The Trump Era is defined by its mythologies, the greatest of which might be that Donald Trump is an anti-establishment figure. (Close runner up: He's a master negotiator who makes the best Business Deals.) Trump was born on third base and has spent a lifetime as a creature of the moneyed, coastal elite, ripping off small-business contractors who worked for him in between trips to Studio 54. But a guy who happily trumpeted himself as "really rich" from the podium somehow successfully cast himself as a champion of the working men and women of Real America throughout the campaign.

It was pretty much destined that he would rip these folks off like they supplied glasswork for the Trump Taj Mahal. We saw it when he abandoned his never-quite-accurate pledge to self-fund his campaign, which quickly turned into taking money from billionaires. We've seen it in the Republican tax plan, which over a ten-year period will overwhelmingly benefit the rich and ultra-rich. (By 2028, middle-income earners will get just 8 percent of the tax plan's benefits.) And now we're seeing it on crime.

His pledge to bring back "law and order" turns out not to extend to wealthy Americans and the corporations they run. The champion of The Little Guy seems A-OK with letting The Big Guys run rampant, at least according to a new study from D.C. watchdog Public Citizen that was picked up by the AP:

The report found that in 11 of the 12 federal agencies led by a Trump-appointed official during the president’s first year, penalties imposed on corporate violators dropped, in the majority of cases by more than 50 percent.

Penalties dropped at the Justice Department by 90 percent, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission by 80 percent and the Securities and Exchange Commission by 68 percent.

The largest drop was at the Environmental Protection Agency, formerly led by Scott Pruitt, where overall penalties dropped by 94 percent, from nearly $24 billion in President Barack Obama’s last year in office to $1.5 billion. Penalties at the Federal Communications Commission dropped overall by 85 percent.

Tough on Crime, it seems, does not extend to white-collar criminals. (Meanwhile, arrests of noncriminal undocumented immigrants have spiked 171 percent, according to ICE records.)

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NEW REPORT: During Trump’s first year in office, penalties for corporate violations plummeted.



While Trump ramps up zero-tolerance policies against immigration, he's gone soft on policies that protect Americans from lawbreaking corporations. https://t.co/32Xg8THhby pic.twitter.com/GuWdluxpGW — Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) July 25, 2018

Before he was finally buried in a months-long avalanche of scandal, Scott Pruitt spent a large part of his tenure at EPA getting wined-and-dined by lobbyists for, and executives from, the industries he was supposed to be regulating. Then it turned out he had a secret calendar, which presumably held all his meetings with the Sierra Club. He even requested tens of thousands in taxpayer cash to set up a Double-Secret Phone Booth in his office, from which he presumably went about The People's Business of protecting the environment.

All that is how you get this:

One example given in the report was the case of Minnesota-based Syngenta Seeds LLC. In the last full month of the Obama administration, the EPA announced it would be seeking nearly $4.9 million in penalties against the company for violating pesticide regulations meant to protect agricultural workers at its farm in Hawaii.

Two months later, in the first full month of the Trump administration, the EPA agreed to have the company’s penalty lowered to $150,000 and have it spend $400,000 on a worker safety curriculum and training program.

Environmental protection!

It was almost inevitable that Trump—who attacked Wall Street early and often during his campaign—would cozy up to the banker types. As soon as he was elected, they started shelling out for his transition and inaugural festivity needs. He then hired three Goldman Sachs alums—including then-current-president Gary Cohn—to serve on his senior staff. They were complemented by a cast of billionaire and sub-billionaire financier types, like Wilbur Ross.

Steve Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, and Wilbur Ross BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI Getty Images

Shockingly, there's been a drop in enforcement actions against financial firms from the Securities and Exchange Commission:

And yet, enforcement actions otherwise have dropped in 10 of 12 agencies under the Trump administration in 2017, according to the Public Citizen report.

There was a 48 percent drop in enforcement actions — from 27 to 14 — during Trump’s first year in office. Enforcement dropped by 44 percent for the SEC and 39 percent for the FCC.

Are we to believe that all these companies in all these varied industries are committing 48 percent fewer crimes and infractions since Trump became president? Even if you believe the Obama administration was overzealous with corporate enforcement—even though just one single Wall Street executive went to jail for the malpractice that detonated the Great Recession—it's a titanic stretch to suggest he was 48 percent too punitive. In fact, it's absurd.

Instead, there's a far more straightforward explanation: the Trump administration is operating in this sphere as basically any modern Republican presidential shop would. It is populated by big business types and political operatives with ties to big business, and it will court political donations from big business when the next election rolls around. The administration's policies merely reflect this—and the simple truth that the working men and women who supported Trump are just the latest to get scammed.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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