“Yikes! Look, I do get the joy of canceling plans. No one loves bailing on drinks or a work dinner or my kid’s piano recital more than me,” Kosta admitted Tuesday. “But you can’t cancel elections. Voting is the most American thing you can do besides, well, not voting.”

Trump “suggesting that he might cancel the midterms appears to be the inflection point toward a dictatorship from which our nation cannot return. This is serious,” he warned.

Kosta, though, then cut to footage of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisting the president was joking and, after expressing his relief, pressed on to say he’d “learned my lesson” and would “take all this much less seriously.”

Still, Kosta said he took “solace” in the idea that “this is just talk,” arguing that “if Trump was really going to meddle with the midterms, he’d be laying the groundwork by manufacturing evidence that there’s widespread election fraud, and he’s not doing that, right? Right? Right?”

Moments later, the show aired a news report on the FBI seizing 2020 election ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, as part of a Justice Department investigation into alleged voter fraud in the election that Trump lost to Joe Biden, but still falsely claims he won.

“Holy shit!” Kosta said. “I think it’s pretty clear that Trump is not joking about meddling in the election this year. And the only way we can prevent it is if everyone stands up to stop him, especially Republicans.”

Watch the full monologue here: