They told us elections were rigged. Then they cloned stolen voting software. Then they bought the voting machines.

Asked what the Founding Fathers would make of this political moment in America, the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns tells The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, that, in drafting the Constitution, they were “reverse-engineering against a tyrant … the balance of powers, the three-legislative stuff. They’re always worried about somebody.”At the link in our bio, read more from Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt about the making of the new PBS series “The American Revolution,” which tells the nation’s founding story.