Nearly a decade on, as he tasks the world’s richest man with slashing and burning through the institutions millions of American families rely on, it’s easy to forget Donald Trump first rose to political heights by promising to take on Washington corruption.

He correctly painted his opponent Hillary Clinton, who had taken millions of dollars for speeches to Wall Street banks and had a history of corruption and pay-to-play with corporate donors, as “corrupt.” To show that “our system is broken,” Trump openly admitted that he had, as a businessman, given money “to everybody,” including Democratic politicians like Clinton, so that “when I need something from them” later on, “they are there for me.” The fact that he was “paying my own way,” or self-funding his 2016 campaign, meant he was “not part of the corrupt system” as a candidate, he told voters, vowing instead to “listen to your voice, to hear your cries for help.” He even put out a plan to “Make Our Government Honest Again” that involved getting lobbyists out of official positions.

“Our movement is about replacing a failed and . . . totally corrupt establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people,” Trump told voters a month before he was first elected.

This kind of talk made its way into even his most recent campaign. Over the past year, Trump complained about “corrupt politicians” robbing Social Security to “fund their pet projects,” and pledged to “reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption” and take on “the corruption that has plagued our federal government and harmed Americans.”

So his decision to appoint Elon Musk, an immigrant billionaire, to form an unaccountable shadow government-within-government to dissolve broad swaths of the post–New Deal state comes as a rude awakening. Simply put, Trump has fully embraced the corrupt system he once claimed to be fighting against — and in fact, taken it to new, unprecedented lengths that make the Clintons look like paragons of ethics and integrity.

At this point, it feels easier to ask which parts of the federal government Musk doesn’t have his hooks in now than which ones he does. Musk and his team at “DOGE” (Department of Government Efficiency) are now installed and tinkering around in the systems of the Departments of Labor, Education, and Energy, as well as the agencies responsible for administering the Medicare and Medicaid programs that nearly 150 million Americans depend on, administering the Social Security program that keeps millions of Americans out of poverty, monitoring and warning the country when deadly hurricanes are forming, and protecting Americans from predatory white-collar criminals, to name a few.

Maybe most alarming, they reportedly have editing power over the computer code of the Treasury Department, the system responsible for the vast $5.5 trillion worth of federal payments that effectively make twenty-first-century America function. Their goal is to radically downsize all of these bodies through mass layoffs and slashing programs, supposedly by rooting out fraud and waste, which they plan to do by feeding the information their systems hold into error–ridden artificial intelligence programs that will decide what to cut. In fact, Trump is now actively fighting the courts to ensure Musk can continue playing around with the Treasury payments system and putting Americans’ most sensitive private information at risk.

To make that happen, Musk is making both policy and staffing decisions, including having longtime, experienced civil servants fired if they stand in his way. According to what Trump officials told the New York Times, no one in the administration but Trump has any authority over him or even knows what he’s doing. As Musk and his team carry out this radical anti-government program, they’re taking steps to circumvent the law and make sure the public won’t be able to later request and look at their communications.

Far from handing control of the government to “the American people” as he once promised, Trump has handed it to a single, particularly incompetent billionaire.

Even before Trump was inaugurated, Musk was sitting in on meetings with world leaders and informally advising the president-elect. Musk was at no point elected, confirmed by Congress, or even appointed to any official position by the president: he’s a private citizen who’s able to walk in and out of the White House whenever he wants, answers to no one, and can fiddle around and potentially wreck government programs you or your family rely on at his personal discretion and no democratic accountability.

What exactly has Musk done to qualify for this kind of unprecedented power over the lives of millions of people in his adopted country? It’s not talent or ability. Musk’s knack for self-promotion and loudly making grand pronouncements he quietly doesn’t follow through on has burnished a public image as a trailblazing genius, which has worked to mask the mediocrity and charlatan’s bluster that sits at his heart.

Thanks to this PR effort, few Americans are aware that, for instance, Musk didn’t actually found the company he’s most famous for, Tesla, but was just an investor who later pushed out the actual founders, installed himself as CEO, and later won the title of “founder” through a lawsuit. Nor do many of them know about or remember his constant failure to make good on the grandiose science-fiction promises he likes to tell crowds of adoring tech groupies, his serial use of trickery and lies to fluff up his company’s products, or his history of wasteful, half-baked ideas and malfunctioning inventions.

Musk’s tenure at Twitter, or X, has been a firsthand show of just how overblown his self-made reputation as a business whiz is, with the platform having become far less functional, more repressive of speech, riddled with spam and fakes, and more financially precarious while its user base has shrunk — all as new features and innovations he brought to the site repeatedly proved high-profile, glitchy embarrassments.

He’s already bringing this same type of incompetence to his new job in government. When Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast pointed out, correctly, that Musk and DOGE’s directive to cut billions in biomedical funding would end up slashing cancer research funding, he replied, “I’m not. Wtf are you talking about?” In other words, Musk quite literally has no idea what he’s actually cutting as he mindlessly downsizes the federal government.

The only reason Musk is in a position to do this kind of damage is because he’s a billionaire, and because he threw the president nearly $290 million in the months before voting — the same kind of blatant campaign finance bribery that’s been endemic to both parties for decades, and exactly the kind of Washington corruption that Trump claimed to be cleaning up, only now on steroids.

Beyond the hypocrisy, it’s as clear a demonstration as you can get of the way that the country’s extreme and growing wealth inequality corrodes its democracy: while the vast majority of Americans sit frustrated at how unresponsive Washington is to their needs, the richest man in the world can simply buy his way into government and do whatever he wants with it, no matter what the rest of us think or how it affects us.

But the Musk situation is just one particularly extreme case of a pattern in the four-week-old Trump administration, which has handed over the US government to a record cohort of thirteen billionaires, as well as corporate profiteers more broadly, sometimes running departments that directly impact their business interests. This is also more of Washington business as usual from Trump, whose only deviation from past presidents like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush on this front so far is in how much more brazen and aggressive he’s been in doing it.

For years now, the US public has complained that the political system is rigged against them and in favor of the rich and powerful — what Joe Biden correctly (and belatedly) called a fledgling oligarchy in his farewell address, and what Trump called the “swamp” the first time he ran, when he pledged to drain it and make government work for ordinary, forgotten Americans. In fact, popular anger at this kind of corruption is exactly what helped drive Trump’s popularity in the first place.

Far from draining it, Trump has firmly become this swamp. Trump really did “listen to your voice” and “hear your cries for help” — and apparently decided he liked listening to the jabbering of a bumbling tech oligarch instead.