When he signed the executive order entitled “Guaranteeing Fair Banking for all Americans,” President Trump told reporters he and his family were cut off by Bank of America and by JPMorgan Chase after his first term in the White House.
“The banks discriminated against me very badly, and I was very good to the banks,” Trump told CNBC.
Abraham Hamilton III, who is general counsel at the American Family Association, says the Mississippi-based ministry has experienced financial punishment in recent years, too. He points out that Stripe, the California-based payment processing company, dropped AFA over the non-profit’s biblical and moral stance. That punishment occurred in 2020.
“I think it creates an opportunity, an opening,” Hamilton says, “for those who would be more constitutionalist, more conservative, to say, 'Hey, why do we continue to bank with people who hate us, and show us over and over and over they hate us?’”
In previous stories about debanking, AFN reported ministries, political groups, and firearms-related businesses have been dropped by Bank of America and by JPMorgan, which represent some of the most powerful financial institutions worldwide. A third bank, US Bank, has also been caught debanking its customers.
Setting aside communist-run banks in China, JP Morgan comes in first worldwide with $4 trillion in assets and Bank of America is eight behind it with $3.3 trillion.
Southern Poverty Law Center, famous for its "hate map" project, has been exposed for dismissing debanking as a conspiracy theory at the same time it lobbies financial institutions to distance themselves from its political enemies.
Tim Wildmon, AFA president, has described how a major U.S. bank once contacted the ministry about its "hate group" status after the SPLC urged the bank to drop the nonprofit ministry as a customer. That lobbying effort failed, however.
Before Stripe dropped AFA in December 2020, an NBC News article, coincidentally published in October, pointed out how Stripe and other corporations were doing business with “hate groups.” The story mentioned AFA and its founder, Rev. Don Wildmon, by name.
In a Fox News interview about debanking, Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Trump, Jr. said they woke up one morning to learn they were locked out of their own business accounts for payroll and for construction projects. Eric Trump says that punishment backfired, bigly, on the banks.
“The people in cryptocurrency were being debanked just like Trump was being debanked,” he said. “And you know what? It's become the fastest growing industry anywhere in the world. It's actually removed a lot of the power from the big banks who have weaponized their platforms.”
Hamilton says the Trump family probably has the legal standing to fight back.
“And if they can show that it was an illegal violation of their legal rights to debank them, I'm pretty sure they would sue to challenge that,” he says.
