In his second week in office, Donald Trump huddled at the White House with a group of leading Wall Street executives. Their goal: to unravel Dodd-Frank, the law passed in the wake of the global financial crisis to curb some of Wall Street’s most predatory practices. In front of assembled press, Trump pointed to Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, which had been forced by the Justice Department to pay a record $13 billion in 2013 for misleading investors about toxic securities. “There’s nobody better to tell me about Dodd-Frank than Jamie,” Trump declared. “We expect to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank.”

That afternoon, Trump signed a pair of executive orders that pave the way for rolling back many of Dodd-Frank’s financial reforms. It was not just a gift to “friends of mine,” as the president put it—people, he said, with “nice businesses.” It was also the opening salvo in a full-fledged war to destroy the law’s most high-profile and effective creation: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

It’s no surprise that a Republican president with close ties to Wall Street would target the CFPB. The watchdog has been a lightning rod for Republican outrage ever since Elizabeth Warren first proposed the idea as a professor at Harvard Law School. As soon as the agency was created, Republican lawmakers began trying to curtail its power or eliminate it outright. GOP ads depict the agency as a neo-Stalinist ministry that is the natural enemy of American consumers. “The CFPB supposedly exists to protect you,” House Speaker Paul Ryan tweeted after the agency levied a $100 million fine against Wells Fargo for incentivizing widespread fraud against borrowers. “But instead it tries to micromanage your everyday life.”

As a self-styled defender of the little guy, Trump should actually be working to strengthen the CFPB, not dismantle it. During his campaign, Trump railed against the global financial elite who had enriched themselves at the expense of ordinary Americans. The working class was devastated by the deep-seated corruption that caused the financial crisis, and Trump’s electoral strongholds are high-density zones of home foreclosures, subprime loans, and payday lenders—exactly the sort of predatory schemes the CFPB was designed to police.

“The CFPB is the first federal agency to look out for Americans on these issues,” says Lisa Gilbert, who monitors Congress for the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen. “As the part of Dodd-Frank that people engage with every day, its work has been massive and essential.”