Modern conservatives hate regulation, and the Trump administration has channeled that hatred into policy. It has scrapped or emasculated rules designed to limit everything from predatory lending to exploitative for-profit education, and has moved on multiple fronts to undo environmental protection. Yesterday it took perhaps its most dramatic anti-regulation step so far, announcing that it would try to prevent California from setting strict rules on auto emissions.

But what’s behind this hatred of regulation? You might think that it’s all about profits, that corporations want to be free to pollute and rip off their customers because it’s good for the bottom line. In fact, however, the striking thing about many of Donald Trump’s deregulatory moves is that major corporations actually oppose his actions.

Thus, most of the big auto companies, having already based their plans on the expectation that Obama-era emission standards would remain in place, don’t want to see them reversed, and several companies went as far as to agree to adhere to California’s rules even if they were stricter than federal regulations.

A similar story is unfolding with regard to the Trump administration’s rollback of regulations intended to ensure that light bulbs become more efficient. True, light bulb manufacturers welcomed the move. But the Alliance to Save Energy, which condemned Trump’s action, is hardly a bunch of hippie tree-huggers; its membership includes a who’s who of major corporations, from 3M to Microsoft to Dupont.