Have you ever needed a loan to buy a car or to pay for college, or maybe you needed some money right away and took out a short-term, a.k.a. “payday” loan that you planned to repay a few days later after you got your paycheck? Have you ever owed money and had to deal with a collection agency?
Let’s go a bit broader. Have you ever bought anything from a company and had to sign away your right to seek justice in court if the company committed negligence or fraud? Or have you ever had a bank account or a credit card? In other words, are you a middle- or working-class consumer struggling to get by?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then one thing you need to know is that Donald Trump did not become president to help you. Forget what he says. Look at what his Administration and his Republican allies in Congress are doing. For starters, Trump and his lackey Mick Mulvaney are gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the one part of the federal government set up to protect you, the consumer, from being abused by the financial industry. Trump and the Republican Party are engaged in a multi-front war on consumers.
This Republican war on consumers is, to be sure, a stealth battle. Trump could not simply shutter the CFPB because polling indicates that it is too popular with the American people. To the right, you can see the results of one poll that was sponsored by advocates for consumers. Furthermore, the New York Times reported the following in July 2017:
At one point, contemplating a high-profile run on the agency, the White House examined polling data from political bellwether states, two people briefed on the matter said. The agency, they concluded, was too popular to pick a public fight with.
[snip] “The public does not share the G.O.P.’s ire toward the agency or its mission,” said Dean Clancy, a Tea Party activist who worked in the White House under President George W. Bush and is now a policy analyst who tracks actions of the consumer bureau. “It is an agency about protecting the little guy, and that is tough to oppose.”
What has the CFPB done for consumers? It has managed to claw back almost $12 billion for 29 million Americans who have been taken advantage of or defrauded in some way by the financial industry—including those who have suffered racial discrimination at their hands. Yet just this week Trump and Mulvaney took more steps to de-claw that very same bureau by closing down the CFPB’s student lending office and placing it inside something called the Financial Education Unit. Our own Joan McCarter offered, shall we say, some healthy skepticism that this move will mean more help for vulnerable student borrowers.
The CFPB came into being thanks to the efforts of now-Senator Elizabeth Warren, with the strong support of President Barack Obama. It was created as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It exists to counter the power of Wall Street and the financial industry. The Trump Administration, by seeking to turn the CFPB into a paper tiger, is doing the bidding of Wall Street and the financial industry. That’s what makes this campaign rhetoric even more galling:
To paraphrase Paul Waldman, Trump is turning the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into the Corporation Financial Protection Bureau. The Republicans are waging war on behalf of the financial elites and against everyone else. That’s what the phrase “war on consumers” means.
The war on consumers isn’t solely about the CFPB either. Trump and the Republicans are working across the board to weaken efforts we count on to protect us from corporations in every industry engaged in fraud, pollution, you name it—all of which can hurt every American. Jack Gillis, about to become executive director at the Consumer Federation of America, connected some of the dots:
“Mulvaney is trying to eviscerate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has been out of service, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has done nothing in terms of auto safety," said Gillis. “It’s a whole move to deregulate.”
Talking about the war on consumers needs to be a core element of Democrats’ midterm election campaigns—an element that can play nationwide as well as provide a foundational theme for more localized approaches taken by individual candidates. The overwhelming majority of American voters identify themselves more as consumers than as members of the financial elite. Emphasizing the Republican war on consumers—not to mention highlighting the Trump rich man’s tax cut that remains deeply unpopular according to recent polling by Gallup and NBC/Wall Street Journal—can help Democrats win elections in districts and states that traditionally have been challenging environments for our party.
Fundamentally, campaigns are about values and identity, about crafting a message that gets enough voters to see that your candidate or party embraces their values, is on their side and on the side of the people they identify with. Being a consumer and/or a member of the middle or working class are forms of identity that cut across lines of race, religion, culture and gender. Emphasizing the protection of consumers against abuse can help drive a wedge right down the middle of the Trump coalition.
Progressives don’t need to, and in fact we must never try to appeal to Trump voters by downplaying our commitment to fighting racism and other forms of discrimination, or in any way appealing to white voters on the basis of their whiteness. That commitment is at the core of what it means to be a progressive. We must run as the party fighting for both civil rights and a more equitable distribution of our country’s economic bounty—and as the party that recognizes the inter-connected nature of those two vital issues. That’s how we remain true to our core values.
We can and must make our best effort to convince a chunk of those Trump supporters—in particular those who had previously voted for Barack Obama—who in 2016 may have voted primarily on the basis of their white racial interests and identity to remember that they have another identity, and other interests as well, ones that center on their wallets. Republicans have waged a political war against those interests. Democrats, on the other hand, have fought for them.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).