Political Debanking Is the Latest Front in the Fight Against the Weaponization of Finance

As companies across America wake up to the risks of “wokeness,” the fight against ideological debanking has become the latest campaign against efforts to weaponize the finance industry to advance a left-wing agenda. 

Following President Donald Trump’s Aug. 7 executive order against political debanking, new revelations emerged that bank executives may have been pressured by regulators in the Obama and Biden administrations to deny financial services to Trump and his associates. Fox News reported on Aug. 19 that, according to an unnamed bank executive, pressure from regulators to cancel political adversaries was “very, very real.” 

“The banks discriminate against conservatives, they discriminate against religion, because they’re afraid of the radical left,” Trump stated. His own accounts were closed at several banks following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot, he said. 

Calling it “a major vibe shift,” Jeremy Tedesco, senior counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom, told The Daily Signal that “for years, banking executives and representatives have been denying that politicized debanking takes place, both in the media and in private meetings with us. 

“What the executives are now saying—though under the cloak of anonymity—is what we’ve known all along,” Tedesco said.    

Trump’s order directed regulators to identify banks that have engaged in ideological debanking, as well as regulations that encouraged it, among them that banks mitigate their “reputational risk.” And while banks deny refusing customers on ideological grounds, they concur that regulatory reform is necessary.  

“We don’t close accounts for political reasons, and we agree with President Trump that regulatory change is desperately needed,” Lauren Bianchi, spokesperson for JPMorgan Chase, told The Daily Signal. “We’re pleased to see the White House is addressing this issue, for which we’ve been advocating for many years, and look forward to working with them to get this right.” 

In an Aug. 5 CNBC interview, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan stated that “the president’s on the right issue, which is we got to stop the regulators behind the scenes of whipsawing back and forth and forcing our companies and companies like ours to make decisions which Congress hasn’t passed on or he hasn’t passed on.” 

And the Bank Policy Institute, a banking advocacy group, issued a statement on debanking that blamed “regulatory overreach, supervisory discretion and a maze of obscure rules.”  

For much of the past decade, corporations like Disney, Target, Anheuser-Busch, and Delta Air Lines have taken up left-wing causes ranging from fighting parents’ rights laws in Florida to promoting gender ideology to combating voter ID laws. But analysts say that the tide is now turning. 

“This is what we’ve seen from corporate America over and over again— for them, risk management was ‘do whatever the Left says and don’t worry about the other half of the country that is conservative,’” Jerry Bowyer, CEO of Bowyer Research and a shareholder advocate against corporate politicization, told The Daily Signal. “We’ve tried to warn them for years that there was a backlash stirring, and now that customer revolt is in full swing.”  

The finance industry has a unique power over peoples’ lives, however, given that few people can function outside it today. The February 2022 protests by Canadian truckers against COVID-19 mandates were silenced not by police action, but by banks freezing protesters’ bank accounts and credit cards, leaving them unable to buy food or fuel, and blocking donations to the truckers on crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe and GiveSendGo. 

Trump’s executive order also charged, as the House Judiciary Committee had done in 2024, that banks improperly searched their customers’ data for purchases at stores that sold firearms or activity in the District of Columbia area around January 2021, handing that information over to law enforcement without a warrant or evidence of a crime.  

“If it turns out to be true, that’s an extremely serious, not just reputational risk, it’s a litigation risk,” Bowyer said. 

Critics say political debanking also encompassed industries disfavored by the Left. 

“We’ve seen a pattern of debanking across various industries, including firearms, transportation, agriculture, and crypto, as well as targeting specific individuals,” Derek Kreifels, CEO of investment advisory firm Prospr Aligned and former CEO of the State Financial Officers Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “This creates a chilling effect where companies self-censor to avoid scrutiny.” 

This includes Operation Choke Point, in which the Obama administration allegedly leaned on banks not to do business with firearms dealers, as well as coercion from New York regulators for insurance companies to refuse service to the National Rifle Association. 

Recently, however, Tennessee and other states passed laws against political debanking. And in June, the Federal Reserve announced that reputational risk will no longer be a criterion in bank supervision. 

“We’ve also seen some major asset managers begin to scale back their more aggressive initiatives,” Kreifels said. “These are meaningful wins that clearly demonstrate a growing pushback against the politicization of finance.” 

Many banks are now implementing policies against ideological debanking, and in the case of Citibank, reversing a 2018 policy that denied service to firearms dealers that served customers under 21. This year, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, and Morgan Stanley stepped back, at least publicly, from diversity, equity, and inclusion agendas, and JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Barclays, and Bank of Montreal recently quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance, a U.N.-sponsored climate activist club.  

“I want to be fair to these banks, some of them have genuinely changed,” Bowyer said. “In the case of JPMorgan Chase, and Citi and Regions, substantive changes were made before the executive orders, and I think they deserve credit for that.”

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