For years, they defended American elections from all threats, foreign and domestic. But this week, veterans of federal law enforcement were forced to look on as the U.S. electoral system came under assault from an unlikely source: the government they served. David Laufman once oversaw counterintelligence investigations for the Justice Department and held senior positions in the Bush, Obama, and first Trump administrations. On Wednesday, he watched images of FBI agents searching an election-office warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, confiscating ballots and other materials in the latest escalation of Donald Trump's five-year quest to prove, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. The episode felt particularly ominous to Laufman'a crossing of a sacred line, and an indication that the administration won't stay within the guardrails that have kept American voting systems free of political interference. The agents in Fulton County loaded hundreds of boxes of sealed records onto waiting semitrucks. Nationwide, election officials who are busy preparing for the midterm vote in November, and for primaries much sooner, told us they felt alarmed about what the search signaled, and feared possible federal efforts to skew the 2026 results. Some compared it to a hostile takeover, or an occupation, or a scene that they thought they would only ever see in foreign countries....

The statements from congressional Republicans after Saturday's shooting of Alex Pretti were relatively mild. Lawmakers said that they were 'deeply troubled' or 'disturbed' by the second killing of an American citizen by federal immigration officers this month; most called for an investigation into Pretti's death. But the statements kept coming, one after another, all through the weekend and into yesterday. The reactions from across the GOP sent an unmistakable message in their volume, if not in their rhetoric, to Donald Trump: Enough. The defining characteristics of the Republican-controlled Congress during the president's second term have been silence and acquiescence. That so many in his party felt compelled to speak up after Pretti's killing was a sign that Republicans had finally lost patience with federal agents occupying a major American city'a deportation operation that has soured the public on one of Trump's signature policies and sunk the GOP's standing at the outset of a crucial midterm-election year....

It wasn't the initial video of ICE officers shooting and killing Alex Jeffrey Pretti, for seemingly no justifiable reason at all, that did it. I didn't yet know Pretti was a 37-year-old nurse who worked in the intensive-care unit at the Veteran Affairs hospital in Minneapolis, or what preceded the shooting, or if the victim had pulled a weapon on the officers. The event looked really bad on my laptop screen. It was extremely upsetting to watch. But I was willing to withhold judgment for a time to wait for additional evidence. Then other videos began to surface showing the events from multiple angles. It looked like Pretti was filming ICE officers from the sidelines as they interacted with some protesters, that he walked toward the commotion and was quickly pepper-sprayed while holding his camera in one hand. Then several officers grab Pretti and wrestle him to the ground while one of them begins beating him with a pepper-spray canister. Then another officer appears to remove a gun from near Pretti's right hip and walk away from the skirmish with the recovered weapon. (Later on Saturday, we learned that Pretti had a permit for the gun; there is no sign on any of the videos that he drew the weapon on the officers.) Then one of the officers fires four shots at Pretti from close range. He sinks to the ground. Within five seconds a total of ten shots are fired by at least two of the officers....

Betting money puts the odds of constitutional collapse in the United States at about one in 25. Anyone can wager three or four cents on Polymarket, Kalshi, or PredictIt that will pay out $1 if Donald Trump wins a third term in the 2028 election'an impossibility, according to the plain text of the Twenty-Second Amendment: 'No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.' Dmitri Mehlhorn, a former Democratic strategist, thinks that the chance of political apocalypse is about 20 times higher'and that Americans need to start preparing now. He recently secured dual citizenship for his family on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and is obsessively thinking through how people should respond if Trump tries to maintain power with the threat of force. He styles himself a doomsday philosopher of this worst-case scenario. On a Tuesday last month, this effort brought him to a co-working space in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood to play a war game of sorts with about 15 finance professionals, nonprofit leaders, technology executives, and former Democratic-campaign advisers'and me....