As of yesterday, Russell Vought had tweeted exactly fifteen times since being confirmed as Donald Trump’s director of Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on February 6, including twice about balancing the federal budget, twice about Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) agency, and six times about the evils of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). One of those six times was on Sunday, when Vought celebrated that his dismantling of the Wall Street watchdog had rescued an obscure company from dire straits.

“Shockingly, the CFPB tried to destroy this company, SoLo, which incurred millions in legal fees and had to lay off 30 percent of its workforce,” Vought tweeted. “It was wrong and we dismissed the case.”

As many Twitter/X users rushed to point out, the company Vought was lauding as an “innovative solution” for helping “working-class Americans with limited means” deal with large, unexpected costs was, in reality, little more than a scandal-plagued payday lender. At first glance, it seems like a vintage move from Vought’s playbook: let corporate greed run riot, cynically tell people that the regulations holding predatory firms in check that you just eliminated were “woke and weaponized,” and assume Americans will be gullible enough to swallow this.

But it’s actually worse than that, because SoLo is also alleged to be exactly the kind of “woke” entity “weaponized” against working Americans that Vought normally rails against when he needs an excuse to put Americans out of work or cut off their health care.

SoLo is meant to be a techified cross between a payday and microlender, connecting people who have spare cash they can lend out with other people who need to borrow modest amounts at short notice. In practice, the firm is accused of being a predatory lender that has had legal action taken against it in at least five states, and was in the process of being sued by CFPB for allegedly ripping off American consumers when Vought came to its rescue.

As state regulators concluded in California, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, and the District of Columbia, it does this by recasting extortionate fees as mere “tips” and “donations.” This lets it claim that the loans it facilitates come with a 0 percent interest rate and APR (even as its founder boasts about its lenders averaging a 20 percent APR and making a better profit than they would on the stock market).

In reality, this figure allegedly comes out to much, much more. The complaint filed by CFPB charges that these “tips” end up producing APRs of more than 300 percent in many of SoLo’s loans. They were anywhere between 43 percent and more than 4,280 percent for Connecticut borrowers who used the platform between 2018 and 2021, according to the 2022 cease-and-desist order lodged by the state’s banking commissioner.

Even though these “tips” and “donations” were technically optional, the company allegedly never made this clear to borrowers, and in fact deliberately designed its web interface to make it seemingly impossible to avoid paying them. If that didn’t work, it incentivized users to pay them anyway by telling them it would raise the success rate of getting a loan, and hitting them with pop-ups pressuring them to tip the maximum amount to have the best chance.

As part of that process, SoLo also put together its own internal credit reports, called “SoLo Scores,” on its users drawn from their phones and a different firm that collects reams of data from the bank technology it provides to banks, and which was itself the subject of a class-action lawsuit. SoLo did all this without a license to be a lender or requiring any of its members to have one, but tried to illegally collect on loans anyway, usually by badgering and lying to borrowers — such as by threatening to report them to credit rating agencies, which it doesn’t actually do. In Connecticut, SoLo contracted with a collection agency to chase up delinquent borrowers that wasn’t actually ever licensed in the state.

But here is the real kicker: SoLo allegedly did all this while presenting itself outwardly as a “woke” company that users could trust because of its diversity and commitment to social justice-y sounding concepts.

SoLo never tires of telling people that it is the “largest Black-owned fintech” firm and the “only Black Owned B Corp Fintech in the US and Canada,” or stressing the diversity of its members. Its top brass and company messaging constantly harp on about how their product is “equitable,” complaining that regulators who smacked SoLo down weren’t driven by “empowering equitable solutions.” Its cofounder and president, Rodney Williams, has slammed tech startups that lean on “performative rhetoric and put profits above purpose,” and charged that SoLo is trying to “right the wrongs and systems” that have kept “underserved communities at bay” in a country that is “at a crisis economically, racially, and environmentally.”

“Big banks and traditional players prioritize making money off cash-strapped communities,” he wrote. “They don’t put nearly as much value and resources toward empowering them and ensuring their products are inclusive, accessible, and affordable.”

Amusingly, even the right-wing media that is all in on Vought’s supposed purge of “wokeness” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) regurgitates some of this same rhetoric in presenting SoLo in a sympathetic light.

All of this makes Vought and Trumpworld’s enthusiasm for SoLo puzzling. After all, Vought’s influential think tank has made it its mission to “identify, resist, and defeat CRT [Critical Race Theory] wherever it rears its head,” a theory that we’re told holds “all of society is racialized” and looks to “revolutionize society by overthrowing the oppressor’s institutions.” So bent are Trump’s people on this purge of wokeness,, that they’ve taken to targeting for elimination anything that so much as mentions words like “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” or “underserved.”

Yet SoLo, which leans copiously on these terms as it rips off consumers, has somehow escaped this campaign.

It’s hard not to suspect that the Trump administration, Vought, and their allies aren’t genuinely motivated by a distaste for “wokeness”; that in fact, what they’re really driven by is anger at government regulators stopping predatory firms from ripping Americans off; and that they’re more than willing to stomach a little wokeness as long as those firms are allowed to keep pursuing that mission.