It was easy to miss amid the tragicomedy of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s security breach, President Trump’s musings about an unconstitutional third term and the sensory assault that is Elon Musk, but last week Trump signed an executive order as potentially chilling as any of the many others.

It concerned elections. More accurately, it concerned his determination to shape them in his favor. And it reaffirmed what has been clear since his prophylactic claims of a “rigged” process in 2016, but becomes more glaringly obvious all the time: He will seize and hold on to power however he must, with no shame about the means.

So while we try to fathom the magnitude of damage Trump is doing — these splenetic, vengeful, bonkers tariffs aren’t even the half of it — we must reckon with a specter every bit as scary: Trump’s resistance to any real referendum on his feral version of governing. He wants to rule. In his mind, he deserves to rule. Democracy is a pretty word but a pesky encumbrance. Best to take it out of the equation.

Then you don’t have to sweat the spasms of the stock market, which plummeted in the first hours of trading today, with the S&P 500 dropping by 4 percent. You can brush off top economists’ utter bafflement about your math and your path. You can survive the pain you’ve inflicted, be it fleeting or forever.

The executive order mandates many changes for federal elections, including, most conspicuously, a requirement that mail-in ballots be received rather than just postmarked by Election Day and that all voters provide not merely a photo identification but proof of citizenship. It’s no coincidence that those revisions align with Republicans’ past concerns that voting by mail hurt them and with a belief that fewer Democratic voters have multiple forms of ID. Trump isn’t after safer, fairer elections. He’s intent on depressing the number of ballots that might not go his and other Republicans’ way.

He’s doing that as he has done so much since his inauguration: in possible defiance of the law, without regard for the prior limits of his position. “The Constitution gives the president no explicit authority to regulate elections,” Nick Corasaniti explained in The Times. “Instead, it gives states the power to set the ‘times, places and manner’ of elections.” Congress can override state legislation. It did precisely that with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.