Trump just had to compel financial institutions to fulfill their basic responsibilities of serving their customers instead of fretting over their political beliefs. But as one former Trump attorney put it, this is what the banks should have been doing all along.
A new Trump executive order is course-correcting Biden administration policies that encouraged financial institutions to debank customers who might pose a reputational risk. In exclusive comments to MRC Free Speech America, former Trump attorney John Eastman, who was debanked by Bank of America and USAA, said that rogue regulators are no excuse for financial censorship. [T]hey should have exposed what the regulators were doing. Certainly, USAA, they ought to [have] stood up to that tyranny if that's in fact what was going on.”
Trump signed his “Guaranteeing Fair Banking for all Americans” executive order on Aug. 7, banning and promising to investigate practices that led to the debanking of customers and industries for political reasons. The executive order also worked to push financial institutions to reinstate debanked customers like Eastman.
Eastman said that he suspects that when bank regulators are burying financial institutions with requests for information about certain customers and their transactions, the banks take the path of least resistance. Eastman agreed that this kind of harassment could lead to debanking. “For a small personal account, that kind of administrative cost is just not worth the small amount of money they make off an individual account, so they may have just made a business decision to cancel it,” Eastman said.
These aren’t the only tools available to anti-free speech regulators. At the beginning of his presidency, Joe Biden’s administration blocked enforcement of the “Fair Access Rule,” which protected disfavored individuals from being debanked for their political beliefs, as noted in MRC Free Speech America’s report on Biden’s censorship initiatives (Censorship Initiative #3).
Additionally, the rule also protected companies from being debanked for selling a product hated by the left, such as guns, oil or coal. Previously, the Obama administration had sought to push financial institutions away from such industries.
Of course, banks almost always have a choice whether or not to cut off service to their customers. Some banks only needed Biden’s permission rather than pressure. For example, Banks such as Wells Fargo, Bank of America and USAA quickly targeted both individuals and industries.
Eastman additionally agreed that financial institutions should be held responsible in cases where customers are debanked after facing accusations from the media or the government. “I’d like to see the banks stand up, and if they don’t, I think they’re in breach of fiduciary duty that they owe to their clients,” he said, noting that debanking is only one of the outrages perpetuated against customers by intrusive government requests.
Eastman also noted that he received no clarity from either of his financial institutions on why precisely he had been debanked.
Thankfully, not every bank is engaging in this kind of anti-speech behavior. Old Glory Bank co-founder and president Mike Ring spoke out against debanking at a Feb. 2025 Senate Banking Committee hearing and created a financial institution that does not engage in financial censorship.
Ring suggested that Americans should go where their money is welcome and where they can trust that they won’t experience discrimination. He told MRC Free Speech America, “We founded Old Glory Bank as a market response to the atrocity of debanking. People need to be voting with their dollars and doing business with those that align with their values.”
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