National Legal and Policy Center has repeatedly accused JPMorgan Chase of appropriating shareholder resources to advance the ideological aims of the left. At the hand of President Trump, the company and CEO Jamie Dimon appear to be receiving their share of accountability. According to CNBC:
President Donald Trump sued JPMorgan Chase and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, on Thursday for closing his and related entities’ accounts in early 2021 after decades of being customers of the bank, allegedly for political reasons.
The closures came on the heels of the Jan. 6, 2021, [“riot”] by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol, and the president exiting the White House later that same month after his electoral loss to former President Joe Biden was confirmed.
JPMorgan on Thursday denied that it closed Trump’s accounts for political reasons, and suggested that the closures were due to federal rules and regulations that the bank has been seeking to change during this and prior presidential administrations.
Trump and the other plaintiffs in the case, which are business entities related to the president, are seeking at least $5 billion in civil damages.
“Plaintiffs are confident that JPMC’s unilateral decision came about as a result of political and social motivations, and JPMC’s unsubstantiated, ‘woke’ beliefs that it needed to distance itself from President Trump and his conservative political views,” the lawsuit alleges.
“In essence, JPMC debanked Plaintiffs’ Accounts because it believed that the political tide at the moment favored doing so,” says the suit, which was filed in state court in Miami-Dade County, Florida.
The suit says JPMorgan failed to disclose why the bank was terminating the accounts, but that the “plaintiffs have subsequently learned that they were debanked as a result of political discrimination against President Trump, the Trump Organization, its affiliated entities, and/or the Trump family.”
According to CNN:
The lawsuit also said that Trump reached out to Dimon directly about the accounts being closed and that Dimon assured Trump that he would get back to him to address the account closures, “but, ultimately, never did.”
NLPC filed a shareholder proposal (ultimately excluded by the company, with the support of the Securities and Exchange Commission) and circulated a proxy memo to investors in support of another for JPMorgan’s 2023 annual meeting that criticized the company for debanking customers on political or religious grounds, including former U.S. Ambassador for Religious Liberty, Sam Brownback.
JPMorgan was already under investigation by both federal banking regulators and the Florida Attorney General. However, this civil action is the first time that President Trump has targeted Dimon and the bank directly.
This week Dimon appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he criticized President Trump’s immigration enforcement posture. It’s a testament to his poor judgment as JPMorgan Chase remains a perennial target in debates over “woke finance,” debanking, and regulatory favoritism. According to CNBC:
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said Wednesday that he disagreed with President Donald Trump’s approach to immigration, offering a rare public rebuke by a U.S. corporate leader of one of Trump’s signature policies…
″I don’t like what I’m seeing, with five grown men beating up little women,” Dimon said. “So I think we should calm down a little bit on the internal anger about immigration.”
It’s unclear if Dimon was speaking about a specific incident, or more broadly about ICE confrontations.
Dimon’s latest statement is just another example of how his actions and opinions sometimes appear indistinguishable from a Democratic politician. That posture has consequences. Public feuds invite blowback and raise the question: is JPMorgan is really politically neutral? Under Dimon, the answer has been no.
The CEO defended “stakeholder capitalism” in 2022, which NLPC has argued is a trojan horse for progressive political objectives. In 2023, JPMorgan announced a $2.5 trillion investment in “climate action and sustainable development,” and Dimon commented that “Climate change and inequality are two of the critical issues of our time, and these new efforts will help create sustainable economic development that leads to a greener planet and critical investments in underserved communities.”
NLPC has confronted JPMorgan over its ESG activities before. In 2024, we filed a shareholder proposal addressing the company’s climate policies. In 2025, we filed a shareholder proposal asking JPMorgan (we filed the same shareholder proposal at rival Goldman Sachs) to remove DEI-linked incentives from executive pay. Our proposals received substantial media coverage. While Goldman responded by walking back some of its DEI commitments, Dimon responded to our efforts by saying, “Bring them on. We are going to continue to reach out to the black community, the Hispanic community, the LGBT community, the veterans community.” In sum, Dimon promised JPMorgan would remain committed to DEI even as the industry, and corporate America as a whole, has retreated.
Worse, Dimon in the past has exhibited what seems to be a personal animus against President Trump. In our shareholder memorandum circulated to our fellow JPMorgan investors in 2023, we recalled:
…following the 2022 election, Bloomberg reported that Mr. Dimon attended a party of former JPMorgan executives where he “began bluntly dispensing opinions.” The news syndicate cited attendees who claimed Mr. Dimon “lit into former President Donald Trump, unleashing obscenities as he discussed the Jan. 6 insurrection.”
“Some guests,” Bloomberg reported, “no strangers to his swagger, were surprised by the ferocity of his performance.”
Not long after that article published, Mr. Dimon said in another election assessment, “I thought the election was good because on both parties…the wing nuts didn’t get elected.”
Shareholders should be able to weave a coherent narrative regarding Mr. Dimon’s leadership. While most financial institutions, even the notoriously woke Blackrock, have attempted to distance themselves from ESG and restore goodwill with conservative movement that was damaged in recent years, Dimon has led JPMorgan deeper into progressive politics. The consequences have become too large for shareholders to ignore. Jamie Dimon has joked about running for president in the past. It appears he never gave up his focus on politics.
