A few days ago, as the institutions of Wall Street swatted away rogue stock traders, none other than Ted Cruz decided to try and get in on the action. “Today’s Democrat Party,” declared the Texas Republican, “is the party of Wall Street, Big Tech, and Hollywood and they’ve turned their back on working men and women.”

The remark was a textbook case of conservative pseudo-populism, lumping together economics and culture and failing to resist the inclusion of “Hollywood” in its list of liberal bogeymen. Nonetheless, Cruz, whose wife is a managing director at Goldman Sachs, had clearly detected a whiff of renewed anti–Wall Street sentiment and decided to make the most out of it. Cruz wasn’t exactly wrong, of course: the leadership of the Democratic Party very much enjoys close ties to Wall Street, whose donations to Joe Biden’s recent presidential campaign were several orders of magnitude higher than those made to Donald Trump’s.

Like Cruz, however, Trump is a case in point for why political capture by Wall Street is almost always a bipartisan affair — rhetorical animus toward big finance being markedly different from actually aligning yourself with ordinary people against it. Doing the first certainly helped the ex-president beat Hillary Clinton. But, having run on a pledge to “drain the swamp,” Trump quickly set up camp in the bog of high finance and made it his own.