ichard Cordray, the crusading Democrat who runs the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had never met or even spoken to President Donald Trump. But on October 30, he sent an unusually emotional letter to the White House, begging the president to preserve a new rule ensuring that consumers could sue financial firms in court. “This letter is not about charts or graphs or studies,” he wrote. “Instead, it is simply a personal appeal to you.”
Cordray said he had been warned that his letter would be a waste of time, since the president's Republican allies in Congress had already passed a bill killing the rule, but he tried a last-ditch appeal to the drain-the-swamp, elite-bashing populism that Trump so powerfully expressed in the 2016 campaign. Cordray explained that the bill would prevent ordinary Americans from filing class-action suits against corporate wrongdoers like Wells Fargo and Equifax, and that a veto would help the people who put Trump in office fight the special interests Trump had vowed to crush.
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