President Trump is chock full of perceived grievances, naming legions of people and institutions he says wronged him at the drop of a hat. Given Trump’s tenuous relationship with truth and facts, I’m typically loathe to dignify or amplify his allegations, however damning they may sound.
But even a broken clock is right twice a day. And Trump’s promised lawsuit against JPMorganChase, alleging the bank rejected his business for political reasons, carries just enough credibility to warrant scrutiny, not of Trump, but of Jamie Dimon’s stewardship of America’s biggest bank, one he has shaped, centralized, and personally defined over nearly two decades.
That scrutiny matters because JPMorgan and Dimon have strong reasons to prefer that certain lines of inquiry remain closed. Litigators acting on Trump’s behalf could shed light on how JPMorgan decides who it banks, who it rejects, and why. This is not about whether Trump deserves a bank. It is about whether Dimon deserves the Wall Street and media adulation he enjoys.
Millions of Americans would reasonably want to know why JPMorgan continued to bank convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein despite internal objections from some senior executives, and yet later deemed Trump unworthy of its resources and services. It is hardly flattering for Dimon that executives who raised concerns about Epstein’s relationship with the bank later departed, while an executive known internally as the “billionaire whisperer,” who managed Epstein’s accounts, continues to enjoy a flourishing career and is frequently cited as a candidate to succeed Dimon.
Trump this past weekend vowed that within two weeks he will file a lawsuit against JPMorganChase for debanking him after he left office following the January 6 Capitol riot, which he still insists on describing as a “protest.” Trump has previously alleged that JPMorgan, Bank of America, and other large institutions refused to accept more than $1 billion of his deposits, forcing him to spread his cash across smaller banks “all over the place.”
“The banks discriminated against me very badly,” Trump said, alleging that major Wall Street institutions have debanked conservatives for political reasons. On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump vowed to crack down on the practice and publicly chastised Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan over the issue.
JPMorgan has implicitly confirmed that it rejected Trump’s deposits, while denying the decision was politically motivated.
“While we won’t get specific about a client, we don’t close accounts because of political beliefs. We appreciate that this administration has moved to address political debanking and we support those efforts,” Trish Wexler, who oversees Dimon’s Policy and Advocacy Communications, told Politico.
It is a safe bet that Wexler’s statement was lawyered within an inch of its life. Notably, she did not deny that JPMorgan rejected Trump’s business. She merely insisted it was not for political reasons. Wexler’s assertion that the bank welcomes scrutiny of debanking practices raises an obvious question: what external pressures, regulatory obligations, or reputational risks might compel JPMorgan to turn away a client it would otherwise gladly accept?
The corporate media dutifully reports that Trump has produced no evidence to support his claim that the Biden administration ordered banks to reject him or his allies. Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s closest aides during his first term, has also claimed he was debanked by major Wall Street institutions.
Frankly, unless Trump produced an email from President Biden or a senior aide explicitly ordering banks to reject his business, the media would insist there was no proof of political debanking. Even if such an email surfaced, the debate would quickly shift to intent, context, or semantics. In any case, Trump would still be framed as the greater danger.
None of this means Trump is right. But the idea that Democrats would use the levers of government to punish political opponents is not far-fetched. In 2017, the IRS publicly apologized to roughly 40 conservative organizations for subjecting them to heightened scrutiny, inordinate delays, and unnecessary information demands during the Obama administration. The abuse drew remarkably little sustained media outrage.
I am not an attorney. But it does not require a Yale law degree to see how an experienced litigator could turn Trump’s case into a discovery nightmare JPMorgan would prefer to avoid. One of those potential fault lines runs directly through the bank’s $290 million civil settlement in 2023 with Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse victims.
Lawyers for the victims alleged that JPMorgan knowingly enabled Epstein’s abuse by continuing to bank him long after credible internal warnings had surfaced.
Prosecutors for the U.S. Virgin Islands went further. In their civil case against JPMorgan, they alleged the bank was not merely negligent, but central to Epstein’s operations.
“Discovery confirms that JPMorgan knowingly, recklessly, and unlawfully provided and pulled the levers through which Epstein’s recruiters and victims were paid and was indispensable to the operation and concealment of Epstein’s trafficking,” prosecutors wrote. “JPMorgan had real-time information on Epstein’s payments that the government did not and had specific legal duties to report this information to law-enforcement authorities, which it intentionally decided not to do.”
JPMorgan denied those allegations. But its subsequent actions told a more revealing story.
After repeatedly vowing it would not settle with Epstein’s victims, JPMorgan abruptly reversed course. The shift came after lawyers for one victim asked the judge overseeing the case to recall Jamie Dimon for additional depositions, citing a critical document produced in discovery after Dimon had already testified.
“Needless to say, the late-produced document is one of the most relevant and responsive documents produced to date, and JPMorgan strategically withheld it from Plaintiff until she could no longer make meaningful use of it in examining JPMorgan’s employees,” the victim’s lawyer wrote to the court.
Rather than subject Dimon to the risk of renewed sworn testimony, JPMorgan opted to settle.
Charlie Javice Debacle
In defending its decision to reject Trump’s business, JPMorgan will almost certainly argue that the bank exercises superior judgment and unusually rigorous standards when assessing risk. The Charlie Javice debacle undermines that claim.
In 2021, JPMorgan Chase paid $175 million to acquire Frank, a student-loan startup founded by Javice, after accepting her claim that the platform had roughly four million users. The actual number was closer to 300,000.
Javice was in her twenties when she snookered America’s biggest bank, one that routinely underwrites and syndicates corporate loans measured not in millions, but in billions.
The Frank acquisition was approved at the highest levels of JPMorgan’s consumer and credit-card businesses. Dimon reportedly pushed for a speedy close.
Javice was later convicted of fraud and conspiracy for deceiving the bank. But the decision to acquire Frank rested with some of Dimon’s most senior lieutenants, including a potential CEO successor. Notably, executives who raised concerns about the deal and the lack of independent validation are no longer with the bank.
That history complicates JPMorgan’s insistence that its judgment in rejecting Trump was careful, consistent, and beyond reproach.
Trump has been on a tear lately about companies using stock buybacks to goose their share prices. So far, he has taken aim at defense contractors and homebuilders. Big banks could easily be next.
That would be a problem for JPMorgan Chase, which last year authorized $50 billion in stock buybacks.
Dimon benefits directly from a rising share price, which helps justify his obscene compensation, totaling $39 million in 2024. Buybacks are not incidental to that outcome. They are central to it.
According to The Wall Street Journal, citing research by Zion Research Group, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley each generated roughly 22% annualized returns on the shares they repurchased over the ten years ended Sept 30. Those returns, which reflect both price appreciation and reduced dividend obligations on retired shares, outperformed the banks’ own compounded annual growth rates plus dividends. They also exceeded what the banks could have earned through traditional lending.
Put simply, buybacks have functioned as financial engineering, not capital allocation as Wall Street and CEOs prefer to call it.
Trump does not have unilateral authority to ban stock buybacks. But he does not need it. He has shown he can use public pressure and political theater to make companies reluctant to engage in practices he deems abusive, especially banks, which are not exactly beloved by the American public.
That said, Trump also treats the stock market as the clearest scorecard of his economic performance. Once he realizes that curbing buybacks could dent share prices and investment returns, history suggests he may lose interest.
Then again, with Trump, nothing is ever settled for long.
Trump has proposed capping credit card interest rates at 10 percent. Whatever its populist appeal, such a cap would almost certainly lead to a mass contraction of consumer credit.
Credit cards are priced to absorb defaults, fraud, and charge-offs. If banks are barred from charging rates that compensate for those risks, they will not simply accept lower profits. They will cut credit. Millions of Americans with imperfect credit histories would lose access to cards altogether, pushed either into a cash-only existence or toward far more predatory alternatives.
Credit cards are among JPMorgan’s most profitable businesses.
To put Trump’s proposal in perspective, even Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were once less radical. In 2019, the Democratic Socialists floated a 15 percent interest-rate cap, roughly aligned with what many credit unions charged at the time. And that was in a very different interest-rate environment, when base rates were significantly lower than they are today.
A 10 percent cap now would not be a modest tightening. It would be a far more aggressive intervention than anything Sanders and AOC first proposed, despite their rhetoric about “loan sharks” and Wall Street greed.
There is also a measure of chutzpah at work. Trump has long boasted about stiffing banks, forcing lenders to accept losses, and using leverage to walk away from obligations. Some financial institutions lost substantial sums financing Trump projects over the years, a fact he has at times treated as evidence of his negotiating prowess.
For someone who once bragged about how he “screwed the banks” to now lecture them on how to price risk is rich. Fortunately, Trump cannot unilaterally dictate lending rates, but he does not need to.
Bank bashing is reliable political sport, particularly at moments when the public already holds the industry in low regard and banks are repossessing homes and automobiles from borrowers who can no longer keep up.
Dimon’s Bad Hand
Even if Jamie Dimon beats Trump’s lawsuit, Trump can still do damage.
A lawsuit alone could force JPMorgan to explain its judgment under oath. Discovery would shift attention away from Trump’s grievances and toward JPMorgan’s decisions: why it rejected Trump’s business, how it evaluates reputational and political risk, and whether those standards have been applied consistently.
That is not a conversation JPMorgan wants to have. It invites scrutiny of decisions the bank insists are unrelated but which could be examined side by side: continuing to bank Jeffrey Epstein despite internal objections, rushing through the Frank acquisition that ended in the Charlie Javice conviction, relying on massive stock buybacks to support share prices, and defending credit-card pricing that has become one of its most profitable businesses.
Each issue is uncomfortable on its own. Together, they create legal, reputational, and regulatory exposure that JPMorgan has spent years minimizing rather than confronting.
Under Dimon’s leadership, JPMorgan is not built to withstand that scrutiny.