What has Mick Mulvaney been whispering in popular vote loser Donald Trump's ear?
Socialist? Richard Cordray is a socialist? Does Trump know what that word means? It must be what Mulvaney is telling Trump as the two of them plot the destruction of the agency Cordray led, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Which, by the way, Cordray led pretty damned impressively.
Cordray has accomplished a lot. The CFPB designed new, simpler mortgage-loan disclosures. It shed light on banks' overdraft practices. It created the first federal rules to make payday lending less predatory. It gave the public reams of valuable information, such as a database that allows consumers to compare credit-card agreements. Its practice of publishing complaints pushed financial institutions to be more responsive. Its investigation of Wells Fargo brought national attention to the fake-accounts issue.
Then there's the little matter of the "consumer" for which he was working. All of that resulted in the CFPB returning $11.8 billion to more than 29 million defrauded consumers by the time Trump took office. If that's socialism, those 29 million people probably don't think it's so bad.