAGA lineup were on the bill, stood in view the whole time, a few hundred feet away. Snipers perched on high-rise rooftops, and a pair of drones hovered overhead. A friend had bought two tickets, but word reached us from the front that tickets weren’t being checked—they were a ruse for the campaign to snag fundraising emails. As the sun drifted toward the Hudson River and the sparkling fall day cooled off, the clock was outrunning us.

I’ve been in Trump crowds before, but never in New York City. The familiarly scuzzy and desolate neighborhood around Penn Station was filled with a political throng wearing an unusual amount of red for a city that dresses dark. Because it was New York, there were a lot more Black and brown people, and a lot more Orthodox Jews, than you’d see at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. An occupying force of unmistakable locals had taken over the street. My disorientation deepened all afternoon.

No one had more than six inches of personal space. To exit through the crush sideways and climb over metal barriers for a bathroom break or cup of coffee would take a major effort of will. We were stuck. There was nothing to do but chat.

Next to me stood a solemn-looking man in his 20s who held a tiny American flag in one hand. He said that he worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a world-famous, progressively orthodox cultural institution where his politics made him a lonely dissident. One of about three? No, he said—there were secret comrades in warehousing. I asked if he thought the country could come together after the election, whatever the result. His answer—that Trump had the support of an overwhelming majority of Americans, more than enough to clean up the mess, and that Democrats alone were guilty of demonizing their opponents, because Republicans were just saying what was true—sounded like a no.

An hour later and 100 feet farther along, I was standing beside Richard and Jason, Trinidad-born men in MAGA caps, who live near me in Brooklyn. They supported Trump because of high prices—a dozen eggs for $6—and lack of international respect; also, The Apprentice. Richard was certain that Trump would win in a landslide—would even take deep-blue New York City. (There’s a lot of secret Trump support in Flatbush, he confided.) When I asked if he would accept a result that went against his candidate, Richard simply repeated: Trump in a landslide. I almost believed him, because the street had become an echo chamber—not the virtual kind, but a physical one—and I began to understand the power of crowds over the mind. As the afternoon wore on, it became harder to hold on to the thought that all these thousands of people were wrong.

Around 3 o’clock—after two hours of standing, and no progress for at least 45 minutes—my lower back throbbed. It was becoming clear that we would never cross 7th Avenue and reach the promised land of Madison Square Garden, and I began to imagine a stampede. If this had been an ordinary Manhattan traffic jam, the blare of car horns would have been deafening. But the crowd remained shockingly patient and pleasant, making instant friends in the American way. Promoters for a local betting market tossed out red T-shirts that gave Trump a 57 percent chance to win, and Richard, Jason, and my other neighbors took up a cry of “Bet on Trump! Bet on Trump!” On the sidewalk, a near-perfect Kim Jong Un impersonator was barking, “No to democracy! Yes to autocracy! That’s why I support Donald J. Trump!” and everyone was laughing. Being fellow Americans together, or New Yorkers, or even Yankee fans, wouldn’t have been enough to prevent things from getting ugly. Today, the week before Election Day, only a political tribe—the Fellowship of Trump on 33rd Street—creates such solidarity.

Close to 4 o’clock, we hadn’t moved in well over an hour. With this motionlessness in the heart of New York City, the crowd congealed into a single thought, and the thought became reality—it was as if Trump had somehow already won. Wedged between the men from Flatbush and a metal barricade, I was living in Trump’s America. The smiles and laughter, the cheerful outbreaks of chanting, the helpful calls of “Chair coming through, wheelchair coming”—all these tokens of happiness depended on a mass delusion that had everyone in its grip. It was absolutely possible for the unanimous belief of all these thousands of people to be wrong. And if I stayed here any longer, I might go under the spell too, like a lost climber who sits down to rest in the snow for a few minutes and never gets up. I squeezed my way along the sidewalk until I found an opening in the barricades and slipped out.

So I, along with 10,000 or 20,000 others, missed the big show inside Madison Square Garden. I missed the racist jokes and vulgar insults and profanity directed at Puerto Ricans and other Latinos; at Jews, Palestinians, women, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, and the half of Americans who support Democrats. I missed the crude nativism, the conspiracy-theory mongering, the warnings of violence and revenge. I missed the grifters and the nepos, the opportunists and the fanatics, the heirs of Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin, the fascist wannabes who don’t quite have the chops—the dark mirror of the good will outside. I missed seeing what the hateful extravaganza would have done to my neighbors in the crowd on 33rd Street. And I went home wondering how a spell ever breaks.

The election is rigged. Democrats are already working to steal the election from Donald Trump, and the results are going to be illegitimate. That is, unless Trump wins. This is the message that has been percolating through segments of the online right. Over the past several weeks, conservative figures ranging from the fringe to the mainstream have been priming their audiences to declare fraud should the election not go their way. “The Democrats are rigging the 2024 election just like they did in 2020,” Laura Loomer, a right-wing troll and Trump ally, posted on the messaging app Telegram earlier this month. “From illegal voter registrations in Arizona, to widespread mail-in ballot fraud and encouraging democrats to flood the polls with illegal alien voters, they’re setting the stage to steal key swing states.”

Democrats “will be stealing Wisconsin and Michigan,” Owen Shroyer, the far-right host of the Infowars show, War Room, said on air last week. “I’d say that’s all but guaranteed at this point.” He then moved on to question why results might not be available on election night as they were in years prior to the rise of mail-in ballots (which take more time to count and process), a common right-wing line intended to further call the election’s integrity into question. The idea is that it’s supposedly fishy that votes now take longer to count, as though election fraud is something that cannot be done rapidly, but must be carefully aged like a delicate French cheese.

Even by the standards of the fringier segments of the right, Loomer and Shroyer are known for saying outrageous and polemic things. Still, more mainstream figures are also trying to more gently push the idea that election-security flaws may exist that could jeopardize the results. Fox News’s Jesse Watters accused Democrats of “trying to make elections less secure” on a segment during his show earlier this month. On Infowars, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed that voting machines were changing voters’ intended ballot choices in a reliably red, mostly rural county in Georgia. “I will be working to investigate this issue and ensure the integrity of our elections in Georgia,“ she later posted.

The claims fall into several rough categories that range from soft attempts to undermine the credibility of the election to outright conspiracy theories: that there are voting irregularities that suggest something is amiss, that the time it will take for results to be tallied is suspiciously long, that Democrats are encouraging explicit voter fraud, that a conspiracy is afoot to let noncitizens vote and potentially sway the election. But there is no evidence that the election is being rigged.

Given that the MAGA right seeded election denialism after Trump lost his bid for the presidency in 2020, such claims are is not surprising. Some kind of “Stop the Steal” redux has long seemed almost inevitable. Less obvious is what the downstream impacts will be. Claims that noncitizens are voting have already led to the erroneous removal of registered voters from the polls, as seen in Texas, but other effects are less clear. Intelligence officials have warned that they anticipate violence around the election. But what does that actually look like, especially if Trump loses?

In 2020, a series of escalating protests in Washington, D.C., culminated in the attack on the Capitol after the turn of the new year. January 6 was energized and encouraged by right-wing protests against COVID-era lockdowns in statehouses across the United States. A protest of hundreds of MAGA protestors had already happened in D.C. by this time in 2020. They served as dry runs for the big one.

This time around, nothing like this has happened in the lead-up to Election Day. Although the past year has seen notable far-right mobilization and activity, and Trump attracts large crowds at his rallies, it hasn’t reached the levels it did in 2020. There haven’t been practice protests across the country that could build up to a massive moment. A January 6-style event is possible, but it would require an abrupt shift in energy, and the will to mobilize would have to materialize almost immediately. And such mobilization would have to happen in a world where people have seen the consequences of January 6, understanding that they could face prosecution and convictions as well.

The right “can’t create momentum out of thin air,” Hannah Gais, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me. Still, even if there isn’t energy in the streets, there is momentum online to reject a Trump loss, and that probably is going to escalate. This rhetoric will likely be translated into violence, just not the Capitol-riot kind. Gais fears that the spike in violent rhetoric encouraged by claims of election fraud could spur unpredictable, isolated instances of violence across the country, instead of large, organized January 6-style ones.

The intelligence community is similarly worried. In a memo, reported on by Wired, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis is concerned about an increased “risk of violence against government targets and ideological opponents,” heightened by the election season. According to the report, analysts have seen online discussions “preparing for future violence against public officials and federal agents.”Now more and more people, especially on the right, are openly fantasizing about subjecting their enemies to violent retribution, and in some cases, are actually already doing it

These fantasies are now starting to edge their way into reality. Last week, a man punched a poll worker after the official asked him to remove his MAGA hat to comply with electioneering laws. On Monday, hundreds of ballots were destroyed after ballot drop boxes were set on fire in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington.

Other recent political violence has been more concerning. Earlier this year, a man in Pennsylvania beheaded his federal-employee father and called on others to kill federal employees. In a separate incident, a man in Arizona planned a mass shooting at a rap concert in an attempt to start a race war before the election. These events happened months ago, before the election was in full swing and before people started making unfounded claims about it being rigged. Should Trump lose on November 5, Loomer, Shroyer, Greene, and the like are laying the groundwork for very dark things to happen.