How the richest person in the world is reshaping Washington

Elon Musk is rapidly dismantling or taking control of government agencies during President Trump’s first weeks in power. But is he or Trump in control?

Vittoria Elliott, reporter for WIRED, covering platforms and power.

Frank Vogl, co-founder of Transparency International. Author of "The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption-Endangering Our Democracy" and "Waging War on Corruption: Inside the Movement Fighting the Abuse of Power."

Timothy Ryback, historian and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague. Author of several books on Hitler’s Germany, including most recently "Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise of Power."

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Robert Rubin served as the United States Treasury Secretary from 1995 to 1999. Lawrence Summers followed him as secretary from 1999 to 2001. Timothy Geithner led the Treasury from 2009 to 2013. Then Jacob Lew from 2013 to 2017, followed by Janet Yellen, who held the post from 2021 until January 2025.

Together they comprise multiple decades leading the largest, most important Treasury department in the world. And yesterday in the New York Times, these former Treasury secretaries of the United States issued a warning to all Americans that the nation's democracy is at risk. Quote: "We take the extraordinary step of writing this piece, because we are alarmed about the arbitrary and capricious political control of federal payments for the sake of democracy, which would be unlawful and corrosive to our democracy." End quote.

They are trying to warn the American people about the ransacking of the nation's payment system by Elon Musk.

In the last week of January, a group of young men, aged 19 to their mid 20s, entered the Treasury Department. They work for Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. They demanded access to the federal government's extensive and complex payment system that oversees payments on everything from federal contracts to your social security check.

NEWS BRIEF: Sources confirming that Elon Musk has been given access to the U.S. Treasury Department's vast payment system. The move essentially puts the government's multi trillion-dollar checkbook in the hands of the world's richest man.

CHAKRABARTI: David Lebryk was acting Treasury Secretary when the men demanded control over the payment system.

He refused their request and was then placed on administrative leave. He subsequently retired. Scott Bessent was quickly confirmed as Treasury Secretary on January 27th. He granted Musk's team access to the Treasury system and therefore access to $6 trillion in payments. That's trillion with a T, and millions of Americans' personal data.

In response, the five former Treasury secretaries wrote in the New York Times yesterday, quote: "These political actors have not been subject to the same rigorous ethics rules as civil servants. They lack training and experience to handle private, personal data," end quote. And they went on saying, quote: "Their power subjects America's payment system and the highly sensitive data within it to the risk of exposure potentially to our adversaries," end quote.

And the former secretaries agreed with a federal judge that this exposure risks, quote, "doing irreparable harm to the nation." Elon Musk, yes, the richest person in the world, is ignoring experienced officials' warnings and the courts. After he gained access to Treasury's systems, he took to the platform he owns, X, formerly Twitter, and their Spaces.

ELON MUSK: Basically, the goal in a nutshell is pretty straightforward. Like, we have a $2 trillion deficit, which is far in excess of economic growth. If we can get that deficit in half, from $2 trillion to $1 trillion, and we can get the economic growth to match that $1 trillion growth in the money supply, that means there will be no inflation.

And also that interest rates will drop. Credit card interest down. Mortgage interest down. Car payment interest down. And prices at the store will stay the same. That is a great outcome for people.

CHAKRABARTI: Of course, it's the United States Congress that has authorized these payments. And Musk isn't saying exactly what he would cut, again, potentially unlawfully.

Now, commandeering the Treasury Department's payment system is just one of the actions taken by Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. His associates have gutted USAID. Gained access to the Small Business Administration and suspended the work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That last organization is responsible for obtaining nearly $20 billion for American consumers in the form of cancelled debt, compensation, and reduced loans from the nation's largest banks.

Is our democracy now a plutocracy? I'm joined by Wired reporter, Vittoria Elliott. She has been covering the DOGE's takeover of the United States Treasury continuously for the past three weeks. Vittoria, welcome to On Point.

VITTORIA ELLIOTT: Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: I hear that you're a little sick and I understand that.

I'm guessing you probably haven't slept in three straight weeks. So take us back to that first day where Elon Musk's associates entered the Treasury. What actually, tell us more about what happened on that day.

ELLIOTT: So our reporting actually extends further back than that, our first sort of indication was, there was the official takeover of what was formerly the U.S. Digital Services. Now it's the U.S. DOGE Service. And the first place that they popped up was actually in the Office of Personnel Management, which is the HR function of the government. So that's all federal employees, basically. And that accounted for the first sort of big place that DOGE really started making inroads.

The next place was in the General Services Administration, and that deals with the real estate holdings of the government, but also all of its systems, like its IT stuff, as well. And then the third place was the Treasury. And what we know from reporting from other outlets was that at the time, existing Treasury leadership did not want to give DOGE access and were forced into resignation.

And what we found through our reporting was that shortly after that, a member of the DOGE team was given read, write access to code in the Treasury system. And so what that means for a regular person is if you get on a Google doc and you can only look at it, but you can't mess around in the Google doc, that's read only access, that lets you see what's in there.

But read, write means you can go in and you can see stuff and you can also change it around.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.  And can I just jump in here for a second, because this is an important distinction. It's read, write access to the actual code that underlies the payment system. So that's basically like the ground level of the entire system.

ELLIOTT: Yes. And when you take into account the fact that the system accounts for around between $5 trillion and $6 trillion, I think in payments every year for the federal government, that's a lot of power.

CHAKRABARTI: Yes.

ELLIOTT: And I think it's really important to understand that these systems underpin the basics of social security payments, tax returns and they're things that run really well.

And so most Americans might not think of as being a really important system that runs pretty efficiently, and that there could be a lot of consequences if it's even unintentional consequences, if it's changed without expertise.

CHAKRABARTI: And especially if it's the code that's being changed, right?

Because it could take who knows how long if we get to a point where we want to unwind from that, that might take. But let me go back to something, Vittoria, because I am having trouble wrapping my head around this. So these associates of Musk, these DOGE employees, actually physically entered the Treasury, and they were met by then Treasury officials, who, I don't know what happened. Do we know? Did they stand in front of them and say, no, you cannot jack into the Treasury's IT system?

ELLIOTT: Reporting from the New York Times basically said that members of the DOGE team had a confrontation with then Acting Treasury Secretary David Lebryk, and he over accessed to the Treasury's IT system.

Payment systems and its systems generally and he was pushed to resign. And I want to be clear that we, at least from what we found, it's not, there are many people who seem to be involved in DOGE. It's a small group, but it's not only a couple of people.

And the particular, there was one particular DOGE engineer that we identified at Treasury, and that was someone named Marko Elez who had that read write access and who had previously worked at X, formerly Twitter, the social media company that Elon Musk owns.

CHAKRABARTI: What more do we know about him, and the other people who are currently running the Treasury's payment systems?

ELLIOTT: The two primary people that were Musk allies is Marko Elez, who was not publicly announced. That was something that we reported, as part of our work. And that Marko Elez seemed to be a DOGE engineer who was coming in and looking at the Treasury stuff.

And then we have Tom Krause, who is a Musk ally and he is now in a leadership position at Treasury, and the primary person that we know that was looking at this code with read, write access was Mark Willis, because obviously he's an engineer. DOGE members are across the government. And from what we've been able to ascertain at this point, they're at different agencies at different times.

So it's not like all of them were necessarily at Treasury and then all of them were at OPM. The sense that we're getting is that they're spreading out across these different agencies. And we have identified some people who say we're working across OPM and GSA at the same time, whereas other people were just at GSA.

And in the case of Elez, he was primarily at Treasury, and we didn't see necessarily a ton of other DOGE people being able to access, but he is apparently part of the greater DOGE team.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so much has been happening in the past three weeks I don't know how you're keeping up with it, but I definitely need your help here.

We have 30 seconds before our next break, Vittoria. I've been seeing reporting that some of these DOGE employees have unsavory backgrounds, to put it mildly.

ELLIOTT: I think the first thing is that they're young. So I think the person that you are referring to is a 19-year-old who we identified who was working at OPM and GSA.

And I think that the biggest thing that is important is that when people are coming in, in this sort of special government employee capacity, they're not going through the same background checks that a regular government employee might, and that means that things that might be disqualifying for other people to work in these roles might not show up for them.

And I think that lack of transparency and vetting is something that is of concern. Regardless of whether or not they are doing the job.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: I want to just dive a little bit more into what we know about some of the people who are working for Musk in DOGE and who have access to not just Treasury's IT systems, but the other government agencies you've talked about.

Because your reporting and others has been very clear, and I think we should be just as clear on this show. One of them, the 19-year-old that we had mentioned, his name is reportedly Edward Coristine. He's only a recent dropout from Northeastern University.

And the Washington Post reported that he's now serving as a, quote, senior advisor at the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Technology. Bloomberg has reported that Coristine was once fired from an internship after an internal probe found that he leaked sensitive information to a competitor.

He denies doing that, but that's given a lot of people in government a sense of alarm that having access to the systems he has now through DOGE could give him a foothold for obtaining unauthorized access to highly sensitive and classified information that belongs to the United States government. And now I see that you and your colleagues at WIRED are reporting that he's appeared on calls where workers are made to go over code they had written to justify their jobs.

With this kind of access already, and I'm thinking back to what the Treasury secretaries wrote in the New York Times yesterday, and as you also underlined, there has been no vetting of any of these people. Their age is not the material issue here, it's their background and their capabilities and their objectives.

There's been no vetting of that. What we can do now at least is try to track what they have been doing. So what do you know about changes they've made or actions they've taken at Treasury, for example?

ELLIOTT: I think that's the scarier part, is that we don't know. I want to give credit to Josh Marshall out at Talking Points Memo who, it does seem from his reporting that Elez was changing code in the Treasury system. Because the IT or other workers that Marshall spoke with seemed to have been very concerned about that, but we don't know what changes they've made.

And that's, I think, been the biggest issue across these things, Musk said before Trump was inaugurated that the second Trump administration would be the most transparent, that DOGE would enforce a level of transparency. But the reality is that not only is the public not getting let in on who these people are and what they're doing, but even the people who have been hired through these traditional avenues of the government, who have been vetted, who are senior employees, are also not being given that transparency.

And that is really concerning, because it opens up all of these questions about, would it be possible, for instance, for someone to turn off payments to individuals or organizations that Musk or Trump decide they are not aligned with. The other question really is that, even if there's just read access, which means you can't mess with the code, you can only see what's in there.

What data and information are they going to be privy to? That might be otherwise privileged. And that could go down to like personal identifying information or PII, which, tax records, social security numbers, but it could also get into some business stuff. I think we really need to highlight the fact that Elon Musk and a lot of his allies in Silicon Valley, like Peter Thiel at Palantir.

They are government contractors. They are competing for government money. And this kind of data is something that their competitors would never be privy to. There's this sort of individual concern about how this data could be used, but then there's the business and competitive concern about the kind of data they may have access to.

We don't know what they're doing. And even if they don't touch these systems and leave them alone and everyone's still getting their social security payments on time and their tax returns on time. That doesn't mean that there couldn't be possibly concerning uses of their access in other ways.

CHAKRABARTI: Except as Musk has said, as we played at the clip at the top of the show, that he has every intention on making changes, right? Because he says he wants to cut a trillion dollars out of the deficit by making cuts in payments that, again, I would, we should emphasize, have been authorized by the Congress of the United States.

It is not normative for an executive, i.e. the Executive Branch, to come in and say now that Congress has made all these authorizations, we're just going to pick and choose which ones we're going to pay if they are in alignment with the values of the president.

ELLIOTT: Exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: Did you want to add more to that?

ELLIOTT: I think that, the most concerning thing is that, I come from the world of international development and if someone's saying they want to make something more efficient, the question, the first question always needs to be for whom, Musk is saying, for instance, that USAID is incredibly wasteful and corrupt.

And the question is really by whose definition, are we looking at a situation where we're not using, as you said, the definition of Congress has created this agency, or Congress has allocated funding for this, and Congress decides if that's worth American taxpayer dollars or not, whose definition of waste or efficiency are we going by here?

CHAKRABARTI: I just want to go back to one more thing about some of these DOJ employees and Edward Coristine, the 19-year-old, I hope I don't get in trouble with the FCC now for saying this, but he's known online as "big balls." And his unsavory, very recent past, has actually, I think it's him that the vice president of the United States, JD Vance has defended him, right? And said, we shouldn't judge someone just based on some unfortunate tweets they put out.

ELLIOTT: No, that was actually Marco Elez.

CHAKRABARTI: That was Elez. Okay. Okay. Can you talk about that?

ELLIOTT: Yeah. So reporting from the Wall Street Journal found that a social media account that we they seem pretty certain belong to Elez, that it posted racist and eugenics, pro eugenics posts, and as recently as a couple of months ago, and when the Wall Street Journal reached out to the White House to ask about that, Elez resigned, and then over the weekend, so I think Friday, Saturday, Sunday you'll forgive me if the days are not exactly perfect.

Time is a bit of a flat circle right now, that Musk came out and said that he wanted to rehire him. And JD Vance also came out and said, I believe that we shouldn't be judging people by the mistakes they make on the internet, basically. And what I think is interesting about that is this person can have whatever views they have, and that can be concerning.

And again, I think the fact that the Wall Street Journal was able to find this, and it did not turn up in, say, a regular background check that one might go through for this kind of access at a government job, is the more concerning thing. Because most of these DOGE engineers appear to be coming in as what's known as special government employees, which means they're only supposed to work for 130 days.

So that's six months. Five days a week. They're not meant to be permanent employees, and when you're a special government employee, you don't go through that same vetting process. You don't, you're not required necessarily to give up your other job permanently.

So I think those are the more concerning questions. And so again, whether or not Marko Elez did post racist or pro eugenics posts on an old social media account is obviously very concerning, but it's the fact that was not caught by any form of vetting before he was given access to really sensitive data, that's most concerning.

CHAKRABARTI: Yes. So here's what the journal reports, that they say this deleted X account from Elez. Some of the comments, some of the posts included quote, Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool. You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity. And normalize Indian hate.

Okay, now to your point, people can say whatever they want, mostly, online. The issue is, now this is a person who actually has his finger on, as we've been talking about earlier, $6 trillion of payments from the United States government. Okay Vittoria, one more question for you, because I know we've got to let you go here. This brings us all the way back.

You talked about there's no transparency going on to the public, let alone members of Treasury internally, about what DOGE is doing. This brings us back to the President of the United States, to Donald Trump. How much would you say your reporting has shown or your colleagues about Trump keeps saying he's on board with this, but does he actually fully know what's going on?

Is there specific approval coming from the White House to Musk? What do we know?

ELLIOTT: Trump's statements have been a little confusing on this because he has said that Elon has his full blessing, and that if anything that he's doing is something that Trump has already approved of.

But he's also said that he hasn't really met any of these DOGE people who are going in. My, I don't think we really know. And a really great freelancer that we work with at WIRED, Jake Lahut, reported last week for us that the fact that DOGE is going in and doing all this is actually causing some concern, not necessarily with the president himself, but with the people around him who are concerned about the level of power that Musk and DOGE are currently exerting over the federal government.

So I can't speak to what's in the president's mind, but I can say from other WIRED reporting that it does seem that people in his inner circle are starting to get concerned.

CHAKRABARTI: Vittoria Elliott is a reporter for WIRED. She has been covering the Department of Government Efficiencies activities across government, but specifically at Treasury, for continuously over the past three weeks.

Vittoria, thank you so much for joining us.

ELLIOTT: Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. I want to turn now to Frank Vogl. He's co-founder of Transparency International, a nonprofit organization that works to stop corruption and promote transparency and integrity at all levels and all sectors of society. And he's also author of a number of books on corruption, including The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption Endangering Our Democracy.

Frank, welcome to On Point.

FRANK VOGL: Thank you so much, Meghna. Good to be with you.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Just the other day in Vanity Fair, there was an article that got to this question that I had asked Vittoria about how much does President Trump actually know about what's going on with the Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk.

And some unnamed sources in the White House to Vanity Fair said Trump doesn't really know what's going on. The White House Press Office officially says they refute that. But then there was another quote from one of these sources in the White House saying Elon Musk is the richest man in the world.

The president essentially can't afford to make Musk mad. Because Musk is too powerful. So with that in mind, Frank, are we already in a plutocracy, if ostensibly the most powerful man in the world who we once believed was the President of the United States now has reason to be concerned or fearful of crossing Elon Musk?

VOGL: We are in great danger of that. We really have to ask ourselves the question, who is in charge of our government? Who is accountable? And what is happening here right now looks a lot like what happened in Russia. ... After the fall of communism in the 1990s. When various incredibly skilled individuals took charge of privatized industries, became the first oligarchs in Russia, and they really had enormous control vis-a-vis President Boris Yeltsin.

One of them said to Yeltsin, we will ensure all the media supports your reelection in 1996, but we want increased business power. As a result, Yeltsin got reelected, and the oligarchs, these business tycoons basically running so much of the government were not brought to heel until Putin came into power 25 years ago now. And locked up the most powerful of all of the oligarchs, warned the rest of them, you can make as much money as you like, steal as much as you like, but you report to me, and when I want a favor from you, you will do it for me without any questions.

Who's in charge right now about the U.S. government is an enormously important question. It's in the courts. It's an issue of the Constitution. It's an issue of the role of Congress. But what we really have to also understand is that at the very same time that Musk and other billionaires in the administration are increasing their knowledge and insight and influence right across the government at the very same time. In parallel, all of the safeguards to investigate fraud and corruption are being dismantled.

CHAKRABARTI: Frank, quickly, can you point to any other time in U.S. history? Where we've had so much power in the hands of one person who was not the president.

VOGL: There are lots of stories about J.P. Morgan at the end of the 19th century, the richest man in America, the man who financed the railroads and really financed the U.S. government. There are times about the robber barons and their influence. But in modern times, absolutely no.

And I really want to emphasize to you, it's not just the money. It's the media power. Because in all countries that you look at, like Hungary, run by Viktor Orban, Israel, with President Netanyahu, the first thing these people do to strengthen their power and their authority is to give businessmen a lot of business contracts from the government in return for them providing media support.

CHAKRABARTI: Frank, we've got about a minute before our next break. Why should Americans care about this?

VOGL: Because millions of Americans and millions of people around the world are suffering today from already the actions we've seen of the last three weeks. And many more will suffer very greatly, greater economic hardship and greater insecurity.

Our security is at stake if we allow these oligarchs, American oligarchs to continue to run rampage through our government.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has defended Musk's actions in the days since he began slashing programs and agencies and inserting DOGE employees at the most fundamental level of IT systems in various departments of the United States government, including the Treasury, and Leavitt essentially says that the Trump administration, the president, trusts Musk.

KAROLINE LEAVITT: If Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, then Elon will excuse himself from those contracts. And he has, again, abided by all applicable laws.

CHAKRABARTI: Again, as we heard earlier from reporter Vittoria Elliott, by virtue of Elon Musk having control over the Treasury's payment system, he is by default overseeing contracts that he himself is involved with through his private businesses, and the contracts they have with the federal government.

And as of yet, there's no indication that he is excusing himself over that conflict of interest. Now here's former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, he recently spoke with NPR's Steve Inskeep about Trump's involvement with Silicon Valley ultra elites. And, interestingly, Steve Bannon maintains a strictly populist stance when it comes to some of Trump's associates, particularly Elon Musk.

STEVE BANNON: These oligarchs in the Silicon Valley, they have a very different view of how people should govern themselves. I call it techno feudalism. They don't believe in the underlying tenets of self-governance.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm joined today by Frank Vogl. He's co-founder of Transparency International. And Frank, I'm going to talk here a little bit about another example that history has for us in just a second.

But I would like to hear your response to what the White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, says there. That Musk is thus far abiding by all applicable laws.

VOGL: Let me give you two concrete examples, if I may. One, so far you've mentioned the Treasury Department and others, but Musk and his team are about to go into the Pentagon.

And, as Musk has various companies, as does Peter Thiel, that are very big Pentagon contractors. Musk would have the opportunity, if he gets hold of all of the Pentagon data, to see exactly what rival companies are doing in terms of contracts, payment systems, and who knows whether he takes advantage of that.

But I believe that would have enormous impact on the efficiency of our military, and in fact, on our national security. Let me give you one other concrete example. Musk was very keen to close down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has now been shuttered. That bureau started last year investigating all digital online payment systems.

Musk has said that he wants X, Twitter, to become a financial entity. Last week, X announced a deal with Visa as the first step to becoming a financial company. Now, he doesn't have to fear any regulation, any investigation from the CFPB, and he is going to build a huge financial empire as the government deregulates so much of business and banking, and we will be heading, as a result, perhaps for another financial crisis.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, I want to ask you also about the courts. And by the way, tomorrow we're going to be doing a full hour about the Trump administration's clashing with the federal courts of the United States and whether or not they are provoking a constitutional crisis.

But regarding Elon Musk, Frank, it was just a few days ago that a federal judge issued an order blocking access to the Treasury Department's payment system to anyone, quote, other than civil servants with a need for access to perform their job duties. That essentially should block DOGE and its employees from controlling the code of the Treasury Department's payment systems.

But I don't see the Trump administration or Elon Musk as of yet having complied with this court order.

VOGL: It's going to be very difficult to find out, all the inspector generals have been fired. Not all, but 18 of them. At the same time, last night Trump issued another executive order which closes down investigations of all foreign corporate bribery.

Just one more move by him. There's more and more actions taking place that will make it incredibly difficult to investigate the wrongdoing that's going on in this administration. And therefore, for example, the violations of court orders. This is a very big issue.

I don't think personally that these people who've come in with Musk, and also please note, there are lots of other billionaires in this administration who are pushing very hard for deregulation of cryptocurrencies, and they've been given key positions for that. We have billionaires at the Commerce Department and the Treasury who are very involved in financial deregulation, because they would personally profit.

All of this is going on, and I don't believe that Donald Trump has a clue about it. And I think his Justice Department are going to work very closely with not only Musk, but also the new OMB director Mr. Vought who is the author of Project 2025 and says wants to dismantle the government. And is totally supportive, as far as we read in the press, of exactly what Musk is doing.

The result is all of us are going to suffer, our security suffers, there will be human misery. Not here, but we're already seeing it around the world with the dismantling of USAID.

CHAKRABARTI: Frank, you keep giving a preview to the show that we're going to do tomorrow, which will be specifically about Russell Vought, the new, he's once again, the director of OMB and his very vocal championing of what he calls 'radical constitutionalism,' which is a deliberate provocation by the executive of the United States federal judiciary, that will be our focus of our show tomorrow.

But back to what you're saying about whether or not President Trump has a real tactile understanding of what Elon Musk is doing. We spoke to a former State Department official who told us that quote, "We know the White House has been caught off guard multiple times and in multiple ways regarding Musk's actions."

And that same State Department official, Frank, told us this, as the person was watching the start of Musk's dismantling of government agencies, like USAID. The official told us, quote, "It took Hitler 53 days. Musk may beat him." End quote. Now, what that official was referencing was Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany and the 53 days it took Hitler to destroy the Weimar Republic's Democratic state and establish the dictatorial leadership of the Nazi Party.

Now, it just so happens that Tim Ryback who's the director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague, is author of a recent book called Takeover, Hitler's Final Rise to Power. And in fact, he had written in The Atlantic about exactly this, an article titled, "How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days."

TIMOTHY RYBACK: Hitler understood democracy and the function of democracy as well as anybody.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, Ryback reminds us that Adolf Hitler was appointed the 15th Chancellor of the Weimar Republic on January 30th, 1933, and he did so by completely legal means.

RYBACK: They were confronted with somebody who understood that system as well as anyone and knew how to disable and then ultimately dismantle all of those protections and all of those defenses.

CHAKRABARTI: Ryback says Adolf Hitler despised democracy for economic and administrative reasons. First, Hitler identified the economic suffering of Germans between the two World Wars, I should be specific about, under the prior government. He spoke against the Weimar Republic's decision to agree that the German people would pay for the costs incurred in World War I.

Secondly, Hitler spoke against democracy's inefficient bureaucracy. And so that's why Hitler sought to eliminate it.

RYBACK: The first thing he puts on the agenda is to pass an enabling law that will give him dictatorial power for the next four years so he can make good on his campaign promises.

CHAKRABARTI: Now Hitler really understood how German government functioned, because he had crippled the prior three chancellorships by leading the Nazi party legislators in obstructionist voting.

He'd forced the German president, Paul von Hindenburg, to dissolve the Reichstag, the German Congress, twice, in order to hold new elections. Once in power, Hitler banned the Communist Party, eliminating that strong opposition in the Reichstag. Then, he and his allies restricted the press, the public, and government employees.

RYBACK: The first thing he goes after is freedom of expression. The following Monday, they begin purging Government offices, and they specifically, they go after the security forces, they go after the police forces. And they purge all of these career, senior career police administrators, and they replace them with Nazis.

CHAKRABARTI: Ryback says there were definitely legal struggles within Hitler's own cabinet that limited Hitler's reach up until this point, but then catastrophe. The Reichstag goes up in flames.

RYBACK: There's this huge fire. This is the symbol of democracy, of representative government in Weimar, Germany. And that night, the whole thing goes up in flames.

The next day, Hitler is able to declare martial law. And at that point, the rest is history.

CHAKRABARTI: So Hitler takes over state and municipal government. The Nazi party intimidates elected officials into voting in support of Hitler's bill, granting him dictatorial powers.

RYBACK: You have a lot of centrist parties that then stand up, and they say we're very concerned about this enabling law. We're worried about the checks and balances on the system. We're worried about civil liberties. We're worried about freedom of the press. We're worried about due process. And after all that, despite all of these reservations, we're going to give you our vote.

And there's actually laughter from the floor because it's so absurd and so outrageous, but they do it.

CHAKRABARTI: But then, of course, as we all know, horrors, the Holocaust, World War II, followed. But Ryback says people had been forewarned.

RYBACK: Until recently, I was able to say that Adolf Hitler was possibly the only politician I knew, know of, who had delivered on all of his campaign promises.

People were, are horrified by what he did, and we should be, but in fact, he just went through programmatically just making good on everything he said he was going to do.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Tim Ryback, director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation at The Hague, and author of How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days.

That appeared in The Atlantic. His book is Takeover, Hitler's Final Rise to Power. Frank Vogl. People are going to say no, you can't compare what's happening in Washington to the Nazis. That's beyond the pale, right? Because the Nazis brought the Holocaust. The Nazis start, triggered the devastation of the Second World War across Europe.

That's not what's happening here in the United States. Elon Musk is operating within the law. He's operating within the prescribed powers in the constitution given to the executive branch. It's not the same. What would you say?

VOGL: I think it's very interesting that you make the parallel. I think your show tomorrow will be very important in this regard.

When we look around the world and, by the way, Transparency International issued its Corruption Index today, ranking countries from the most corrupt to the least corrupt, and the U.S. once again has fallen in its ranking. When you think about corruption around the world, you think about oligarchic power, you find time and time again one of the very first things that new governments who want to be authoritarian do.

Is they change the laws, they manipulate the courts, they put themselves above the law. If Trump is successful, Trump/Vance, I should say. If they are successful, along with Elon Musk and his other oligarchs, and I call them American oligarchs, if they as a group are successful in putting themselves above the law, in ensuring that the courts cannot enforce what the courts wish to enforce, if they put themselves above the law, then we are on the way to a very serious authoritarian regime, the consequences of which will be anybody's guess, but the outlook would then be very bleak.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. We are not there yet, but we are in danger. So let me, we have one minute left, and I have to ask you, the United States, what we have been experiencing under both Trump administrations is basically a norm destroying regime. This democracy is not built for this kind of stress on normative behavior.

As the courts may, if they may continue to issue their stop orders, essentially, how can those orders be adhered to? Who would enforce them? If Donald Trump doesn't tell Elon Musk, you have to stop doing this because the federal court said so, what other mechanisms are there?

VOGL: Let's just finally, two points, if I may.

First of all, let us have some confidence in federal government employees. Are they going to simply do anything that they're told by Musk and Trump, even if it violates the law, or are they going to stand up for the law?

CHAKRABARTI: Their ranks are being purged, though, as we speak.

VOGL: Okay, but there are many of them left.

And those who are being purged are suing and trying to get through to the courts. And we're going to see more and more protests across the country. The public has a tremendously important role here, so long as it's not complacent.