Hoover created this playbook of how you could use an institution like the FBI to intimidate your

enemies to gather information. And then on the other hand, he's actually nothing like Cash Patel because

Cash Patel is so open about being loyal to Donald Trump in particular. He calls him King Donald.

And Hoover was a very different creature.

Hello and welcome to Wise This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

You know, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out like what is happening.

Why is this happening in the country in terms of the sort of ferocity, rapidity,

recklessness and chaos and destructiveness of the first several months of the second Trump

administration. One of the things I think we're all constantly reaching for is some kind of

comparison point. Like we're headed towards X. And there's a bunch of

different ways people think about that. One of them, you know, the most catastrophic, obviously,

are comparisons with Weimar, Germany, and, you know, the Nazi takeover, the Atlantic wrote a piece

about how Hitler undid the constitutional order. Obviously,

there's, you know, people are using the Nehemeyer quote poem about first they came for the

communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. So that's like, I think it's fair to say

like utter complete, worst, absolute worst case scenario is like the sort of deepest pit of

human evil, the Nazi takeover.

And then there's other comparisons. People try to use the most common, I think, in contemporary life is Hungary, where what was a liberal democracy was kind of transformed by Victor Orban into what scholars of comparative politics called competitive authoritarianism.

We had Steve Levitsky on to talk about. So Hungary is one model. There's Vladimir Putin's

Russia where a very, very delicate weak and new democracy in terms of Russia post the fall

of the Soviet state gets sort of converted into this Putinist autocracy. There's Turkey.

But one of the things I try to think about is just looking to American history. Because one of the

...