Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

Richard Cordray, the crusading Democrat who runs the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had never met or even spoken to President Donald Trump. But on October 30, he sent an unusually emotional letter to the White House, begging the president to preserve a new rule ensuring that consumers could sue financial firms in court. “This letter is not about charts or graphs or studies,” he wrote. “Instead, it is simply a personal appeal to you.”

Cordray said he had been warned that his letter would be a waste of time, since the president’s Republican allies in Congress had already passed a bill killing the rule, but he tried a last-ditch appeal to the drain-the-swamp, elite-bashing populism that Trump so powerfully expressed in the 2016 campaign. Cordray explained that the bill would prevent ordinary Americans from filing class-action suits against corporate wrongdoers like Wells Fargo and Equifax, and that a veto would help the people who put Trump in office fight the special interests Trump had vowed to crush.


“I think you really don’t like to see American families, including veterans and service members, get cheated out of their hard-earned money and left helpless to fight back,” Cordray wrote. He wryly noted the bankers’ arguments that their disgruntled customers were better off with mandatory arbitration than the power to sue the banks. “You are a smart man,” he told the president, “and I think we both know what is really happening here.”

Cordray’s letter was indeed a waste of his time. Just two days later, Trump signed the bill killing the so-called “forced arbitration” rule at a private White House ceremony, surrounded by bank lobbyists and bank-friendly Republican lawmakers. At the ceremony, Trump reportedly vented about Cordray’s overly aggressive approach to protecting consumers from financial ripoffs, and openly speculated about firing him even though his agency is supposed to be independent of the executive branch.

One year after Trump’s rhetorical war on elites produced a shocking electoral victory, the president still talks and tweets like a populist, promising lower taxes, better health care and terrific infrastructure for hardworking families. But it is now possible to evaluate Trump’s policy priorities based on more than his words. And a review of his executive orders, personnel picks, budget choices and regulatory actions, as well as the legislation he has backed from the White House, show that he has mostly governed as a corporatist, siding with big businesses, wealthy individuals and the Republican establishment on almost every domestic issue. His agenda has neatly fit the playbook of the K Street lobbyists and conservative ideologues he attacked and mocked last year on the campaign trail, pushing to slash funding for nursing homes and student loans, gut rules protecting workers from toxic chemicals, and cut taxes for the rich.

Political campaigns are never precise blueprints for what comes next. George W. Bush sounded much more moderate on the trail than he did in the White House; Barack Obama ran for president as a post-partisan outsider but didn’t really govern that way. Still, the gap between Trump’s rhetoric and his actual record is much more extreme, and almost all his major initiatives fit the pattern.

Trump touts his tax reforms as the biggest middle-class tax cut ever, but independent analysts say nearly half the benefits in the House Republican bill would go to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, while tens of millions of middle-class families would actually see their taxes go up. He campaigned on a pledge to protect Medicaid from cuts, but as president he’s pushed health care bills and budget plans that would have cut Medicaid by well over $1 trillion. His long-promised trillion-dollar infrastructure bill has yet to materialize. Trump also promised a war on financial elites, accusing Wall Street in general and Goldman Sachs in particular of bleeding the country dry, but he has stocked his administration with Wall Street veterans—and installed Goldman alumni as his Treasury secretary, top economic adviser, deputy national security adviser and chief strategist. His top Wall Street regulator is a former attorney for Goldman and the husband of a Goldman wealth manager.

It is not clear how much of a political price Trump has paid for abandoning his fight-the-power approach. His poll numbers are the worst ever for a president a year after his election, even though the economy remains strong, but it’s hard to tell how much of his unpopularity stems from his policies, how much from his inability to deliver on most of those policies, and how much from the Russia scandal and other furors that constantly swirl around his presidency. His support from Republicans remains strong, but it’s not clear how many of them truly embrace his policies, or at least his characterizations of his policies, and how many support him for cultural, political or emotional reasons that have little to do with the way he actually governs.

That said, many of Trump’s anti-populist positions were always hidden in plain view. He vowed all along to dismantle President Obama’s sweeping Wall Street reforms, including the new fraud-busting agency created to help consumers. The tax plan he unveiled shortly after launching his campaign in 2015 was already heavily skewed toward the wealthy. And Trump has retained his nationalist populism on a few issues, notably trade and immigration, dismaying Chamber of Commerce types who had hoped his anti-globalist campaign talk was just talk.

For the most part, though, Trump has kept throwing red meat to his white working-class base through his Twitter feed and his campaign-style rallies, while pushing substantive measures that would largely benefit the Republican donor class. He started almost immediately after winning the election.

***

Three days after Trump’s victory, he shook up his transition team, replacing chairman Chris Christie with Vice President-elect Mike Pence. This was portrayed as a routine move, and it was overshadowed by Trump naming his three adult children and son-in-law to the team, inviting questions about nepotism and self-dealing that linger to this day. But the abrupt shift from Christie, a relatively moderate Republican pragmatist, to Pence, a leader of the party’s ideologically conservative wing, would have a lasting impact on the Trump administration.

Trump did not campaign as a movement conservative, but Pence began recommending movement conservatives for a slew of Cabinet positions. The president-elect, who had never served in government or learned much about public policy, signed off on most of Pence’s recommendations.

So Mick Mulvaney, a government-bashing South Carolina congressman who had helped found the rabble-rousing House Freedom Caucus, was tapped to lead Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, where he has led an intense push to cut spending on popular programs and roll back health, safety and environmental regulations that businesses consider burdensome. Another deeply conservative Pence ally from the House, Tom Price of Georgia, was best known for leading the fight against Obamacare’s insurance subsidies for low-income families before he became Trump’s health services secretary, and he continued to push to rein in health spending before he was fired over his extensive use of private jets. Trump’s equally conservative picks for energy secretary and education secretary, Texas governor Rick Perry and billionaire activist Betsy DeVos, were both on record supporting the elimination of the departments they were nominated to lead. And even though Trump promised during his campaign to “work very, very hard on clean air and clean water,” his Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, had sued the agency over just about every major clean-air and clean-water rule it enacted during the Obama years, repeatedly siding with corporate polluters over the people the pollution affects.

Part of Trump’s appeal to his base was his financial independence from the GOP establishment, which lent some credibility to his promises to take on Big Business as well as Big Government on behalf of the little guy. But these high-profile picks have had far more appeal to the donor class than the working class. And Trump’s lower-profile picks have been just as tight with the special interests he pledged to fight; a list assembled by the Democratic group American Bridge shows that the administration has already hired 188 former lobbyists for corporations ranging from Fidelity to Ford, Raytheon to Verizon, U.S. Steel to United Technologies. It is packed with farm lobbyists, Wall Street lobbyists, fossil-fuel lobbyists, insurance lobbyists and all-purpose business lobbyists.

The nominee to be Pruitt’s deputy was a lobbyist for Murray Energy, a coal company run by a top Trump supporter; the EPA appointee overseeing chemical safety was an executive at the chemical industry’s trade group; the agency’s general counsel was an American Petroleum Institute lobbyist. A senior counselor to DeVos came directly from Bridgepoint Education, a for-profit school that was under investigation by the department. “He’s further rigging the system and flooding the swamp, not draining it,” says Andrew Bates, a spokesman for American Bridge.

DeVos is now pushing to roll back Obama’s regulations cracking down on for-profit schools that underserve their students. Meanwhile, Pruitt has already delayed tough new EPA safety rules for facilities that store dangerous chemicals, and has reversed an Obama-era decision to ban an agricultural pesticide that causes neurological damage to babies exposed in the womb. And while Trump is not the first Republican president to side with business interests against farm workers and students of Trump University-style diploma mills, he has also sided with business interests against his own core voters.

For example, the Agriculture Department recently scuttled an Obama rule that enabled small farmers and ranchers to sue giant meatpackers over anticompetitive practices—a move that was attacked as “just pandering to big corporations” by a Republican senator, Charles Grassley of Iowa. Similarly, while Trump has held multiple ceremonies with coal miners to celebrate his attacks on various Obama pollution rules, his mining regulators have twice delayed an Obama safety rule that would have protected those miners by requiring operators to inspect their mines every day before allowing them inside. And Trump’s nominee to be the top regulator of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, a former CEO of a mining company with a sketchy safety record, has not even been confirmed yet.

Trump never made any secret that he hoped to roll back the entire Obama era; that was the heart of his message of change. But some of those rollbacks have hit working-class voters particularly hard. His administration has blocked an Obama overtime rule ensuring time-and-a-half for workers earning less than $47,000, scaled back another Obama rule protecting construction workers from toxic beryllium, and shut down Obama’s tax-deferred savings plans for workers without access to 401(k)s. One of Trump’s first actions on Inauguration Day was to suspend an Obama effort to lower the Federal Housing Administration’s mortgage insurance premiums, essentially imposing a hidden tax on low-and-moderate-income homeowners. He recently cut off subsidies that help families buy health insurance on Obamacare exchanges, a move he admitted was a political ploy to pressure Democrats to cave on repeal, but is jacking up premiums and deductibles for many of his supporters. And his team has delayed an Obama rule requiring financial advisers to serve the best interests of their clients, basically siding with sketchy brokers over their unwitting victims.

Trump used to be a Democrat, and he campaigned as a non-ideological dealmaker looking out for regular Americans his new party has ignored. But when it comes to legislation, he’s consistently deferred to the conservative Republicans who control Congress. Perhaps the most striking examples of how he’s embraced their donor-driven agenda are the 15 resolutions GOP lawmakers sent to his desk to scuttle individual regulations like that forced arbitration rule. Trump has signed every one of them, killing rules that would have required employers in dangerous industries to keep better records of on-the-job injuries, forced oil companies to disclose payments to foreign governments, banned firms with extensive labor violations from getting federal contracts, and prevented internet service providers from selling customer data without permission. None of those rules would have reshaped the trajectory of the republic, but the stand was consistent: with employers against their workers, with Big Oil over transparency, and with telecoms against their customers.

Trump has been just as deferential on his big-ticket legislative priorities, letting the GOP leaders who have done little to investigate his various scandals take the lead on the substance. He promised his Obamacare replacement would expand access to insurance and preserve protections for pre-existing conditions, but he supported the bills Republicans wrote on Capitol Hill that did nothing of the sort. He said tax reform wouldn’t help “the wealthy and well-connected,” but he’s on board with a House plan that provides a quarter of its benefits to the top 0.1 percent, even as it wipes out tax breaks for adoptions, health expenses and student loans.

There are principled conservative arguments why government shouldn’t force insurers to cover patients with expensive conditions, and why reducing the tax burden on upper-end job creators makes sense, but Trump hasn’t made them, arguing instead that the bills he supports won’t really do those things. And while he still talks about a big and beautiful infrastructure bill as if it’s coming soon, GOP leaders don’t seem anxious to pass one, so right now there isn’t one.

“It’s going nowhere,” one Trump administration official who works on infrastructure issues recently told me. “And it’s like the one thing on the agenda that people might actually like.”

***

So far, most of Trump’s agenda has gone nowhere. The most vivid example may be his 2018 budget proposal, which reflects Mulvaney’s limited-government conservative fundamentalism, and has completely stalled on Capitol Hill.

The Trump budget would slaughter all kinds of sacred spending cows, including heating aid and legal services for the poor, rural development programs for Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, technical assistance for factories, and the Americorps national service program. It proposes deep cuts in Medicaid, food stamps, disability insurance, environmental protection and affordable housing. But these are not fights Congress seems even slightly willing to take on. Washington is still spending money at just about the same rate it spent money in the Obama era, and on just about the same things.

There’s a case to be made that Trump has been failing like a fox, delighting conservative activists with his draconian proposals without enduring the political pain that would follow if Congress actually embraced them. On the flip side, his nationalist base can get excited about his tweets attacking black athletes and the judges who blocked his travel ban, even though Congress is refusing to fund his border wall and he broke his promise to label China a currency manipulator. None of his loyal supporters seem particularly upset that his grandiose promises to solve the opioid crisis have thus far translated into a task force and a declaration of a national emergency with no money attached. Trump’s appeal was never about wonky white papers or policy details, and it’s not clear that his base expects him to deliver much more than his usual diet of politically incorrect but consistently entertaining resentment. Some of his supporters may enjoy what he says so much that they don’t particularly care whether he actually does what he says.

But the electorate is a lot larger than Trump’s base, and Tuesday's Democratic landslides were political push notifications that the rest of America isn’t currently buying what Trump is selling. As Washington braces for a hugely consequential debate over everybody's taxes, he’ll have to decide whether to keep pretending the current Republican plans aren’t tilted toward billionaires like him, or whether to try to shift them in more populist directions.

Populism, after all, happens to be popular. And as Richard Cordray said, Trump is a smart man. He knows what’s really happening here.