Donald Rumsfeld, who died peacefully on Tuesday at the age of eighty-eight, was the ultimate Washington bureaucrat. Had he been born in almost any other country, his cunning and ruthless ladder-climbing might have culminated in some scandalous kickback scheme, or the bulldozing of a poor neighborhood to make way for condos — terrible but relatively small-scale atrocities.

As it was, Rumsfeld spent his life clawing his way up the Beltway ladder, a place where quiet conversations in small rooms incinerate families and raze villages, and his career ended in the destruction of a country, the destabilization of a region, and at least hundreds of thousands dead.

Rumsfeld was everything the political establishment claimed to despise about Donald Trump. He was an inveterate liar who spent years cheerfully deceiving the US public on a near-daily basis. He was an authoritarian who was no stranger to attacking the press or flouting laws. And he profited handsomely from his place in government and the dizzying web of investments perfectly calibrated to capitalize on it.