On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton said president-elect Donald Trump is the most dangerous man to ever run for president. He’s a “moral disaster,” according to her former running mate Tim Kaine. If you believe the Democrats’ campaign rhetoric, Trump is a direct puppet of a foreign leader. At best, he’s “temperamentally unfit to be commander in chief,” as President Obama put it. For others, Trump is a literal fascist, a dictator-in-waiting who has been compared to everyone from Hitler and Mussolini to supposed Latin American strongmen.

This is the man who will now be in control of the most powerful military and state surveillance apparatus in all of history. When Trump is inaugurated in January next year, he will take charge of a sprawling, opaque, and extremely powerful national security regime with few checks and balances.

It’s an apparatus that was built by both parties. George W. Bush massively expanded the system after the September 11 attacks, taking measures that were at the time viewed as extreme and unprecedented. But Obama’s ready acceptance and expansion of this national security state upon coming to power has helped entrench it, while also making it more powerful than Dick Cheney’s wildest dreams. Now it’s in Trump’s hands.