In December, Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker asked Donald Trump about his threats of revenge during the campaign. He demurred. 'I'm not looking to go back into the past. I'm looking to make our country successful,' he said. 'Retribution will be through success.' During the first two months of his presidency, the prevailing theme of Trump's White House was the Elon Musk'led attempt to drastically cut federal agencies. The purge is incomplete'the U.S. DOGE Service continues to seek cuts at more agencies, and litigation has slowed or blocked some of the cuts'but we seem to have already moved into the next stage: revenge. Trump took one of his most chilling steps toward retribution last week, when he directed the government to investigate two officials in his first administration: Chris Krebs, who headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Miles Taylor, who was chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security. The reasons Trump is out to get these two men are clear enough. Krebs, whose work focused on election security, was fired for refusing to say that fraud tainted the 2020 presidential election; as I wrote back in November of that year, Trump targeted him 'not because he did a bad job, but because he did too good a job and said so.' Taylor wrote a notable anonymous New York Times op-ed about administration officials resisting Trump, then published a book unmasking himself and worked to organize Republican opposition to Trump....

Allison Riggs didn't set out to be at the center of the nation's sole uncalled 2024 election, but it's fitting that she is. Before Riggs became a justice on the North Carolina Supreme Court, she spent years as an attorney pushing to make it easier for people to vote, often challenging Republican-passed laws. Now she's at the center of one of the most pitched battles over vote-counting in memory. In November, Riggs, a Democrat, appeared to win reelection to the court by a paper-thin 734-vote margin, but her opponent, Republican Jefferson Griffin, has challenged more than 60,000 votes'effectively trying to get courts to change the rules of the election, despite the votes already having been cast and counted. Whether those votes are included in the final tally will decide the outcome of the race'and Riggs's political future. 'I didn't expect for me to be in a the-cheese-stands-alone kind of situation,' she told me in late March at her home in North Carolina. 'I don't want this fight, but since it came to me, I'm up for it.'...

To live together in social communities, people create and maintain expectations about what is normal and what is not. Sometimes things can fall outside the range of normal and people are OK with it. You might have a neighbor who likes to wear Revolutionary War-era costumes on their evening walks around the neighborhood. Their behavior seems weird to you, but you consider it an instance of everyone's freedom to express themselves. But other times something seems not only abnormal but also unacceptable. In this case, people take active steps to squelch what feels unfair, inappropriate, bad or deviant. Things that people think are morally abnormal ' aberrant behavior, transgressions, violations of their most sacred values ' are viewed as highly threatening and necessary to shut down, with force if necessary. Most people would find a neighbor who purposefully starves and tortures their dogs morally repugnant. That neighbor would need to be stopped and would deserve to be punished. A decade of research in my psychology lab and others' demonstrates that people struggle to express tolerance for different moral values ' for instance, about sexual orientation, helping the poor, being a stay-at-home mother and so on....

An unfortunate reality now confronts Americans who value the rule of law: The court system has limited capability to act as a guardrail against Trumpist authoritarianism. And so elections matter'vitally. The final and most powerful check on Donald Trump has always been, and will always be, the ballot box. The president knows this, and that is why he has now turned his attention to the election system. His recent executive order on election 'integrity' is nothing less than an attempt to disenfranchise his opponents and forestall electoral defeat. Some of that effort is rather technical in nature, but the fundamentals of Trump's challenge to free and fair elections are easy to understand. This is an attempt to completely rework the constitutional rules that structure the American election system. The Constitution established a decentralized election system that was intended to be difficult, if not impossible, for a single actor to subvert. To that end, the Constitution gives the states most of the authority over the conduct of elections. Article I, Section 4 provides that 'the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof''creating 50 independent and separate election systems....