A Fitting End For Trump And Musk? Or A Bit Too Divisive?
“[E]xecutive orders,” wrote Lisa Needham, “aren’t laws, and the authority of presidents to issue them is not absolute. They can’t contradict or overturn existing statutes. Subsequent presidents can undo executive orders just by issuing a new executive order saying so. And federal courts have routinely struck down EOs for being unconstitutional or for exceeding the scope of the president’s authority. When executive orders are challenged in court, government attorneys typically point to the underlying laws that give the president the authority to issue the order. Trump seems to have dispensed with that requirement, however. Trump’s imperial ambitions have made for some laughably thin legal theories… While Trump and his henchmen [Elon Musk & the Muskrats] deconstruct the administrative state, his lawyers are embracing the logic of dictatorship. The core argument emerging in their legal filings and executive orders— one without support anywhere in the Constitution or the law— is that simply by being elected, Trump has the power to do whatever he wants.”
There’s a bigger problem here. Congressional Republicans, as Needham put it, “seem content to do nothing except sit on their hands and let Trump take a torch to democracy... Since congressional Republicans shrugged off the shuttering of USAID, why not just keep going? That seems to be Trump’s plan, as it appears now that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is being demolished. Russ Vought, a Project 2025 ghoul heading the Office of Management and Budget and the CFPB, just zeroed out the agency’s funding for the next quarter and instructed CFPB staff to stop working.”
Congressional Republicans have despised the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from the moment Elizabeth Warren conceived it in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse. They fought its creation, tried to hobble it through endless legal challenges, and have sought every opportunity to defund, dismantle or drown it in a bathtub. Why? Because it works. The very independent CFPB has returned billions of dollars to defrauded consumers, held predatory lenders accountable, and acted as a rare bulwark against the relentless corporate pillaging that defines modern Republican economics.
Warren: “Elon Musk and the guy who wrote Project 2025 Russ Vought are trying to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If they succeed, CEOs on Wall Street will once again be free to trick, trap, and cheat you. The CFPB is the little agency working to shut down scams and fraud on the payment apps like Zelle, and PayPal and CashApp. It’s the agency that steps in when the big bank trips up and repossesses your car. It’s the agency that’s working to cut those crazy fees that banks and credit card companies bury down in the fine print and then you gotta pay for them. Already, this little agency has forced giant banks and corporations to give back more than $21 billion directly to families they cheated— and that includes hundreds of millions of dollars back for veterans who got cheated by predatory lenders. So why are these two guys trying to gut the CFPB? It’s not rocket science: Trump campaigned on helping working people, but now that he’s in charge, this is the payoff to the rich guys who invested in his campaign and who want to cheat families— and not have anybody around to stop them. Yeah, it’s another scam. After the 2008 financial crash and the big bank bailout, Congress created the CFPB to protect people from getting swindled. For years, Republicans have tried and tried again to repeal it in Congress— and they have failed every single time. Congress built the CFPB, and no one other than Congress— not the President, not Musk, not Vought— can shut it down.”
As she said, since its establishment in 2011, the CFPB has secured over $21 billion in consumer relief— forcing banks, payday lenders, credit card companies and other financial predators to return ill-gotten gains to the people they cheated. The agency has cracked down on junk fees, discriminatory lending, illegal foreclosures, and deceptive financial products that enrich Wall Street at the expense of working people. The CFPB has been, in short, a resounding success, which is precisely why Republicans and their contributors want it dead.
Republicans— whose entire governing philosophy is little more than a protection racket for the ultra-wealthy— have spent years waging war on the CFPB under the guise of “limiting government overreach.” But their real concern isn’t overreach; it’s oversight. They are desperate to gut an agency that has proven beyond any doubt that financial regulation works, that corporate America needs a leash and that when consumers have a watchdog, they are far less vulnerable to exploitation. This latest assault by Vought and Trump isn’t about principles. It’s about power: the power of banks, billionaires, and payday lenders to operate with total impunity.
The attack on the CFPB is a test case for Trump’s broader authoritarian project. If he and his congressional enablers succeed in destroying one of the most effective consumer protection agencies in U.S. history, it will set the stage for the dismantling of every other regulatory safeguard that stands between working people and the corporate predators who bankroll the Republican Party. This isn’t just economic warfare— it’s class warfare, and the GOP is making it crystal clear whose side they’re on.
On Sunday, Matt Stoller wrote that “By shuttering the CFPB, Trump is not just going back to a pre-financial crisis status quo, but to something actually weaker than that. There is essentially no longer any Federal enforcement of consumer protection rules for financial products… We can now expect rampant fraud and cheating in banking and fintech, not just a scam here or there, but regular losses of life savings by people who followed the rules, illegal foreclosures, random seizures of the working capital of small businesses, abuse by debt collectors, and routine deception by even respected financial firms. And behind that, we could see big tech, either Google, Meta, Amazon, or perhaps Twitter, serving as your credit card, payroll provider, and debt collector, all in one.”
Let’s start with some of the small stuff that will now change. Rules against excessive overdraft fees? Gone. A rule capping credit card late fees? Gone. Oversight of debt collectors and payday lenders? No more. An honest site to compare credit card products? Likely gone. In 2023, the CFPB said that big banks can’t charge junk fees for basic customer service, like being able to check the amount of money in your account. The reason isn’t just that it’s nice, but that big banks themselves were unable to offer basic information, like who owned mortgages, prior to 2008. That’s gone too. Another rule put forward recently is that mortgage servicers can’t garner excessive fees when they foreclose, which is an incentive to foreclose rather than working out loans. No longer.
And then something more significant. In July, the CFPB proffered an interpretive rule for how companies, such as Walmart, Kroger, and Wendy’s, give “paycheck advances” to their employees, charging over 109% in interest charges. About 5% of workers use these, and the number is increasing rapidly. Is there disclosure of the terms? That’s not clear. But now that there’s no one paying attention, we can expect these company store-like products to be everywhere.
Finally, let’s do the big stuff, big tech and fintech.
Elon Musk’s stated goal with X is to create an “everything app,” which you would use to communicate, engage with social media, pay for things, hail cabs, shop, and so forth. All the big tech monopolists want to be the “everything app.” The CFPB was proposing to treat these companies with payment systems as, well, payment systems, and subject them to the same supervisory treatment that banks have. Now that’s out the window, so big tech firms have a competitive advantage over banks. More than that, new “fintech,” which is to say companies that act like banks but do so on your phone, won’t be regulated or FDIC insured, so a whole generation of Americans will be introduced to the nice bank runs of the 1920s, losing their savings because they clicked on the wrong box.
So what’s the stated reason Musk, as well as others like Mark Zuckerberg and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, put forward for eliminating the CFPB? Well, they say there’s corruption, it’s Elizabeth Warren’s agency that’s unaccountable, et al, but mostly, they argue that the CFPB is targeting conservatives for “debanking” or removing them from the banking system. That is of course the opposite of the truth, Director Chopra proposed the first ever rule to block debanking. But Andreessen went on Joe Rogan and lied about it anyway, because he’s invested in companies like Synapse, which cost many peoples’ life savings, and some firms in his portfolio were shut down by the CFPB for scamming people. As for Zuckerberg, who went on Rogan and said that Meta is not a bank, well, Meta has a payments business, and he tried to start a currency and still wants to. And he’s angry at the CFPB because of this:
… One key problem for him is interest rates, which are high and likely to remain high. Trump promised on the campaign trail to cap credit rates, and if he’s shutting down the CFPB, then that’s not going to happen.
At any rate, the banking lobby has always wanted to weaken consumer protection rules, and since the financial crisis, shut down the CFPB. Now, with Silicon Valley’s support, and a President who looks populist but seems to be governing as George W. Trump, they will likely achieve it.
That said, destroying the bureau strikes me as a long term strategic error for the banking sector and big tech. The banks were already losing to Silicon Valley, and now they are at a regulatory disadvantage to boot. More fundamentally, this shutdown breaks a basic deal. I worked in the House during the great financial crisis, and the arrangement was that the banks would accept some mild oversight via the CFPB, and in return they would get a multi-trillion dollar bailout and make excessive profits. I didn’t like that deal and encouraged the member I worked for to vote against it, but it was forced on liberals by Barack Obama. (This deal was an intra-Democratic Party arrangement; conservative Republicans were in thrall to the banks and wanted nothing but foreclosures and bailouts. And they still do.)
It was an egregiously terrible choice, one that liberals couldn’t acknowledge because then they’d have to admit a whole lot of uncomfortable truths, notably that Wall Street is a malevolent force, that Obama was a malevolent leader, and that the Dodd-Frank reform bill passed in the wake of the crisis, rather than ending bailouts, was a joke. But now they will be faced with the bracing truth, that there is no good faith negotiations with dominant firms demanding coercive governing power.
Either Silicon Valley bankers rule America, or the public does. But there’s no middle ground.
Back to Needham... she continued that “Part of what’s especially terrifying here is that Trump is taking unilateral action to do things that Republican members of Congress would happily help him with. The CFPB is an agency so loathed by the GOP that every Republican state attorney general joined a lawsuit alleging its funding scheme was unconstitutional. With Congress holding the power of the purse, it would be free to defund the CFPB. With Congress holding the authority to create and abolish agencies, it would be free to close the agency entirely or to radically limit its pro-consumer mission. But Trump has shown no inclination to approach lawmakers on this, and congressional Republicans don’t seem to care either. It can’t be stressed enough that there is no meaningful legal support for Trump’s actions. Yes, Republicans for a few decades now have flirted with the unitary executive theory— the idea that the president’s authority over the executive branch is absolute, particularly in national security contexts and when it comes to hiring and firing. (Well, to be perfectly correct, Republicans flirt with the unitary executive theory only when Republicans hold the presidency. When Democrats do, the constant drumbeat from the GOP is that the president should have very little authority.) But even the unitary executive theory hasn’t gone so far as to say that the president can do things like unilaterally close government agencies. Even when Project 2025 called for radical changes to USAID, for example, they didn’t argue it could just be closed. The only way Trump’s actions can be justified is if you start from the principle that simply by electing him president, the country gave him complete authority to do anything he’d like. But that justification renders Congress entirely superfluous. Why go through the charade of making policy and negotiating budgets if the president can just ignore laws when he wants to? This view makes Congress nothing more than an advisory body.”
She got to the heart of the problem: “The arguments being made by the Trump administration boil down to one thing: if Trump wants to do it, he gets to. Russ Vought has been explicitly arguing for years that Trump should not have to worry about whether something is legal, whining about pesky lawyers who ‘come in and say it’s not legal, you can’t do that, that would overturn this precedent, there’s a state law against it.’ So what is the role of the judicial branch in this brave new world? What happens when a federal court holds that Trump doesn’t have the power to do anything he wants?… The administration's stance appears to literally be that federal laws are irrelevant in the face of Trump’s wishes and the courts can’t stop him. If Congress and the judiciary no longer check or balance the executive branch, no separation of powers is left. That’s a complete rewiring of America. That’s tearing democracy down to the studs and rebuilding something entirely different and much worse in its place. As much as it might seem overly dramatic to say, this sounds a lot like dictatorship, and a despotic one at that.”
Or… in the words of Robert Reich, “He is the most lawless president in American history. He’s allowed Musk’s rats unfettered access to the Treasury’s payments system. Banned birthright citizenship. Refused to spend money appropriated by Congress. Closed independent agencies without Congress’s approval. Substituted political loyalists for civil servants. Unleashed the military on civilians… Republican lawmakers won’t restrain him. In one of the most shameful apologia for dictatorship I’ve ever heard coming from a public official, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina admits that much of what Trump is doing ‘runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.’ But, Tillis adds, ‘nobody should bellyache about that.’ We shouldn’t bellyache about Trump’s torching the Constitution? As Trump’s marauding continues, America's last defense is the federal courts. But the big story here (which hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves) is that the Trump-Vance-Musk regime is ignoring the courts.On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance declared that ‘judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.’ This is bonkers. In our system of government, it’s up to the courts to determine whether the president is using his power ‘legitimately,’ not the president.”
You have every reason to be cynical about the current majority on the Supreme Court. But the cases I’ve just cited, along with many others, are based on the Supreme Court’s own precedents that say that Trump cannot legally do what he’s doing.
Yes, the Roberts court has shown itself willing to reverse its prior opinions (see: Roe v. Wade), but my betting is that at least on some of these issues the high court will rule against Trump.
All of which raises a final, perilous question: What if the Trump regime ignores the Supreme Court just as it has ignored lower courts?
In his 2024 year-end report on the federal judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts anticipated this possibility, noting that judicial independence “is undermined unless the other branches [of government] are firm in their responsibility to enforce the court’s decrees.”
Roberts mentioned defiance by southern governors of the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Their defiance required that federal troops enforce the Supreme Court’s decision.
Roberts then commented on more recent defiance:
“Within the past few years … elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.
There’s no secret whom Roberts was referring to. His first initials are JD and he ought to know better. Vance graduated Yale Law School Class of 2013, and his wife, Usha, clerked for Roberts from 2017 to 2018.
Yet Vance said on a 2021 podcast, “When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”Here’s Vance in a February 2024 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:
Vance: “The president has to be able to run the government as he thinks he should. That’s the way the Constitution works. It has been thwarted too much by the way our bureaucracy has worked over the past 15 years.”
Stephanopoulos: “The Constitution also says the president must abide by legitimate Supreme Court rulings, doesn’t it?”
Vance: “The Constitution says that the Supreme Court can make rulings, but if the Supreme Court— and, look, I hope that they would not do this— but if the Supreme Court said the president of the United States can’t fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling, and the president has to have Article II prerogative under the Constitution to actually run the military as he sees fit.”
In other words, if the Supreme Court rules against Trump on an important issue, there’s a fair chance the Trump-Vance-Musk regime will thumb their nose at it.
What then? Impeachment isn’t a possibility because Republicans run both chambers of Congress and haven’t exactly distinguished themselves with integrity or independence.
If Trump simply ignores the high court, is that the end of law?
Yesterday, Jamie Raskin told his followers that he “grew up with the concept of American exceptionalism— the idea that fascism couldn’t happen here and that violent mobs and runaway oligarchs could never overrun our elections or destroy our government. But there’s no magic potion in our water that makes us immune to dictatorship and despotism. Alexander Hamilton warned in Federalist No. 1 of opportunistic politicians who would pander to the negative emotions as demagogues only to take power and become violent tyrants over the people and our freedom. Hamilton’s warning captures the appalling trajectory of Donald Trump and the grave danger we face under Elon Musk and this second round of right-wing authoritarianism… True American exceptionalism is rooted in our commitment to advancing voting rights and democracy for all, defeating the forces of racism and white supremacy, and vindicating Lincoln’s dynamic promise of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
Let's leave off here with two quotes by two horrible authoritarians who Trump admires, separated by a century:
Andrew Jackson (1834): “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it”. This quote is believed to be apocryphal.
Joseph Stalin (1935): “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?”