President Donald Trump called out the CEOs of Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase earlier this week, contending that the financial giants have “debanked” conservatives and faith groups.
Trump took a moment during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to blast CEO Brian Moynihan, of Bank of America, and CEO Jamie Dimon, of Chase, over “woke capitalism.”
“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,” he said via videolink from Washington, D.C. “They don’t take conservative business.”
The president was responding to a question from Moynihan on his latest executive orders and the US economy.
“And I don’t know if the regulators mandated that because of Biden or what,” he said. “I hope you’re going to open your banks to conservatives, because what you’re doing is wrong.”
As CBN News has reported, an increasing number of Christian leaders and conservative groups say their accounts have been closed in recent years, payment processors turned off, or have been placed on a donor “blacklist,” by some of the nation’s top lenders.
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That was the case for former U.S. Ambassador for Religious Freedom Sam Brownback who said Chase Bank abruptly closed an account associated with his nonpartisan, faith-based nonprofit organization with little explanation.
Brownback who serves as the chairman of The National Committee for Religious Freedom (NCRF) said in 2022 the bank decided to “end their relationship” with his group and closed the account after only three weeks.
“When our executive director called to see if this was an error, he was informed that ‘a note in the file read that Chase employees were not permitted to provide any further clarifying information to the customer,'” he explained.
“Why the cancellation? Why the secrecy and lack of transparency? Why was Chase hiding its reasons and intentions for closing the account of a client that seeks to serve the public good and defend religious freedom for every person in America,” Brownback questioned.
The bank later stated the group had not provided the requested documentation in a 60-day timeframe, but Brownback noted the account was only open for 20 days before it was closed.
And it didn’t just happen to Brownback. There are dozens of people and organizations who say they have been debanked.
Bank of America reportedly canceled the accounts of religious organizations including Indigenous Advance Ministries and a Memphis church, Servants of Christ.
And Nick Vujicic has even started his own bank, ProLifeFinTech, after what happened to him when he gave a 2019 interview in which he spoke out against the killing of innocent, unborn babies.
“They froze my credit cards, froze my debit cards,” he said. “They gave me a letter to say that they did a review of me as a client and they don’t want anything to do with me.”
OUR COVERAGE HERE: ‘No Apologies’ From ‘Weaponized’ Banks Canceling Faith Groups
Last year, a House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government was given a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and Global Disinformation Index titled “Bankrolling Bigotry: An Overview of the Online Funding Strategies of American Hate Groups.”
The list “draws a false equivalency between certain conservative civil society groups and the American Nazi Party and the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, suggesting FinCEN views them equally,” said the House Select Subcommittee.
Brownback told CBN News on Friday that he is glad the issue is “finally coming to light.”
“I hope really the president will follow through on his campaign promise to the NRB [National Religious Broadcasters] to form a commission on anti-Christian activity in the United States and start surfacing these issues, start bringing them out,” he said Friday.
“They need to dig into their [banking] organizations and find out where these problems are coming {from}. Now maybe it’s not at the top of the organization, maybe it’s somewhere in the middle level of it but these need to be dug out,” he added.
In Davos, Moynihan side-stepped Trump’s allegations during the virtual meeting and instead complimented him on the U.S. hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup. However, Bank of America later denied the allegations saying in a statement, “We serve more than 70 million clients, we welcome conservatives and have no political litmus test.”
MORE: 23 GOP State Attorneys General Warn Firms to Stop Backing Efforts to ‘De-Bank’ Conservatives
Hundreds of Billions of Overseas Investment Begin Flowing to US as Trump Presses for More
Meanwhile, Trump also pushed for more economic investment in the U.S. during the Davos forum promising global elites he’ll lower taxes if they bring manufacturing to the U.S.
And the investments have already been pouring in, including an expected $600 billion from Saudi Arabia. Trump told foreign leaders he hopes the country will “round out” their $600 billion “to around $1 trillion.”
“I think they’ll do that because we’ve been very good to them,” he said.
This is not the only strategy Trump is trying to use to bolster the U.S. economy.
He also announced on Tuesday a project through a new partnership formed by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank to build artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States.
Masayoshi Son of SoftBank, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and Larry Ellison of Oracle joined the president for the announcement.
The executives say they will commit $100 billion initially and pour up to $500 billion into projects under Stargate, a new joint venture between the companies.
Stargate will start building out projects needed for the further development of fast-evolving AI, according to the White House. One project is to build a data center in Texas and there are plans to eventually expand to other states.
“What we want to do is we want to keep it in this country,” Trump said of AI.
This announcement is a signal that the Trump Administration is willing to work with tech companies. Tech executives including Mark Zuckerberg, of Meta Inc., and Jeff Bezos, executive chairman of Amazon Inc., attended Trump’s inauguration.
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