In her gracious concession speech last Wednesday, Hillary Clinton said of her victorious opponent, Donald Trump, "We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead." That's an admirable sentiment, but it doesn't mean we can ignore how the President-elect puts together a government. Trump isn't just another politician, and we shouldn't pretend he is. Moreover, in 2008, we saw how the decisions taken immediately after the election proved immensely consequential. When President Obama brought in the Robert Rubin crew to run economic policy, he effectively committed himself to a bank bailout that stabilized the financial crisis and put the economy back on the road to growth, but also produced a huge populist backlash, which, as we saw last Tuesday, is still reverberating.

Six days into the Trump transition, one of the biggest bait-and-switch operations in recent history is already well under way. Trump campaigned as an outsider who would overthrow a hopelessly corrupt Washington establishment. Now we learn that many members of that very establishment will play key roles in a Trump Administration. On Friday, Trump announced that his soon-to-be Vice-President, Mike Pence, a former head of the Republican Study Committee on Capitol Hill, would replace New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as the chairman of his transition team. On Sunday, that team announced that Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, the Party's principal fund-raising and organizational arm, will serve as Trump's White House chief of staff, while Stephen Bannon, the former Goldman Sachs banker and head of Breitbart News, the controversial alt-right Web site, will serve as Trump’s chief strategist. And, on Monday, Bloomberg News reported that the transition team had recommended for the post of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, another former Goldman Sachs banker, who served as Trump's chief fund-raiser.

The hiring of Priebus shouldn't have come as a surprise: he supported Trump throughout the campaign. Similarly, the idea that Trump, as President, would banish all the money men and billionaires who support and bankroll the Republican Party was always dubious in the extreme, and since the election it has been shown to be an utter sham. On Friday, the _Wall Street Journal _reported that "at least a half dozen major Washington lobbyists and three top fundraisers for Mr. Trump’s campaign have been tasked with heading key portions of Mr. Trump’s transition team. . . . In many cases, the lobbyists are selecting administration officials for departments that will affect the interests of firms they represent."

The Journal report helpfully listed some of the lobbyists, the special interests they represent, and the duties they have been assigned. Martin Whitmer, who shills for the Association of American Railroads and the National Asphalt Pavement Association, is leading the transition's “transportation and infrastructure” team. In the magazine this week, my colleague Jane Mayer wrote about Michael Catanzaro, a veteran lobbyist for oil and gas firms who is overseeing "energy independence,” and Mike McKenna, the president of the lobbying firm MWR Strategies, who is overseeing appointments to the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Both men count Koch Industries as clients.

The denizens of K Street, Washington’s notorious lobbying corridor, have charitably agreed to help Trump “drain the swamp,” as he has put it. Trent Lott, the former Republican Senate Majority Leader, who resigned from the Senate in 2007 and set up shop as a lobbyist representing big corporations, including foreign ones, offered up perhaps the quote of the week in an interview with the Times’ Eric Lipton. “Trump has pledged to change things in Washington—about draining the swamp,” Lott, whose clients have included Airbus, the European aircraft manufacturer, and Gazprombank, a big Russian bank, said. “He is going to need some people to help guide him through the swamp—how do you get in and how you get out? We are prepared to help do that.”

Conservative policy experts, many of whom turned up their noses at Trump during the campaign, are also—selflessly, no doubt—prepared to help. On Friday, the _Journal _reported that the Heritage Foundation, which for decades has been in the vanguard of promoting conservative policies such as privatizing Social Security and prisons, has dozens of staffers and alumni working on the transition. Have these free-market conservatives suddenly discovered the virtues of Trump's threats to impose tariffs on China and Mexico? Hardly. But they can see much to like in his pledge to make a bonfire of financial and environmental regulations, and also approve of his tax plan, which, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, would boost the annual after-tax income of the top one per cent by $214,690, on average, and annual after-tax income of the top 0.1 percent by $1.1 million. (Amy Davidson wrote more in Comment this week about the questions those thinking about joining the Trump Administration must ask themselves.)

Nobody expects Ben Carson, Newt Gingrich, or Rudy Giuliani, three of the newly named vice-chairs of the transition, to get involved in the nitty-gritty. It’s the names you don’t recognize—members of the permanent Washington establishment—who will be sifting through résumés and recommending people for senior and mid-level positions at federal agencies, where many consequential decisions will be made. "President-elect Donald J. Trump is serious about changing Washington, whether the town likes it or not," Jason Miller, a spokesman for Trump, told Politico on Friday, before delivering a line that gives Lott’s quote a run for its money. "This might ruffle the delicate sensitivities of the well-heeled two-martini lunch set, but President-elect Trump isn't fighting for them, he's fighting for the hard-working men and women outside the Beltway who don't care for insider bickering,” he said.

What's really going on, an unnamed Republican operative told Politico, is something akin to the Oklahoma land grab of 1889, with various factions of the Trump campaign, the Republican Party, and the business lobby fighting over the spoils of the election victory. “It's gonna get vicious the next seventy days as people try to place their people where they want them," the source said.

One interest that will definitely be protected is the Trump business empire. Trump has said that he will hand his businesses over to his children to run while he’s in office, but three of them—Donald, Jr., Eric, and Ivanka—have been named members of the transition team's new executive committee, as has Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Perhaps because nothing seems shocking anymore, this mingling of family and political interests didn't provoke much comment when it was announced. But, as my colleague Ryan Lizza pointed out, it represents a "massive/unprecedented conflict." Imagine the outcry if Hillary Clinton had won the election and then appointed Chelsea Clinton and Donna Shalala, a board member and the president of the Clinton Foundation, to her transition team.

And what of the great leader himself? The Times reported Friday that Trump perhaps intends to dispense with the antiquated notion that the President should spend nearly all his time living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. According to a report by Maggie Haberman and Ashley Parker, Trump "is talking with his advisers about how many nights a week he will spend in the White House. He has told them he would like to do what he is used to, which is spending time in New York when he can." The idea, apparently, is that Trump "might spend most of the week in Washington, much like members of Congress, and return to Trump Tower or his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., or his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach on weekends." I don't know about you, but I missed the bit in Trump's speeches where he promised to the turn the Presidency into a part-time commuter job.

But what happens if, during one of these weekends while Trump is away, the Russians march into Ukraine, or the Chinese occupy a disputed island in the South China Sea? Never fear. The Trump Administration will be staffed by folks as skilled at dealing with pesky foreigners as they are at draining the swamp: statesmen like Gingrich, Giuliani, and John Bolton—the veteran warmonger who has been rumored as a possible Secretary of State.

To sum up, this is the prospect we are facing. A populist but semi-engaged President who is less interested in governing than in soaking up adulation at big rallies. (He might hold more of them even though the campaign is over, the Times story said.) Meanwhile, his cronies and members of the permanent establishment make many of the actual decisions, which will largely benefit the already rich, including the ruling family. Debt mushrooms as El Presidente approves prestige construction projects but not the taxes needed to pay for them. And skilled propagandists, like Bannon, whip up nationalist fervor to keep the masses diverted from what is really going on.

We've seen this movie before, many times. But not here in the United States.