There’s a pipeline draining the Wall Street swamp directly into the White House, making a farce of popular vote loser Donald Trump’s promises of standing up for the middle class against a corrupt financial establishment. It begins with all of Trump’s cronies with which he’s stacked his White House and agencies.

Trump’s affinity for Wall Street is most obvious in his choice of personnel. His top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, his treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and Bannon are all Goldman Sachs alums. Trump’s nominee to run the Securities and Exchange Commission is Jay Clayton, a Wall Street lawyer who has represented Goldman Sachs as a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, a law firm so close to Goldman it is sometimes jokingly referred to as the legal wing of the bank. Trump’s pick for commerce secretary is private equity billionaire Wilbur Ross, whose wheeling and dealing included stewardship over American Home Mortgage Servicing and Option One, mortgage companies that paid millions to settle charges of relying on forged signatures and fabricated documents to push through foreclosures. Mnuchin’s bank, OneWest ― often referred to as a “foreclosure machine” ― also pursued improper evictions by “robo-signing” key documents, a fact Mnuchin lied about in his confirmation hearing.

Then there's the stuff that he's actually done in his first month in office, demonstrating as clearly as he possibly can where his loyalties actually lie. One of the first executive orders was to call for a review of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, a message sent to the regulatory agencies to basically put them on notice that they should stop trying to enforce any of those regulations. That same day, he signed an order—that was later withdrawn—to do away with the new fiduciary rule that requires retirement account professionals to look out for their clients' interests first. That rule has now been indefinitely delayed. That rule is intended to protect investors from losing about $17 billion annually. But Wall Street could lose as much as $7 billion a year, and as much as $13 billion up front, so clearly they have to be allowed to continue to swindle investors.