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Donald Trump built his presidential campaign around two ideas: 1) a corrupt financial establishment had swindled the middle class, and 2) immigrants and foreigners are dangerous.

Some combination of these two sentiments has fueled every Americanpopulist movementdating back to President Andrew Jackson. Populists can take credit for plenty of economic progress: child labor laws, universal public education, the eight-hour workday, the abandonment of the gold standard and all modern antitrust and bank regulations. The dark side of populism can be blamed for the Trail of Tears, the Chinese Exclusion Act and the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

After a month in office, its pretty clear which strain of populism Trump takes seriously. Hes ordered the construction of a border wall with Mexico and plans to hire 5,000 new border patrol agents and 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. Hes also attempted to ban Syrian refugees and travelers from seven Muslim-majority nations from the country.

In the meantime, Trump has embraced American financial titans as some of his closest allies. Wall Street is making its peace with people like Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart News executive chairman, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whos been repeatedly accused of racism,as the crackdown on immigrants intensifies.

Trumps 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. Trumps 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.

Trumps 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. Mnuchins 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.

Within two weeks of taking office, Trump was already delivering policy favors to Wall Street. He feted banking kingpins likeJPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon at the White House before signing a flashy executive order calling for a review of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

The signing ceremony was essentially symbolic regulatory agencies dont need an executive order to rewrite the regulations required by the law. In fact, they dont really need to rewrite the rules they can simply refuse to enforce them.

Trump Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao was a master of this approach when she served as Labor Secretary for President George W. Bush. As The Huffington Posts Dave Jamieson has reported, a Government Accountability Office investigation found that Chaos agency simply didnt investigate serious complaints about labor violations. The GAO determined this by registering several fake and outrageous complaints, and monitoring the departments response. In the most outlandish case, Chaos agency didnt follow up on a report that children were operating meat grinders and circular saws at a meat-packing plant during school hours.

All Trumps appointees have to do to gut Dodd-Frank is follow Chaos example. But the symbolism of the signing ceremony matters. Trump was sending the strongest signal possible to Wall Street that he will not interfere with their quest for profit, however reckless or ill-gotten it may be.

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The same day Trump attacked Dodd-Frank, he signed another executive order with more immediate consequences. The Obama administration had crafted a fiduciary duty rule that required retirement account professionals to manage their funds in their clients best interests. Most people think their retirement advisers have to work on their behalf, but many pick and choose investments based on special perks and financial gains that accrue to the adviser or his firm.

As far as Wall Streets bottom line was concerned, the rule was a bigger nuisance than the vast majority of Dodd-Frank. The Obama administration had calculated that Americans lose $17 billion a year to conflicted retirement advice and Goldman Sachs projected the rule would cost the investment industry $7 billion a year, plus $13 billion upfront.

Trump erased the rule. He invited Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) to the signing ceremony to explain the move. Wagner, who raises about $900,000 every election cycle from the financial sector (more than quadruple her haul from any other industry), declared: This is about Main Street this is a big day, a big moment for Americans. It was true. It was also a big rip-off.

This executive order was not the most harmful of Trumps early activities, but it may be the dumbest. Any administrative agency that wants to write a new regulation under president Trump will have to identify two existing regulations that it will eliminate.

This is, of course, completely arbitrary. It is also short-sighted. Over the course of a presidency, bad things happen. And one way that presidents can make themselves appear attentive to those problems is by having regulatory agencies respond with new rules. Those rules might not be worth much, but Trumps executive order makes it harder for the administration to even pretend to paper over future problems.

Even if deregulation is your lodestar,this executive order doesnt really help. Killing enforcement is just as effective as deleting a rule. But like the Dodd-Frank review, the deregulation rule carries real symbolic value. Trump was telling members of the corporate establishment to feast on whatever spoils they can secure.

Shortly after the Senate Banking Committee advance the nomination of former neurosurgeon Ben Carson as the secretary of housing and urban development, the agency raised prices on mortgages for low-income people. It was a windfall for private mortgage insurance companies that compete with the Federal Housing Administration.

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

The Securities and Exchange Commission appears to have received Trumps deregulatory message. Former President Barack Obama left the agency understaffed only two of the five commissioners appointed by the president were in office when Trump assumed the presidency.

The December resignation of SEC Chair Mary Jo White perhaps Obamas most embarrassing regulatory appointment for her deference to CEOs and dark money left Republican Commissioner Michael Piwowar in charge of the agency. And Piwowar has unleashed a reign of corporate favoritism that would make even White blush.

Piwowar has already directed the agency to scuttle a Dodd-Frank-mandated rule that would require corporations to report the pay discrepancy between their CEOs and a typical worker.

He has done the same for another Dodd-Frank regulation requiring companies to audit their supply chains to determine whether they relied on conflict minerals mining resources that enrich warlords engaged in long, violent campaigns in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The rule would also have required American companies to tell consumers whether their products were conflict-free.

The conflict minerals rule was partially overturned in a controversial federal court decision, but Piwowar is apparently not one for half-loaves. His first public statement as acting SEC chair effectively called for killing what remained of the rule. You do you, failed state butchers.

Piwowar is also moving to revoke the power of the SECs enforcement division to issue subpoenas launching investigations.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Carson had been confirmed as HUD Secretary. He has been voted through the Banking Committee, and is yet to receive a confirmation vote on the Senate floor.

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Here Are All The Favors Donald Trump Has Performed For Wall Street - Huffington Post

Forbes

Poll: More Americans Trust The Media Than Donald Trump Forbes Despite President Donald Trump's relentless attacks on the fake news media, a new poll from Quinnipiac University finds that more Americans trust the media than Donald Trump. A majority of Americans, 52%, said they trust the news media over Donald ... Donald Trump is losing his war with the mediaWashington Post Donald Trump's popularity is 'sinking like a rock'NJ.com Poll: Trump's approval rating continues to dipCNN The Independent all 219 news articles »

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Poll: More Americans Trust The Media Than Donald Trump - Forbes

Hatred of Jews, like hatred of Muslims, is embedded more deeply in the Western consciousness than President Trump seems to understand.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY OLIVIER DOULIERY / GETTY

The anti-Semitic threats targeting our Jewish community and community centers are horrible and are painful, and a very sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil, President Trump said Tuesday at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C. He was referring, rather obliquely, to a spate of recent bomb scares and acts of vandalism, part of an uptick in hate crimes that has occurred since his arrival on the political scene. Trumps sentiment, however forced, was welcome, given the obtuseness, ambivalence, and even denial that have characterized his past responses to the problem. As a candidate and a President, he has seemed oddly untroubled by the license that anti-Semites derive from the us-against-them motif of his rants. But now, Trump says, the bigotry has to stop, and its going to stop.

Would that it were that simple. Anti-Semitism is not a run-of-the-mill example of hate and prejudice and evil, which is why contempt for Jews keeps showing up as a symptom of social stresseven now, and even in the United States. One neednt posit an eternal anti-Semitism, in Hannah Arendts warning phrase, to know that the imagination of the West has always defined itself positively against the negative other of Jewishness. That was blatantly the case in Germany in the sixteenth century, when Martin Luther characterized Jews as vermin within the German body politic, a pest in the midst of our lands. That belief ultimately came to flower, of course, in the exterminating anti-Semitism of Hitler, who saw the very existence of Jews as a mortal threat to the Thousand-Year Reich. But, as the Holocaust revealed, this fear infected both Nazi ideology and the broader Western consciousness. The crime of genocide may have been enacted by the Nazis, but Jews died as they did because the rest of Europeand America, tooexcluded them from moral concern.

Religious anti-Judaism, which became racial anti-Semitism, began long before Luther, stretching all the way back to the Gospels themselves. It is not just that Jews are labelled as Christs killers in the Passion narratives, but that Jesus is fully portrayed throughout the texts as fiercely opposed to his own Jewish people. (He came unto His own and His own received him not, John 1:11 says.) If Jesus was merciful, Jews were condemning; if Jesus was egalitarian, Jews were hierarchical; if Jesus was generous, Jews were greedy. Soon enough, Christians imagined that Jesus had never really been Jewish to begin with. Never mind that this was a terrible mistake of memory, that he was a faithful, law-observing, Shema-proclaiming Jew to the end, and that, Johns words notwithstanding, the only ones to receive Jesus in his lifetime were Jews. The imagined conflict persisted, and it informed the structure of Christian theologychurch against synagogue, New Testament against Old, Christian god of mercy against Jewish god of judgment. Down through the centuries, this positive-negative bipolarity formed the twin pillars of European consciousness, and, whenever the social equilibrium shook, Jews were targeted. When the targeting reached its genocidal peak, in the twentieth century, the old hatred was exposed once and for all.

Well, not quite for all. The Holocaust was a world-historic epiphany, but not to the Trump Administration, which last month erased the Holocausts most salient feature by deliberately omitting any reference to Jews from the White Houses official statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Trumps generalizing in that statementthe victims, survivors, heroeswholly ignored the fact that Hitlers industrialized death machine was created expressly to eliminate one particular people. To neglect that purpose is to restrict responsibility for the broad civilizational crime, with roots in the religious anti-Judaism of the Christian Church, to a small gang of Nazi thugs, as if no one else were guilty. Both the neglecting and the restricting are forms of Holocaust denial.

If it is too much for Trump to grasp anti-Semitism as the bug in the software of the West, it is not likely that he will see how his own Islamophobia comes from the same malicious code. When Christendom launched the Crusades, the holy wars that shaped Europe, in the eleventh century, Jews were the paradigmatic enemy inside (the infidel near at hand), and Muslims became the defining enemy outside (the infidel far away). Little wonder, then, that the First Crusade coincided with some of the earliest German pogroms, known as the Rhineland massacres. Within a few hundred years, the Spanish Inquisition had instituted its blood-purity laws, which lumped Muslims and Jews together in a new category of biological inferiority. In 1492 and 1502, first Jews and then Muslims were declared personae non gratae in Spain, facing forced conversion, expulsion, or death. The invention of racism in Europe, in other words, aligned neatly with the discovery of the New World and the advent of colonialism. Genocide and slavery followed.

Islamophobia is thus, to use the phrase that Edward Said applied to Orientalism, a strange secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism. This hidden alignment was particularly discernible in the ease with which the Cold War, with its ubiquitous, if subliminal, anti-Semitism, morphed into the clash of civilizations, with jihadists replacing Reds as figments of the American nightmare. Trump no doubt regards himself as an American original, but he is only the latest ringmaster of this binary circus. In fact, our temperamental President is bigotrys clich. Even the cult of white supremacy on which his movement depends has its origins, too, in the positive-negative structure of the Western imagination, a structure erected in the first place to keep Jews in their place. It may offend Donald Trump to be linked to an ancient current, but while his arrival, with all its mayhem, is an unprecedented crime against democratic values, it is also evidence of the deeper disorder from which our culture has yet to recover.

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What Donald Trump Doesn't Understand About Anti-Semitism - The New Yorker

If there are two charts that suggest a very polarized, nasty four years ahead, they're these two.

First, we have Republican voters saying they are more likely to side with President Trump if and when he clashes with GOP leaders.

And second, we have Democratic voters saying, overwhelmingly, that they are more worried about their leaders doing too little to stop Trump rather than going too far.

In other words, when Trump does something a little further out to the extreme -- like a travel ban, for instance -- GOP base voters are more apt to take his side. And when Democrats don't go to extremes to stop Trump -- as in, say, filibustering Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch -- they risk incurring the wrath of a base that wants them to pull out every stop at all times.

As Philip Bump notes, the first half of this equation isn't all that surprising. GOP voters have long sided with Trump over GOP congressional leaders, dating back to the 2016 campaign. The relative unpopularity of those leaders probably doesn't help their case. And the same thing happened early in Barack Obama's presidency, with 65 percent saying in a 2009 CNN poll that they deferred to Obama when he disagreed with congressional Democrats. Just 26 percent sided with Democrats in Congress.

But the second part is more notable. We've seen evidence of this absolute anti-Trumpism in the Democratic Party in the form ofphone-calling campaigns that led to overwhelming Democratic votes against Cabinet picks and protests including the Women's March on Washington and now the tumultuous congressional town halls. These numbers quantify it.

Americans are flocking to Republican legislators' town hall meetings with questions about health care, immigration and more. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

The Pew polls also shows Democrats aren't particular enamored of the man who has flirted with working with Trump on certain issues -- and who really is the one Democratic leader standing in Trump's way: Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.). Schumer is viewed unfavorably by 26 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters, compared to 37 percent who see him favorably. His favorable rating with Democrats actually isn't all that much higher than it is with Republicans (24 percent).

Those are the kinds of numbers that Republican leaders became accustomed to when their party's base saw them as insufficiently anti-Obama.

And let's not forget that the tea party movement wasn't just a response to Obama, but also to GOP leadership that was seen as wishy-washy and not firm enough on conservative principles. These numbers suggest a similar environment on the left side of the aisle in the early days of the Trump presidency.

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Democrats' insatiable appetite for opposition to Donald Trump - Washington Post

At this point Im convinced that President Asshat is trolling us. That he believes none of the stuff he says or does, and in the end hes just re-enacting the Black Bush skit played brilliantly by Dave Chappelle on Chappelles Show.

During an impromptu press conference at the White House last week, Asshat was asked about the recent resignation of National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn and his ties to Russia. Asshats answer was, I have nothing to do with Russia ... nobody mentions that Hillary received questions to the debates.

Which got me thinking: That answer isnt very far off from Chappelles President Black Bush, who was asked during a fake press conference if he was invading Iraq because of its ties to oil.

What? Black Bush responds. Huh? Oil? Who said something about oil, bitch; you cooking? Black Bush then knocks over a pitcher of water and runs from the room.

Which also got me thinking: Asshat has been running the White House with the same tone and tenor that Black Bush would have had if hed been real, which led me to this conclusion: Asshat is the real-life Black Bush.

Asshat doesnt respect the United Nations. In fact, just as recently as December, Asshat called the U.N. a waste of time and money. Trump has repeatedly threatened to leave the 71-year institution and added that its little more than a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time.

Many believe that Trumps fixation with his administrations media portrayal is nothing more than a distraction to keep people off the scent of how horrible his administration actually is. Since the media serves as the bridge between his administration and the public, Asshat continually attacks the medias credibility. If he can encourage people to believe that the media isnt trustworthy, then he provides doubt on whether his administration is actually a bag full of deplorables.

Clearly hes outmatched at every turn, and its brilliant to watch. While Melissa McCarthy has nailed Sean Spicy Facts Spicers temperament and inability to answer anything with a straight answer, I would argue that Black Bushs Black Head of the CIA was the original Spicy Facts.

Doesnt matter if the policy was implemented by Asshat or whether it was a leftover remnant of the Obama administration; if theres a celebration to be had, best believe that Asshat is taking to Twitter to talk about it. After one of the worst shootings in U.S. history, Trump took to Twitter to brag on being right about radical Islam.

And in May 2013, he sent this tweet out to all his followers:

Asshat on Twitter sounds a lot like the time Black Bush defeated Iraq.

Im not sure if its the braggarts behavior, his insistence on spouting nonfacts as undeniable truths or the inherent humor behind his frightening inability to form a complete thought, but Trump is studied in the Black Bush approach toward governing, and its only sad to us because this skit has the potential to last four long years.

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Donald Trump Is Basically 'Black Bush' From Chappelle's Show - The Root