The key factor in this case, for Chase, is risk.
The key factor in this case, for Chase, is risk.
O ver the weekend, JP Morgan Chase (Chase) publicly acknowledged what had long been suspected: The nation’s largest bank shut down accounts connected to President Trump following the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021. The admission, reported by the New York Times, came in connection with a lawsuit the president has filed in Florida state court against Chase and its longtime chief executive officer, Jamie Dimon.
I’m tempted to say, “So what?” But this story deserves to be put in context.
Trump alleges that he was advised in February 2021 of Dimon’s directive that he be “debanked” — i.e., that Trump should take his business and money elsewhere because his accounts (including some of his family business’s accounts) would no longer be serviced. The president is seeking an astronomical $5 billion in damages for what he claims is “political discrimination” by the financial institution. The Times notes that Trump had already filed a similar lawsuit against Capital One — also in Florida state court, which the president regards as a home game. (Chase is currently moving to get the case against it transferred to federal court in Manhattan, its home base.)
The context here is that the president is trying to rewrite the history of his appalling conduct after the 2020 election. In the revised tale, Trump is the victim of massive, criminal election theft motivated by political animus, not the perpetrator of impeachable offenses motivated by lust for power.
To advance the storyline, the litigious Trump has opted for “sue and settle” as a useful tactic. The chief executive’s prosecutorial and regulatory authorities can harm major corporations and financial institutions in various ways. Complementing that, the president has consciously developed a reputation for willingness to leverage the government’s awesome powers for personal advantage.
So here’s how it works.
Trump sues political enemies and scapegoats for outlandish amounts. To spare themselves the crushing legal fees and heavy-handed government invasions that litigation portends, the targets settle. For major corporations and financial institutions, settlement amounts in the low eight-digits are a small cost of doing business, a bare fraction of what it would cost to defend themselves aggressively — which includes bearing the punitive, retaliatory measures regulators can impose on their businesses (audits, mandatory administrative approvals of mergers and acquisitions, etc.).
Such settlements are minuscule in comparison to the astronomical money damages Trump claims in the complaints that frame the public narrative of these lawsuits. But the public doesn’t focus on that — on the fact that the target settled because doing so was, by far, the least expensive way out. Rather, what people hear is that Trump made a bold claim, and the target said, “Uncle.”
The implication is that the president has been vindicated. Why else would his target have paid him millions of dollars? He must have been right all along: These politicized actors schemed against him.
And of course, it does help that some politicized actors have, in fact, exploited their own government powers and influence to scheme against him — e.g., New York’s elected Democratic prosecutors Letitia James and Alvin Bragg, Ukraine impeachment impresario Adam Schiff (now an elected Democratic senator from California), the Obama administration and Clinton campaign confabulators of Russiagate, and so on. Trump is hardly the only one in the business of historical fantasy.
Trump’s private civil action against Paramount, the parent of CBS News, is a good example of how this iteration of lawfare works.
The president sued for $10 billion, alleging CBS News had deceptively edited a 60 Minutes interview with his 2024 Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. The case had no legal merit. Sure, it was a deceptive editing job — of the kind consumers of media see every day. CBS News, however, is a private press outlet and it has First Amendment free speech and free press liberties, including the right to make editorial choices. It wasn’t under oath in an official proceeding; it wasn’t soliciting money under false pretenses. Everyone who paid attention knew CBS batted on the left side of the plate, and that MAGA-leaning outlets exercise similar editorial discretion in portraying Trump heroically and his rivals as villainous.
Plus, though he occasionally seems to think otherwise, Trump has no ownership or property interests in the presidency. In the unlikely event someone was concretely harmed by the 60 Minutes machinations, it was the American people, not Donald Trump. So why should he get even $1 in damages, never mind $10,000,000,000?
But naturally, Paramount settled. It only cost them just $16 million — less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the catastrophic harm Trump claimed. It’s nowhere near what the company would have paid to defend the suit. Meanwhile, on July 24, 2025, three weeks after the settlement, the FCC (chaired by Trump appointee Brendan Carr) approved Paramount’s merger with Skydance, a complex transaction valued at about $8 billion. And in its ongoing battle to outbid Netflix for Warner Bros. Discovery — a transaction valued at over $100 billion — Paramount-Skydance is well positioned to persuade WBD’s shareholders that it can surmount any regulatory hurdles.
Meantime, Trump can claim the settlement is more proof that the media plotted to rig the 2024 election against him . . . just as they did in 2020.
That is what the $5 billion lawsuit against Chase is about — the 2020 election and its turbulent fallout.
The president alleges that the bank told him to “find a more suitable institution with which to conduct business” (as the Times quotes an unsigned note from the bank, dated February 19, 2021) because it was “distanc[ing] itself from President Trump and his conservative political views” (as the Times quotes Trump’s civil complaint).
It’s a specious claim — and I’m not just saying that as an actual conservative who sees Trump’s erratic political views as statist and corporatist.
The president’s accounts were not closed because of his political views. They were closed because he was a liability. Financial institutions are heavily regulated. They risk legal jeopardy if there are suspicions that they knowingly facilitate their customers’ illegal, unethical, or immoral activities. They risk vast expenditures for legal fees and other compliance measures if they have customers who, they have good reason to know, have or will come under investigation for criminal, civil, or administrative transgressions.
Consequently, the law gives financial institutions wide discretion to decline to do business with customers who do or could cause them legal, regulatory, or reputational risk.
By mid-February 2021, Trump had been impeached in the wake of the Capitol riot, and a solid majority of the Senate, 57–43, had voted to find him guilty and disqualified from holding future office — not quite enough to convict him under the Constitution’s daunting two-thirds’ supermajority requirement, but notable.
Equally notable was the rationale of senators who voted not guilty: In the main, it wasn’t that they believed Trump was innocent of the claims against him; to the contrary, because he was no longer in office, the senators theorized that (a) it was unconstitutional to impeach him, and (b) in lieu of impeachment, he should face criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits in the judicial system. As the then-Minority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) put it, in stressing Trump’s “disgraceful dereliction of duty” despite the acquittal, he could still be “tried and punished in the ordinary tribunals of justice.”
Regardless of whether the prime movers of the impeachment were politically motivated Democrats (and there were plenty of Republicans similarly condemning Trump at the time), a financial institution cares about exposure, not political philosophy. Dimon would tell you (and be able to show you) that people across the partisan and ideological divides are served by Chase. To a financial institution, it didn’t matter whether Trump was a conservative. It mattered that he had been credibly accused of high crimes and misdemeanors, and that even the lawmakers who were unwilling to impeach him were predicting that criminal and civil actions against the then-former president were imminent.
And as just a sampling illustrates, they weren’t wrong. At the time, E. Jean Carroll had already sued Trump and would ultimately win around $90 million in verdicts against him. The Manhattan DA’s office, even before Bragg got there, was probing the historical business practices of the Trump Organization; that investigation that ultimately yielded the evidence that was used in New York Attorney General Letitia James’s massive civil lawsuit against Trump. Meantime, Bragg launched a hush-money prosecution of Trump, as well as tax and business fraud prosecutions against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer. Both James and Bragg had run for office touting their willingness to bring lawsuits against Trump. And note: The theory of James’s lawsuit (based on which Trump was found liable and his company subjected to extensive monitoring, although the gargantuan damages award was nullified) was that Trump habitually deceived his counterparty banks and insurers about the value of his assets in order to obtain better loan and coverage terms. That is, probes of Trump’s financial history, which were ongoing and zealous, promised to put his banks under the prosecutors’ microscope and subject them to burdensome demands for transaction records.
In the interim, the Biden Justice Department had turned the Capitol riot into the most large-scale criminal investigation in American history (charging over 1,600 defendants). The question driving prosecutors, lawmakers, and journalists was: Could Trump be held liable for inciting his supporters to violence? The Biden DOJ was actively exploring whether criminal charges could be brought against the then-former president, as McConnell had intimated. As that federal investigation evolved, Democratic state prosecutors around the country got into the act, eventually leading to charges against Trump in Fulton County, Ga., and proceedings against his top campaign advisers in several states.
It also emerged that the Democratic-controlled Congress planned to conduct highly partisan, slickly produced committee hearings to redraw the country’s attention to the Capitol riot and Trump’s actions in the run-up to it. That would predictably lead to a criminal referral to the Biden Justice Department, which was only too happy to appoint a special counsel, who eventually indicted Trump not once but twice: (a) in connection with the Capitol riot and (b) for alleged unrelated crimes involving the mishandling of classified information and obstruction of justice.
From a bank’s standpoint, it doesn’t matter how much of this potpourri may have been based on real misconduct — whether actionably criminal or not — and how much may have be the product of politicized hyperbole. What matters is risk.
At the time he was “debanked,” Trump was a risky client who stood to cost Chase a lot of money and headaches, quite possibly more than he was worth to the bank in revenue. Ergo, Chase disassociated itself from him. Banks are allowed to do that. They are not the government — they don’t owe their customers a presumption of innocence, and their customers do not have a right to the bank’s services.
There are, of course, civil rights considerations: Banks are not allowed to discriminate based on race, other immutable characteristics, or membership in legally protected classes. But if a person, objectively speaking, could foreseeably cause an institution financial damage, then the institution need not do business with him or her — and even membership in a legally protected class would not change that.
Much was made of the fact that, until the last few days, Chase had refused for five years to publicly address whether or why it had closed Trump’s accounts. That silence does not, as Trump-sympathetic commentary suggests, signal consciousness of guilt. Banks can be sued or subjected to rigorous government investigations if it is suspected that they defamed their former and current customers and business counterparties. Even if they are not sued, prospective customers won’t want to bank at an institution that is reputed to malign its depositors, lendees, or other counterparties. Obviously, banks refrain from going public about their suspicions and fears because the point of debanking risky customers is to protect the bank, not hold the customers up to public scrutiny or ridicule.
Chase was not looking to damage Trump; it was looking to shield its business from involvement in the maelstrom around him — much of which, patently, was self-induced.
Chase has described the president’s lawsuit as without merit. That seems accurate. As other big companies and institutions have discovered, it can be perilous to resist lawfare. Yet the nation’s largest bank certainly has the means to do it.
Settling would be a victory for lawfare, and a victory for lawfare is a loss for the country. If the president is right, let him prove it in court.