Trump's Capital One Lawsuit: The Conservative Push for Banking Deregulation
President Donald Trump, Eric Trump, and multiple associated business entities have just initiated what appears to be the highest-profile "debanking" lawsuit to date.
The complaint, recently filed on March 7, 2025 in Miami-Dade County, Florida, alleges that Capital One abruptly terminated hundreds of accounts associated with Trump-affiliated entities without explanation or recourse.
The plaintiffs are:
THE DONALD J. TRUMP REVOCABLE TRUST
DJT HOLDINGS, LLC
DJT HOLDINGS MANAGING MEMBER, LLC
DTTM OPERATIONS, LLC
ERIC TRUMP
This litigation arrives as Republicans intensify their efforts to dismantle essential banking safeguards that protect consumers and the financial system from risky or potentially harmful activities.
Manufacturing a Crisis from Operation Choke Point
The Trump complaint dedicates substantial space to exaggerating and distorting the Obama administration's Operation Choke Point initiative. This Department of Justice program, which ran from 2013 until the Trump administration terminated it in 2017, was designed to combat fraud by ensuring banks properly vetted high-risk merchants.
Operation Choke Point targeted industries that the FDIC had identified as posing elevated risks for fraudulent activity, including: payday lenders, debt consolidation services, credit repair companies, tobacco sales, pharmaceutical sales, telemarketing businesses, and online gambling. While Republicans have characterized this as an ideological targeting of conservative-aligned industries, the list reflected documented patterns of elevated fraud complaints and regulatory concerns.
The program was officially terminated in August 2017 when then-Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd sent a letter to House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte stating that the program was "misguided"–A decision that conveniently overlooked the program’s legitimate anti-fraud purpose. This termination reflected the Trump administration's broader deregulatory agenda rather than any substantive problems with the program's approach to fraud prevention.
Despite its termination, Operation Choke Point has remained a Republican rallying cry against financial oversight, conveniently omitting the fact that banks still retain full discretion to assess risk and deny services to high-risk clients. This selective retelling of history allows lawsuits like Trump’s to cast routine risk management decisions as a continuation of a long-running political vendetta.
The January 6th Context They Omitted
While the complaint strategically avoids direct mention of the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, the timing is impossible to ignore. Capital One's March 8, 2021 termination notice came approximately two months after Trump supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol, resulting in deaths, injuries, and significant property damage.
The complaint's silence on this context is telling.
The plaintiffs attempt to frame the terminations as purely political, ignoring the legitimate security and compliance concerns that Capital One may have identified regarding entities or individuals potentially connected to an attempted insurrection.
Banks have explicit obligations under anti-money laundering laws to monitor accounts for potential connections to unlawful activities, yet the lawsuit attempts to frame these fundamental risk management practices as unfair discrimination.
Banks' Superior Information Advantage
What the lawsuit conveniently ignores is that financial institutions possess vastly more information about their customers' financial activities than outside observers. Banks develop and have access to comprehensive transaction data, customer risk profiles, suspicious activity reports, and sophisticated monitoring systems that can identify concerning patterns invisible to the public or even to account holders themselves.
Capital One, like all major financial institutions, employs teams of compliance specialists, risk analysts, and anti-money laundering experts specifically trained to evaluate complex risk factors across their account portfolio. These professionals have access to proprietary risk assessment algorithms and cross-institutional data sharing through regulatory channels that provide insights far beyond what can be gleaned from public information.
I happen to know these specifics because I have advised multiple major financial institutions in my career as an information security consultant, and once interviewed at Capital One for a Director of Insider Threat role. One particular bank of which I am currently thinking employs more than 1,000 staffers in their risk management department. Those staffers are typically faced with making similar types of decisions as the bank’s cybersecurity teams.
Is this a bad transaction? Is this pattern of activity suspicious? Does this relationship pose unacceptable risk to the institution?
When a bank terminates a relationship, it may be acting on specific transactional patterns, intelligence from regulatory advisories, or risk indicators that cannot be shared publicly due to confidentiality requirements and ongoing investigations. The lawsuit's assumption that account terminations must be politically motivated deliberately ignores this information asymmetry.
Business Autonomy vs. Consumer Protection
While businesses generally maintain the right to choose their customers, banking presents unique considerations that differentiate it from ordinary commerce. Banks do retain significant discretion in selecting and maintaining customer relationships based on their risk tolerance, business strategy, and compliance obligations.
However, this discretion is not unlimited. Federal laws prohibit discrimination based on protected characteristics like race, religion, and national origin. Some states have expanded these protections to include political affiliation, creating a complex and inconsistent regulatory landscape across jurisdictions.
The key distinction that conservative advocates for "banking access" deliberately obscure is between identity-based discrimination and activity-based risk management. A bank cannot refuse service simply because a customer is a Republican or Democrat, but it can (and indeed must!) evaluate specific activities, transactions, and risk factors associated with particular accounts.
The Trump lawsuit attempts to conflate these distinctions by framing legitimate risk-based decisions as political discrimination. This mischaracterization serves a likely broader agenda of forcing financial institutions to maintain relationships with entities engaged in potentially concerning activities by exploiting political polarization.
The Legislative Push to Hamstring Regulators
The lawsuit emerges alongside a partisan push in Congress to weaken banking regulators' ability to protect consumers and the financial system. As recently reported by Axios, Senate Banking Committee chair Tim Scott (R.-S.C.) has introduced the Financial Integrity and Regulation Management Act (FIRM Act), a bill designed to prevent banks from denying services based on “reputational risk” alone.
While supporters argue that banks should not be pressured into severing ties with businesses over public perception, the bill’s opponents warn that it could strip regulators of critical tools to combat fraud and financial crime. In reality, reputational risk is often intertwined with regulatory compliance, money laundering concerns, and fraud detection—all areas where banks must exercise considerable discretion to protect their own interests.
Tellingly, while all 13 Republicans on the committee signed on to support this bill, not a single Democrat has endorsed it. Senator Elizabeth Warren's office represents the Democratic perspective on the Banking Committee and has not expressed support for this transparent attempt to shield potentially harmful businesses from proper oversight.
Although the FIRM Act does not outright prevent banks from assessing financial risk, it could make it significantly harder for institutions to justify account closures in politically sensitive cases, including those involving high-risk clients or politically influential figures. By narrowing the criteria banks can use to assess customers, it risks creating a loophole that shields bad actors under the guise of preventing discrimination.
Strategic Use of State Consumer Protection Laws
The Trump lawsuit conspicuously relies on general consumer protection statutes rather than laws specifically addressing political discrimination. It brings claims under the consumer protection acts of North Carolina, Nebraska, New Jersey, and Minnesota—none of which contain explicit protections against discrimination based on political affiliation in banking services.
North Carolina's Consumer Protection Act (N.C. Gen. Stat. § 75-1.1), Nebraska's Consumer Protection Act (Neb. Rev. Stat. § 59-1602), New Jersey's Consumer Fraud Act (N.J.S.A. § 56:8-2), and Minnesota's Consumer Fraud Act (Minn. Stat. § 325F.69) all prohibit "unfair or deceptive" business practices in general terms. The lawsuit attempts to characterize Capital One's account terminations as violations of these broad provisions rather than as specific instances of political discrimination.
Notably absent are claims under laws like Washington state's Law Against Discrimination (RCW 49.60), which does provide some protections against discrimination based on "political ideology" in certain contexts, though its application to banking relationships statewide remains limited. The lawsuit also does not cite California's Unruh Civil Rights Act, which does not explicitly list political affiliation among its protected categories despite sometimes being broadly interpreted. This suggests the plaintiffs' legal team may have determined that even where potential protections might be argued, they wouldn't apply effectively to banking relationships in this specific case.
The complaint references Florida Statute § 655.0323 for contextual support but doesn't assert a direct claim under it, possibly because the statute limits enforcement to state authorities rather than providing a private right of action. This new statute, passed by Florida's Republican-controlled legislature, prohibits financial institutions from terminating relationships based on customers' 'political opinions, speech, or affiliations' and exemplifies an emerging legislative approach that risks constraining financial institutions' risk management practices when potential risks intersect with political expression, which is what this entire lawsuit seems to be about.
The lawsuit's strategy within context of state consumer protection laws not only reveals the novelty of these claims and the limited existing legal framework addressing political viewpoint discrimination in banking, but also risks creating a potentially dangerous loophole where activities that might otherwise trigger legitimate risk management concerns could be shielded simply by claiming political motivation.
Discovery Could Be Crucial
Should this case survive initial motions to dismiss, the discovery process may reveal Capital One's legitimate reasons for terminating these relationships. Bank regulators require financial institutions to document account closure decisions, particularly for high-profile relationships.
If Capital One can produce evidence showing application of standard risk protocols and specific account-related concerns, the plaintiffs' claims of political discrimination will almost certainly collapse under judicial scrutiny.
The Real Agenda Behind the Lawsuit
In my personal, non-lawyer opinion, the Trump lawsuit aims to accomplish several concerning objectives beyond the obvious financial compensation sought in the complaint. First, it seeks to establish legal precedent that would severely restrict banks' ability to make independent risk management decisions when those decisions affect politically connected individuals or organizations.
Second, the lawsuit represents a clear attempt to punish Capital One as a perceived adversary who dared to take protective action following the events of January 6th. This punitive dimension aligns with a broader pattern of using litigation to target entities perceived as opposing Trump's interests.
Last, but not least, the ultimate goal appears to be forcing banks to bend to Trump’s ideological agenda by eliminating their ability to deny services to customers they reasonably believe pose substantial risks. This would create a carve-out in banking risk management that could protect potential bad actors from standard financial oversight simply by claiming political persecution.
The lawsuit appears purpose-built to effectively nullify banks' fundamental responsibility to evaluate risk factors, even when those risk factors relate to potential criminal activity, by recasting legitimate risk management decisions as ideological discrimination. This represents a dangerous effort on Trump’s part to weaponize claims of political bias to shield certain activities, potentially even those which are criminal in nature, from appropriate banking oversight.
If successful, this strategy would fundamentally undermine the risk-based regulatory framework that protects our financial system and potentially force banks to maintain relationships with customers engaged in concerning or potentially illegal activities. This outcome would benefit nobody except those seeking to operate beyond the reach of standard financial oversight mechanisms.
As this case proceeds, it will be essential to recognize it not merely as a dispute between Trump and Capital One, but as a strategic effort to reshape the relationship between banking institutions and politically connected entities in ways that could seriously compromise the integrity and security of the American financial system.
Trump’s lawsuit wields political bias as a red herring, diverting attention from its real agenda: dismantling financial accountability.
Excellent reporting, Jackie. Information about this suit is so important for people to know. I wonder if they are inadvertently making it harder for themselves to cut their own perceived enemies off from banking.
Jackie, this is an important analysis. I urge you to submit it to the court along with your credentials in the form of an amicus curaie brief.