Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Wednesday, February 19th.

Today on Forbes, to understand how Trump is upending Washington, speak to people from his past.

Donald Trump held court in the Oval Office last week with exactly the kind of crowd he loves,

the world's richest man at his side, a gaggle of journalists at his foot.

Teeing up a speech from Elon Musk, the president promised to share some shocking discoveries.

He said, quote, billions and billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse. I think it's very

important. And that's one of the reasons I got elected. I said we were going to do that.

Nobody had any idea it was that bad, that sick and that corrupt. In fact, inspectors general,

independent watchdogs throughout the government, have been working for years with the explicit

mission of rooting out, quote, waste, fraud, and abuse. Trump fired a group of them en masse on the evening of January 24th,

kicking off his first weekend back in power with a purge. The fallout from those dismissals

became apparent in the Oval Office last week. Their jobs are now Musk's job.

Members of Washington's oversight community, the people who fret about how the government

does its business, have been in a state of bewilderment ever since Trump returned to the White

House. The president storms ahead, appointing loyalists, wiping out regulations and unilaterally pausing

the enforcement of certain laws, such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans Americans from paying

bribes overseas. Trump seems unconcerned that Musk wields enormous power with limited visibility

into potential conflicts of interest, something the Office of Government Ethics generally ensures.

The president fired its director, too.

Richard Painter, who served as George W. Bush's chief ethics lawyer, scoffs, quote,

sort of in-your-face, f-U to ethics.

But nothing about the way Trump has barged back into the White House surprises those who have known him for decades.

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