Trump Slams Bankers To Their Faces At WEF For De-Banking Conservatives
President Donald Trump slammed bankers to their faces during a virtual appearance at the World Economic Forum on Thursday for allegedly de-banking conservatives over the last four years.
Trump made the remarks to several individuals who sat on a panel and asked him questions, including Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan.
“And by the way, speaking of you and you’ve done a fantastic job, but I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives, because many conservatives complain that the banks are not allowing them to do business within the bank,” Trump said.
“And that included a place called Bank of America, they don’t take conservative business,” Trump continued. “And I don’t know if the regulators mandated that because of Biden or what, but you and [Chase Bank CEO Jamie Dimon] and everybody, I hope you open your banks to conservatives, because what you’re doing is wrong.”
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Debanking — when a bank decides it does not want you as a customer — has become a hot topic amid a flurry of accusations from people and companies who say they were kicked out of their banks over their politics.
The apparent targets of debanking tend to be prominent people on the Right and cryptocurrency companies, which tend to lean right and were under scrutiny from regulators during the Biden era.
Former first lady Melania Trump said in her recently published memoir that both she and her son, Barron, were refused bank accounts after the Capitol breach on January 6, 2021.
“I was shocked and dismayed to learn that my long-time bank decided to terminate my account and deny my son the opportunity to open a new one,” Ms. Trump wrote.
She blamed the “venom of cancel culture” and said she had “serious concerns about civil rights violations.”
In November, conservative author Dinesh D’Souza claimed he was kicked out of Chase Bank without explanation.
“Walked in one day to discover they had closed my account,” D’Souza posted on X. “The local branch couldn’t understand it since I was a good and known customer. They said the order came from the top with no explanation given or even available!”
When a person or company is debanked, they are blocked from having a bank account at one or multiple banks, often with little explanation. Sometimes, they are blocked from other financial services, such as making credit card transactions or using payroll platforms. If they cannot find another bank, they may be forced to rely on alternatives, like check cashing services with high fees and interest.
Meanwhile, debanking hurts their reputation.
Critics note that debanking resembles Big Tech’s censorship at the behest of the government during recent presidential elections.
Marc Andreessen, the tech billionaire founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz which invests in dozens of crypto companies, spoke in depth about debanking in November on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Andreessen accused the Biden administration of debunking, targeting its political opponents and crypto company founders.
“We’ve had like 30 founders debanked in the last four years,” he told Rogan. “It’s been a big recurring pattern. This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump. We just can’t live in this world. We can’t live in a world where somebody starts a company that’s a completely legal thing and then they literally get sanctioned and embargoed by the United States government.”
The Biden administration’s targeting is an expansion of the Obama administration’s debanking of certain legal businesses, including gambling, marijuana, prostitution, and gun shops, under a program called Operation Choke Point, Andreessen said.
“This administration extended that concept to apply it to tech founders, crypto founders, and just generally political opponents. So that’s been super pernicious,” Andreessen said.
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Andreessen said that while the First Amendment protects speech, there is no constitutional amendment saying the government cannot debank you, so the government pressures private banks to do so. The banks comply because they rely on the government to exist, he said.
“The government gets to say, ‘we didn’t do it,’” he said, and this system “lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing we do to Iran, just kick you out of the financial system.”
“It’s just raw administrative power,” Andreessen said.
After Andreessen’s interview, a string of crypto founders spoke out about their experiences of being debanked.
Elon Musk, who himself recently faced political discrimination against his SpaceX rocket launches by a California regulator, also spoke out and called for it to be a federal crime to debank political enemies. Musk said debanking shows “just how evil the government has been.”
As far as which regulators are involved, critics mainly point the finger at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), but they also take aim at the Department of Justice, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In December, the crypto industry finally uncovered what it says is hard proof that federal regulators have been targeting them.
Documents obtained by the crypto platform Coinbase during a court fight showed that in 2022, crypto companies saw their banking activity blocked at a large number of banks by the FDIC.
“We respectfully ask that you pause all crypto asset-related activity,” the banking regulator wrote to banks in one message.
Advocates for cracking down on crypto say they aim to prevent risky businesses from doing business.
In 2023, the White House cited crypto as it encouraged banks to separate “risky digital assets from the banking system.” This is also a common cry from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who received backlash for vowing to mobilize an “anti-crypto army.”