President Donald Trump sees the government as having two key functions: to enrich himself and his pals, and to hurt everyone else. His rollbacks of key consumer and worker protections—or his administration standing aside while federal courts roll those back for him—combine both those ignoble impulses. He gets to reward corporate interests and the ultrarich while making life worse for the rest of us. 

What’s jarring about his moves is that there is no credible argument that doing so helps most Americans. The only underlying justifications are profit and cruelty. 

For example, who benefits from the Department of Labor withdrawing a Biden administration plan to ban the practice of paying disabled workers a subminimum wage? The only use case for paying disabled employees as little as 25 cents per hour is that it ensures the employers make much more money by exploiting their labor. It isn’t surprising the Trump administration would ride to the rescue of just those types of employers, but it’s still depressing. 

Or try to figure out a non-nefarious reason for canceling the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule to stop scuzzy data brokers from buying and selling your data without your consent. The vague explanation from Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, Project 2025 drafter, and Christian nationalist, was that the rule did not align with the “current interpretation of the [Fair Credit Reporting Act],” which somehow CFPB was also still “in the process of revising.” 

At least the administration is being transparent about the fact that their interpretation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act does not involve protecting people.

Killing CFPB rules is really a belt-and-suspenders approach here. The administration has thoroughly hamstrung the agency via mass firings. The employees who remain, meanwhile, have been instructed to do no work. While agency employees can no longer protect people from credit card or mortgage scams, agency heads are refunding or cancelling existing settlements, even those where the settlement required banks to return money to consumers. 

When it comes to the brave new frontier of cryptocurrency crime, the administration’s stance is essentially “screw those suckers.” The Justice Department disbanded the team that had been tasked with investigating crypto exchanges and related entities to determine whether they facilitate the misuse of cryptocurrency to enable criminal activity. No longer, of course, because the president himself is entangled with the shadiest crypto stuff, so we can’t have a team focused on protecting people from crypto crime, now can we?

Kicking Americans in the teeth isn’t a solo project from the Trump administration, though. Sometimes the courts help kick. 

This month, District Judge Sean Jordan, a Trump appointee, obligingly tossed the Biden-era medical debt rule, which would have removed unpaid consumer medical debt from consumer credit reports. Apparently, it exceeds the CFPB’s authority to protect consumers from having medical debt destroy every aspect of their lives. 

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which now has only one Democratic appointee and is rapidly becoming as sure a bet as the 5th Circuit at giving conservatives favorable rulings, also just tossed the Federal Trade Commission’s click-to-cancel rule, which would have required businesses to make it as easy to cancel services as it is to sign up for them. As with the medical debt rule, this isn’t driven by the goal of protecting consumers. The only constituency that hates the idea of making it easier to cancel a gym membership is companies that make their money by trapping consumers in memberships. 

For cases still moving through the courts, the administration is tipping their hand by telling courts they are “reconsidering” the rule they are supposed to be defending, and asking for the case to be paused. The Department of Justice told a Washington, D.C., federal court that it will not enforce part of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, erasing Biden-era protections requiring insurance companies to treat coverage for mental health and substance abuse the same as other medical coverage. 

The DOJ also told the 5th Circuit that it is reconsidering a Department of Labor rule to increase the minimum salary threshold for the “white-collar” exemption. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, certain executive and professional employees are exempt from overtime pay. Currently, that exemption kicks in at $35,568 per year, meaning that businesses are not required to pay overtime for those white-collar employees with salaries above that amount. The rule promulgated under former President Joe Biden would have increased it in two steps, first to $43,888 and then to $58,656. Secretaries making $36,000 a year will no doubt be thrilled to learn that the Trump administration is making sure they don’t get overtime pay. 

Speaking of the minimum wage, Trump wasted little time in overturning Biden’s executive order that had increased the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15 per hour in 2022, with annual adjustments. No longer will federal contractors know the tyranny of a higher wage and can instead return gratefully to being paid a minimum of $13.30 per hour. 

Not a single one of these actions benefits consumers or workers, but every one of them benefits the interests of those who make money by exploiting people. And since that is Trump’s natural constituency, he’s going to do everything he can to help them out. 

And this is only the beginning.