President Donald Trump was just four days into his second term when he used the world stage to call out American banks for their track record of discriminating against lawful American businesses. That criticism tracks with what numerous businesses in the firearm and ammunition industry have experienced not just over the past four years of the Biden-Harris administration but also going back to the Obama presidency.
While speaking at the World Economic Forum 2025 in Davos, Switzerland, the president didn’t mince words.
“You and Jamie [JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon] and everybody else, I hope you start opening your banks to conservatives,” President Trump said directly to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan. “What you’re doing is wrong.” Dimon in 2021 testified at a Congressional hearing and stated under oath that JP Morgan Chase would not lend to manufacturers of Modern Sporting Rifles (MSRs). “We do not finance the manufacture of military style weapons for civilian use,” Dimon said at the time.
The broadside came in response to a question to the president by Moynihan and is a welcomed harbinger for how the administration will approach those who penalize and suffocate small businesses they disfavor, including and especially the firearm industry.
The president’s message was crystal clear: There’s a new sheriff in town.
Banking Broadside
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan was one of a few panel moderators who asked President Trump questions about his new administration’s approach to instituting pro-growth, pro-business policies. It was a wide-ranging discussion and the president fielded questions from several participants. When Moynihan asked a question about lending, the president seized the opportunity to get personal.
“And by the way, speaking of you – and you’ve done a fantastic job – but I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives,” President Trump began. “Many conservatives were complaining that the banks were not allowing them to do business, and that included a place called Bank of America.”
“I don’t know if it was the regulators mandated that because of Biden or what, but…I hope you’re going to open your banks to conservatives because what you’re doing is wrong,” the president added.
Moynihan responded among laughter that he looked forward to working with the president on the upcoming World Cup soccer matches hosted in the United States and did not address the president’s salvo.
Long and Wrong History
President Trump using such a critical time and place to highlight corporate America’s – and specifically the banking industry’s – discrimination against lawful businesses isn’t new. The firearm industry has had to fight against it for years, including directly from Bank of America when in 2018, the bank announced they would end financial relationships with manufacturers of Modern Sporting Rifles (MSRs), which they erroneously called “military-style rifle.” MSRs are semiautomatic centerfire rifles that utilize the same one-trigger-pull-one-round-fired technology used in handguns and several varieties of shotguns.
But even before 2018 and BoA’s public pronouncements, the Obama administration conducted the illegal Operation Choke Point scheme launched by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) to stop financial institutions from offering services to companies in politically disfavored industries in an attempt to crush them by choking off banking services.
Fast forward and it was the Biden-Harris administration that yanked the publication of the “Fair Access” banking rule by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. That action gave banks the greenlight to continue to openly discriminate against firearm business, which is just a privatization with a wink-and-nod to continue the illegal Operation Choke Point that was begun under the Obama administration.
President Trump so forcefully laid out a marker that this sort of behavior will no longer be tolerated and it certainly struck a chord, not just with banking CEOs, but also conservatives and members of the lawful and highly-regulated firearm industry who have been throttled under the past four years of the whole-of-government attacks by the Biden-Harris administration. Don’t forget, the former CEO of Citigroup proudly instituted an anti-gun manufacturer policy at his $300 billion bank and tried to recruit other banking giants to follow suit. At that time, Citigroup instituted a U.S. Commercial Firearms Policy that required firearm retailers to agree to not sell a firearm to anyone who has not passed a background check (despite the fact that all firearm retailers are required by law to do so), enact an age-based gun ban to deny sales to law-abiding adults under the age of 21 and not sell bump stocks or “high-capacity” magazines – what most firearm owners refer to as “standard-capacity” magazines.
These policies led Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to halt the state of Texas’s municipal bond offerings to Citigroup, telling the bank, “It has been determined that Citigroup has a policy that discriminates against a firearm entity or firearm trade association. Citi’s designation as an SB-19 discriminator has the effect of halting its ability to underwrite most municipal bond offerings in Texas.”
Whether it’s by government regulator or a bank’s own policy, discrimination against a lawful, highly regulated industry – that’s protected by the Constitution – should not be tolerated and President Trump is telling them to get in line.
Mistaken Mockery
Debanking conservative businesses, including members of the firearm industry, has absolutely been happening for more than 15 years. It is real. It is damaging and it has real impacts on the livelihoods of those in the firearm industry. Don’t believe for a moment the mockery from left-wing entertainment or news outlets like Saturday Night Live who profess “debanking is a made up word.” Bloomberg, the news outlet eponymously named for its’ billionaire and gun control activist Michael Bloomberg, immediately wrote about the president’s World Economic Forum remarks, falsely describing his assertion as “an unsubstantiated right-wing conspiracy theory.”
The firearm industry knows financial discrimination by big banks against the lawful industry and firearm businesses is real and happens often. It’s why the industry wholeheartedly supports several federal legislative policies to prohibit such bad behavior. That includes the Fair Access to Banking Act, introduced in the U.S. Senate last year by Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) and in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.). Both bills are expected to once again by introduced in the new Congressional session imminently. Additionally, the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance is slated to hold a high-profile hearing on Wednesday, Feb. 5, to cover this exact topic.
These efforts, as well as state-level legislation, are much-needed and appropriate means of leveling the playing field and holding major financial institutions accountable for their failed boardroom gun control attempts. The firearm industry has experienced these efforts and felt the consequences for years.
Now the tables have turned and President Trump didn’t waste his moment to let the banks know it.
What I want is for our ability to advertise to be restored. Social media doesn’t allow it, but yet I see ads all day long for booze.
And at every opportunity, one should share this fact:
According to the CDC, every year TWICE as many die from the abuse and misuse of alcohol, as are killed with the use of a firearm.
Look it up.
Must not include DUI related deaths.
When the SG alerted the public to the carcinogenic qualities of alcohol recently the liberal talking heads were falling over themselves attempting to pin down the “safe” amount of alcohol. It’s all NPR and MSNBC could talk about the whole week.
One NPR interview particular stands out in my mind where the doctor being interviewed essentially said “we’ve known all along that alcohol is basically poison and the ideal amount of poison in your body is zero.” The host frantically responded over and over with things like “any?” “even wine?” “what if I only have a few drinks a week?” The way she kept saying “I” in her questions told me this was less a fact-finding interview and more a selfish concern grasping at any justification to continue her bad habits.
The liberal wine aunts and academic cocktail drinkers just couldn’t accept that their particular form of bourgeois self-medicating is killing them.
And to get those health benefits touted in those studies totally not funded by the wine industry, you could just drink grape juice. Or maybe hop on a treadmill and stop eating cookies.
Somehow I strongly doubt alcohol consumption has much to do with the spike in various cancers especially to those under 40 let alone under 20 we have see the last several years. But yes there is a strong argument that alcohol in any quantity is detrimental to health regardless of potential benefits much like nicotine.
Well, now you’ve gone and done stepped into my wheelhouse.
You’re correct about the “last several years”, a topic I tried to warn about beforehand btw because, at root, that idea cannot be safe in its current iteration, and quite frankly as a “v a x” probably can’t be made safe at all. But between being accused of believing in “5G nanobots” and a certain former writer here who claimed to have worked on a similar project (yet couldn’t answer basic questions about it) and have all the inside baseball information I kinda gave up on that, especially once it became clear that he basically had zero clue what he was talking about. I never did decide if he was just fleeced by others or outright lying.
Alcohol does have carcinogenic effects. Two drinks per day is about the same as a pack of smokes a day as a risk factor. For a back of the hand calculation consider a drink to be half a pack of smokes until you hit five and then each new drink is a whole pack.
The problem is several fold. Covering the major issues:
First, alcohol is a great dehydrating agent which causes cellular stress. In some cases that can cause problems in cells that survive and in other cases it just causes excessive turnover of cells which grants more opportunities for miscopying of the genome when the division occurs. This also produces places in the throat, mouth and digestive tract that are harmed and become permeable to other toxins that normally wouldn’t be absorbed.
Second, the way we process alcohol produces several nasty aldehydes that have genotoxic effects . This is also related to reactive oxygen species that are produced by our processing of alcohol. These species are known to screw with epigenetic markers in a variety of ways, most commonly it’s known to alter methylation which is going to screw with your promotors.
Third, it messes with hormones in a way that can drive rapid cellular division, adding to the issue first mentioned with dehydration stress. Mostly this is linked to insulin but there are others.
Forth, it impairs the uptake of several vitamins and other nutrients and also suppresses the immune system. These two things work in tandem, realistically. Not only is the immune system impaired, it’s also not getting the nutrients it needs and therefore becomes more impaired and welcome to a downward spiral.
Fifth, it’s generally pro-inflammatory.
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It’s one of those things that’s multiplicative. If you smoke and drink and you’re fat and you’re eating the wrong things you can end up with a single drink multiplying several other factors together and it’s really bad news from a risk perspective.
As I’ve pointed out before, and gotten a lot of crap for saying, the number one thing for Americans and cancer is: Lose the fucking weight, fatboy.
Being overweight is kinda THE risk factor IMHO because it’s proinflammatory but it also allows for you to have much higher concentrations of various other carcinogenic things in your body for longer.
I suspect, but cannot prove at this point, that this is why Europeans have lower cancer but higher drinking/smoking rates. They’re not chunky the way we are so they can get away with more.
states and federal government should prohibit any and all government use of those banks, their credit cards, investments for retirements ect
Now do marijuana.
Better late than never. No mention of Trump addressing the 2018 restrictions during his 1st term.
Half the country still thinks this is a wild conspiracy theory.
Of course half the country doesn’t believe a FEMA employee directed her staff to skip houses with Trump flags.
When the propagandists tell them to jump, they ask how high. They’ll ignore how they’ve been wrong about everything for years because it’s basically a habit at this point. The team has been chosen.
Meanwhile get your 2 ton 4 wheel drive human plow financed by the ignorant as noid azzhats Bank of America…headquarters for Blatant Discrimination.
Lol good luck with that stroke.
As an FFL; Chase was the only bank that would work with us for deposits and cc processing.
Well, according to Libertarians liberals and leftists right here on TTAG. The banks, the media, doesn’t have to accept business from the gun industry. That according to the smartest people in the room.
They are well read college educated members of the “gun community.” Boy, they sure know a lot.
That would be true, if we had anything even remotely resembling laissez-faire going on.
We don’t. And we’re not going to get there any time soon, whether or not the idea is justifiable on its merits.
Doesn’t mean we can’t think/talk about it. Doesn’t mean we can’t think/talk about what a next-best solution might look like, either.
But we’re probably all just idiots so you can go ahead & ignore what I just said.
I’m very happy to hear how blunt and direct he was in addressing this issue, without making otherwise-capable business leaders feel attacked or disrespected. It would of course be a slippery slope if he were to have to resort to basically forcing financial institutions to bank with the gun industry, due to the precedents it would set.
That said, I think it’s time we stop worrying so much about the distinction between between “military-style” weapons and “sporting weapons”. The Constitution protects the right to keep and bear arms FOR the very purposes military weapons are designed for. Continuing to insist that weapons that are essentially identical to those used by military forces are in fact, not “military-style” due to their trigger group isn’t convincing anyone who’s already anti-gun, and only serves to further galvanize the NFA, GCA I, GCA II, and the Hughes Amendment placing restrictions on full-auto weapons. Sure, trying to get those overturned is quite the uphill battle and not necessarily the best focus of our efforts, but they’re still blatantly unconstitutional laws restricting the private ownership of firearms.
Instead, we need to be pushing the narrative that there’s no reason to distinguish between military small arms and those available to civilians, because again, the Constitution explicitly protects that very right.
Agreeing with the notion that only those who sign a contract to serve the federal government are to be granted access to small arms that are different from what we as citizens may own supports the idea that it is the federal government who has the right to control access to firearms in general.
The entire purpose of the Constitution was to *create* the federal government as a contracted entity to serve the people, and specifically delineates the powers and authority that are delegated to the federal institution. The Bill of Rights was a further point of concession by the Federalist party to the States-Rights party to ensure that specific civil rights may NOT be impeded by the federal institution in any way. Thus, by the intention of the Founders the federal government has no authority to control civilian ownership of weapons aside from criminal prosecution of specific individuals by due process of law.
Again, not stating we should start fighting the uphill battle of overturning the NFA just yet, if ever, but let’s at least stop galvanizing it as if it were Constitutional, when it clearly is not.
Instead, we need to be pushing the narrative that there’s no reason to distinguish between military small arms and those available to civilians, because again, the Constitution explicitly protects that very right.
I agree with this from a philosophical and Constitutional point of view. However, we’d probably want to think about the distinction created by liability before jumping in with both feet.
I’d lay a hefty wager that when it comes to loans banks can do a risk analysis that comes back in a manner that they can use to reject loans to MSR makers because of potential lawsuits.
We should probably attempt to address both areas at once, and close the circle on both topics.
I’m fairly confident that if pressed to do so, at least in the past, banks could come up with a risk analysis to avoid giving loans to MSR manufacturers.
Such is the nature of eggheads, they can justify just about anything by finding the reason in the fine print.
Which kind of raises a two-fold point. On the one hand you might think that financial institutions being forced to do business with someone who’s “awful but lawful” isn’t necessarily the right thing. You might be right because freedom of association and whatnot.
OTOH, I seem to remember this exact issue being a thing with regards to wedding confectionary and the Lefty argument was basically that once you hung your shingle in public you had to serve all of the public. I’d say these banks have hung their shingle in public…
Maybe it’s time to ram their own rules down their throat?