Throughout the 2024 campaign, we heard repeatedly from Democrats and the legacy media that Donald Trump was a threat to democracy. No doubt, he can be uncouth and often does things that require pushback, but we see nothing in the Trump administration that rivaled the threat to democracy that was created in the Biden administration via its encouragement of the “debanking” of conservatives.
Debanking is the process by which pressure is placed on a bank to close the accounts of people with whom the bank (or the government) disagrees on policy issues. Or perhaps the bank may refuse that person’s request to even open a new account.
This is not some esoteric “pie in the sky” concept. It was actively pursued by many banks during the Biden administration.
It started with some banks telling gun owners that they would not be able to bank with their institutions. Then it spread to supporters of Donald Trump, including his wife and son, who were told that their bank accounts had been frozen.
This fascist tactic was also promoted by the illiberal administration of Justin Trudeau in Canada, who coordinated with Canadian institutions in debanking truckers engaged in a protest against Trudeau’s COVID policies that shut down their businesses.
Now that is the true threat to democracy!
Other examples brought out by the Heritage Foundation include:
- Dr. Joseph Mercola, a critic of the COVID vaccine, found his business accounts shut down by JP Morgan Chase, a move his chief financial officer claimed was at the same time Mercola spoke out against the Food and Drug Administration.
- In her new memoir, Melania Trump says her bank account was terminated after the riots of Jan. 6, 2021, and her son Barron was unable to open his own account. She called it “political discrimination.”
- On Joe Rogan’s podcast, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen blamed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a group set up at the behest of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to go after crypto firms in particular.
- A group of state and federal elected officials in Utah accused S&P Global and its subsidiary, S&P Global Ratings, of “politicizing the ratings process” for using environmental and social governance (ESG) as “credit indicators.”
- “Basically every crypto founder, every crypto startup, either got debanked personally and forced out of the industry, or their company got debanked,” Andreessen said.
- Andreessen added that others, like Kanye West, have been debanked “for having the wrong politics. For saying unacceptable things. Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there’s now a category called a politically exposed person (PEP). And if you are a PEP, you are required by financial regulators to kick them off, to kick them out of your bank.”
Thankfully, this insidious trend of debanking, egged on by Biden’s misinformation and disinformation brigade, is being corrected by the new administration.
It would be just as wrong for the Trump administration to pressure banks to debank liberals who disagree with them. Let’s not overuse the term “threat to democracy” so we can save it for those cases in which it’s actually relevant.