Charles Guiteau thought himself a remarkable man. Born in 1841, he grew up convinced he was not only quite special, but that he was destined for greatness. But his own mediocrity held him back. He tried to become a student at the University of Michigan, my alma mater, but failed the admissions test. He then studied at Ann Arbor High School, also one of my alma maters, and failed there as well.

After a move to Chicago, Guiteau got a job as a clerk in a law firm, and somehow through some shenanigans that are unclear, got himself admitted to the Illinois State Bar Association. He tried one case as a “lawyer” and lost and spent most of his time as a lawyer actually working as a bill collector.

In 1872, as past failures and bill collectors began to catch up with him, Guiteau escaped to New York City and became enamored with politics. Still quite convinced of his remarkableness, Guiteau got involved with the Democratic Party, though he later switched to the Republican Party. In the 1880 election Guiteau campaigned, albeit in his own odd way, for James A. Garfield, who won the election and became president in 1881.

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Guiteau assumed for the hard work he felt he put in, and indeed, giving himself credit for Garfield’s victory, he would be given a cushy government job. He particularly wanted to be named consul in Vienna. He sent in a note and awaited his formal appointment.

That appointment, of course, never came.

Guiteau became more and more obsessed with the denial of what he felt was his due. After weeks of bending the ear of any Garfield administration person that would listen, he still was unemployed and, worse in his mind, ignored.

Finally, in the certainty a dramatic act would forever seal his greatness in history, Guiteau waited for Garfield to arrive at a Washington, D.C. train station, where the president (as published in local papers) would embark on a brief vacation trip. When Garfield arrived he stood with his back toward his assassin. Guiteau fired two shots, one of which struck Garfield in the back.

Guiteau was delighted upon his immediate arrest, certain he would be acquitted, as a hero, and had made his own plans to run for president in 1884. Garfield would linger for months, his weight falling from 210 pounds to a mere 130 before passing on, his death most certainly due in large part to his doctor’s terrible medical procedures, such as placing unwashed fingers into the wound in an effort to find the bullet. Today people routinely survive similar wounds.

Guiteau, his dreams finally shattered, was hanged a year later, his quest for a government job, like his life as a whole, another point of failure. And America lost a man who might well have become one of our greatest presidents, given the chance. Garfield was a man so brilliant he could write Latin with his left hand while writing Greek with his right, and he was lost, all because a disgruntled job seeker didn’t get what he wanted.

The shock from the assassination brought on a number of changes, to include the creation of the federal civil service by federal law, in direct response to Charles Guiteau’s actions and especially his motivation. The federal government would now be professionalized, with presidential political appointees leading various organizations, but with career non-political staffs of professionals to do the day-to-day work of the people.

A president appoints roughly 3,500 folks, with about 1,200 of them requiring Senate confirmation. But the vast bulk of the U.S. government is made up of civil service individuals, directly in response to the assassination of Garfield and the recognition our nation is better served by career experts led by political appointees.

Until, like so many things, the American people, in one of the closest elections in our nation’s history, elected Republican Donald Trump with his so-called “mandate” being a margin of 1.62%. He certainly won, but he won by a whisker yet has declared the win a landslide and has decided he does, in his mind if not in fact, have a mandate. And that mandate, he believes, should result in massive changes to the federal government.

As a result of his election, Trump is appointing (or more precisely, seeking to appoint, as many of these folks require Senate approval, which is not at all clear at this point) people who genuinely feel the concept of government is evil. They seek to take over agencies in hopes of crippling them, or at best, in their minds, destroying them. One of their goals is to drive the civil service folks out of government, to be replaced by Trump loyalists who will follow his orders regardless of encumbrances like, I dunno, the Constitution?

For example, Trump’s nominee to head the FBI is Kash Patel, to replace Christopher Wray, out of the usual sequence of 10-year terms designed to prevent politicalization. Oh, and remember please Trump’s own first term FBI nominee was Wray, who in Trump’s eye was not sufficiently loyal and therein willing to twist the law to go after Trump’s foes. Trump has been clear, and Patel is clearly on board, that they want the FBI largely disrupted, except in that it can be a tool of retribution to go after Trump’s real and perceived enemies.

Trump’s cabinet will likely be filled with minions untroubled by the idea of an authoritarian president, and we certainly can’t count on the GOPers in the House and Senate to be a brake on Trump’s revenge tour. Oh, and the Supreme Court is fully a GOP agency now too.

In his first administration, Trump tried to gut the Bureau of Land Management by ordering a move out of D.C. and to Grand Junction, a lovely town but quite a ways from D.C. Trump hoped everyone would resign and the agency would collapse. He plans similar moves in hopes of getting around the Civil Service Act by getting people to quit on their own, rather than move to where they don’t want to live.

Trump will get away with much of this. Ironically, it is his own supporters who may well end up paying the price of an authoritarian administration. Tariffs don’t work the way Trump claims they do, and an FBI that is merely a vindictive shell of its former self cannot effectively investigate crimes against Americans, even those with red MAGA hats.

Thoughtful people entering office might ponder whether it is a good idea to overturn 143 years of civil service precedents, but we don’t have thoughtful people coming into office. Rather, the bitterness and revenge written on the faces of Trump and his team are both cautionary and scary. We are entering dangerous and untested times.

Stay tuned.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.