The Trump Family's Debanking Story Reads More Like a Fairy Tale

It’s the latest chapter in a story that began with the Trump family’s multibillion-dollar debanking lawsuits against Capital One and JPMorgan – a tale that merits scrutiny.

The story the Trumps are telling is straightforward: TradFi turned its back on them, so they turned to crypto. It's a narrative pulled from the anti-establishment playbook that helped Donald Trump win the White House twice. And financially, at least, it has worked spectacularly.

Wealth boost

When Forbes published its rich list in March, Trump stood out as $1.4bn wealthier than the year before, largely on the back of crypto ventures including memecoin sales to fans who wanted to meet him at a large-group dinner and to Justin Sun, the crypto mogul famous for publicity stunts. Sun was also among those who poured cash into World Liberty Financial, the company operating the USD1 stablecoin. The Trump crypto vehicle also reportedly sold half a billion dollars of stock to an Abu Dhabi investor.

That’s despite a 60% decline in the dollar value of the flagship WLF token since last year’s high and a 95% decline in the stock of Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT) since it peaked in 2021, the first year of trading on the Nasdaq.

But is the debanking story true?

The Trumps have argued that they had to turn to crypto because the traditional finance world ostracized them.

The lawsuits against Capital One and JPMorgan cast Trump and his sons as outsiders driven into crypto after being shut out of mainstream banking. Both account closures occurred in spring 2021, after the 6 Jan attack on the US Capitol by members of the public. Neither bank has publicly linked the two events, stating only that decisions reflected legitimate risk assessments.

Constructing victimhood 

The Trump family has on-going legal cases against Capital One and JPMorgan, positioning the US President and his boys as anti-establishment victims driven to crypto after being excluded from traditional banking services.

The suits stem from the closure of Trump-related accounts that occurred several months after the attack on Congress. Neither of the financial institutions has provided detailed public explanations, or linked the shuttering to the incident in Washington, stating only that the decisions reflected legally permissible risk assessments.

They were not alone. Businesses across insurance, hospitality, sports and real estate distanced themselves from Trump around the same time, for broadly the same reasons. He was also banned from the social platform then known as Twitter, before Elon Musk took it over and rebranded it as X.

On that 6 Jan in Washington, DC, protestors forced democratically elected representatives to stop work and flee for their security in what looked on video like a deranged attempt at a coup d’état.

Whatever one's politics, characterizing the violent disruption of a democratic process as a "woke" episode to air "conservative political views" – as the Trump legal filings do – is a stretch. A protestor was shot dead on the day. Police officer Brian Sicknick died the following day after being assaulted, and 174 of his colleagues were injured.

Both banks have denied the political motivation charge. JPMorgan has stated it closes accounts only when they "create legal or regulatory risk for the company." Capital One has said it "has not and does not close customer accounts for political reasons."

JPMorgan told Sandmark it has nothing to add to what it has already said. Capital One did not respond to a request for more detail about its reasons for closing the Trump accounts.

A populist's playbook

The Trumps are not unique in making this kind of claim. Nigel Farage from Reform UK, Marine le Pen of France’s Rassemblement National and Sascha Schlösser from Alternative für Deutschland have all alleged that their bank accounts were closed for political reasons.

The language of establishment persecution clearly resonates with their respective bases. That does not make it true.

If the account closures were as damaging as claimed, the response was remarkably unhurried. Capital One shut Trump-related accounts in spring 2021; the lawsuit was filed in March 2025 – nearly four years later. The JPMorgan suit followed in January 2026, roughly five years after the alleged debanking.

Nor does the public record support the idea that the debanking drove the family into crypto. Sandmark did not find any public statements from Eric or Donald Jr linking debanking to their crypto pivot before April 2025 – the same month as the Capital One filing. Moreover, their statements expressing trauma and harm from "debanking" were somehow stoically held in check until their father returned to power. Given that since his return to the Oval Office, President Trump has weaponized the Department of Justice to focus on political enemies, and targeted law firms and media organizations that scrutinize or criticize him one could be forgiven for viewing Trump's actions against those who debanked him as more retribution than a blow for truth, justice and the American way.

A belated public relations assault 

"I never thought I’d fall into the world of crypto until every bank began cancelling us for absolutely no reason other than the fact that my father was in politics," Eric Trump said at the time.

Donald Trump Jr followed in May 2025 with: "We were real estate guys, we were hard assets, we built buildings. It [Bitcoin] was a bit nebulous. But once we got into that political sector...we were getting debanked, we were getting de-insured, we were getting de-everything. It was brutal."

Brutally profitable would be more accurate.

The victimization story has become central to the Trump brothers’ messaging. In August 2025, Eric told the Wall Street Journal that, "The whole thing showed me how fragile the system was and how easily it could be weaponized."

The claims formed part of the backbone of a narrative peddled around the world in media interviews and at crypto events later in the year. At 2025’s Bitcoin Asia conference in Hong Kong and at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, a minority of audience members booed and jeered along with the familiar refrain. But most were sceptically silent.

In a joint interview with CNBC in Feb 2026, Don Junior said, "You know, we didn’t get into crypto because we were on the leading edge. We got into it out of necessity. They basically forced us into it."

Eric went further: "We were the most cancelled people in the world in 2020, 2021, and it’s really great to almost have this retribution where all of a sudden we start pushing an agenda."

Chronological details 

The chronology tells a different story. The Trump NFT collection launched in December 2022. Its commercial success came first. The debanking narrative came later, folded into Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, where crypto was reframed as a tool of American economic sovereignty against global financial elites. The victimhood story looks less like a cause and more like a retrospective justification.

What makes this more than a family PR dispute is that presidential power is now being used in ways that might advance the Trumps’ case.
 
In August 2025, Trump signed the Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans executive order, prohibiting the denial of financial services based on "constitutionally or statutorily protected beliefs, affiliations, political views." It directly targets the concept of reputational risk – the same grounds both banks cited when closing Trump accounts. The FTC's recent letter to the payment companies references the same order.

Lost opportunity 

The next big platform at which to reiterate the refrain of woe – the 2026 edition of TOKEN2049 in Dubai – is gone, cancelled due to instability in the Middle East caused by the war President Trump started.
 
The cancellation is a small irony. The story the Trump family has built – of being forced into crypto (and the massive self-enrichment that came with it) by a hostile establishment – has become one of the most effective pieces of political-commercial storytelling in recent memory. The numbers bear that out. The facts, rather less so.