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.
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