For the civil servants at the sole financial regulator devoted to protecting consumers, Monday morning wasn’t just a dreary return to work after a holiday break. It also occasioned an awkward dance between two competing bosses who both claim to be in charge.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s first and so far only director, Richard Cordray, abruptly resigned last week. President Trump wants his budget director, the ultra–fiscal conservative Mick Mulvaney, who has called the CFPB a “sad, sick” joke, to lead the agency. Leandra English, who was deputy director under Cordray, argues that she should be made acting director automatically, and filed a lawsuit this weekend saying that Trump lacks the authority to replace her.

Why is Trump playing such a strong hand? He says it’s because the bureau was “a total disaster” under the previous leadership. “Financial Institutions have been devastated and unable to properly serve the public,” he tweeted over the Thanksgiving break. “We will bring it back to life!”

There’s no evidence at all, however, to back those claims. In fact, one would think Trump would be the CFPB’s biggest champion, given its wild success in helping everyday Americans square off against banks, which would seemingly fit with the populist façade he stood behind during his campaign. But as with so many things, Trump’s true colors bled through as soon as he got into office. Installing Mulvaney as the head of an agency he loathes is just one more kiss that Trump has blown to the finance sector.

Before the CFPB existed, there was no single government entity tasked with protecting American consumers from predatory practices in the financial industry. Some duties fell to the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of Thrift Supervision, but financial entities such as mortgage lenders, credit card companies, debt collectors, credit reporting firms, and payday lenders faced few rules and scant oversight. If you can now read the plain-English, two-page disclosures that come with credit cards and mortgages, you have the CFPB’s work to thank. Before it changed the rules, the typical credit card contract had ballooned to 30 pages.