By Christina Maas – Reclaim The Net
The White House has decided that banks shouldn’t play political bouncer, at least the banks that answer to federal regulators.
In a flourish of pen and podium, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that supposedly halts “politically motivated debanking.” That’s the practice where someone loses their bank account, not because they bounced checks or defaulted, but because someone behind a desk didn’t like their politics, religion, or choice of lawful business.
The order’s language is strong. Trump, who has a personal score to settle in this arena, told CNBC’s Squawk Box, “The banks discriminated against me very badly. They totally discriminate against – I think me, maybe even more, but they discriminate against many conservatives.”
While the press release version sounds like a broad defense of free financial access, the actual order is more of a neighborhood watch than a citywide ban. It applies only to banks, savings associations, credit unions, and other outfits directly supervised by federal banking regulators or the SBA.
That means Visa and Mastercard, the twin tollbooth operators of the global payments highway, are untouched. Same with PayPal, Stripe, and other tech-driven platforms that have spent years quietly freezing out lawful but unpopular actors with all the due process that in the real world wouldn’t even get you a parking ticket.
These companies have been the muscle in modern financial blacklisting, but they will not get so much as a warning letter under this policy.
For the institutions it does cover, the order tells regulators to rip out any guidance that allows “reputation risk” to be used as an excuse for cutting customers loose over political or religious reasons. SBA-partner banks are instructed to reinstate clients who were politically deplatformed. Federal watchdogs are told to fine, sanction, or otherwise make life difficult for any bank caught doing it again. Cases that appear to involve religion must be sent to the Attorney General for potential civil action.
It’s a tidy list of marching orders that leaves one wondering why the most aggressive financial censors, the ones that dominate online commerce, get to keep their scissors. The order takes a few swings at the branches while leaving the trunk standing.
If the point was to stop political discrimination in finance, it’s an odd choice to leave out the players who can cut you off from selling so much as a baseball card online.
President Trump has long argued that regulators wield excessive control over banks. In June, he told reporters, “The regulators control the banks” and that when an administration pushes regulators to target certain institutions, “they really control it.”
The move takes aim at a framework built during the Obama years, when the Justice Department advised regulators to treat “negative public opinion” as a legitimate risk factor. That phrase became a free pass for banks to exit relationships with any client who might attract headlines or activist campaigns. It was sold as prudence. It quickly turned into a permission slip for politically driven account closures.
The personal angle is never far from the story. First Lady Melania Trump wrote in her memoir that her own account was abruptly closed after years with the same bank. She added that Barron Trump was refused an account entirely after January 6, 2021. It was not just political activists or small-business owners on the wrong side of the ideological fence getting hit.
But while the order is a strong start, its scope makes sense only if you believe banks are the ultimate choke point. They are not. There are thousands of banks and credit unions in the United States, and if one decides to cut you off, you can usually find another willing to take your business. Even for niche or controversial industries, a determined customer can work the phones long enough to land an account somewhere. The process may be frustrating, but it is rarely terminal.
Payment processors are a different animal entirely. Visa and Mastercard are more than dominant; they are the rails on which nearly all card-based transactions run. Lose access to them, and it does not matter how many banks are technically willing to serve you; none can process your payments without going through those networks.
By leaving them outside the reach of the order, the administration has left the real monopolies in place, fully empowered to decide who gets to participate in the economy.
These episodes have a common theme. No judge ever gavels the decision into law. No statute formally bans the activity. Instead, a handful of private companies, armed with vague terms like “brand goodwill” and “objectionable content,” decide which lawful speech, products, and services can continue to exist in the marketplace.
The policies that justify these decisions are written in flexible corporate legalese, which means they can be tightened overnight without public debate or legislative oversight.
The result is a shadow regulatory system. In practice, processors operate as choke points, able to shut down businesses, advocacy groups, or entire industries with a single compliance memo. Their decisions may follow genuine public outrage or political pressure, but once implemented, they set precedents that are difficult to reverse.
The historical examples are instructive.
In December 2010, after publishing hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks became the subject of one of the first coordinated global payment blockades.
Within days, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Bank of America, and Western Union cut off all processing of donations to the organization. None of these companies acted on a court order. There were no formal criminal charges in the United States at the time. The justification varied, with some citing “illegal activity” and others pointing to “terms of service violations,” but the result was the same: WikiLeaks lost roughly 95 percent of its donation revenue in a matter of weeks.
It would take years for European courts to rule parts of the blockade unlawful, by which point the damage would be irreversible. The lesson was clear: a small set of intermediaries could, without legal process, financially disable a global publisher.
In 2015, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart decided that Backpage.com’s adult services section was a menace. Lacking the authority to outlaw it, he sent letters to Visa and Mastercard urging them to stop processing payments for the site. The card networks complied almost immediately, severing Backpage from one of its key revenue streams.
Backpage sued, arguing that Dart’s letter-writing campaign was a First Amendment violation. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, ruling that his actions amounted to “an unconstitutional attempt to suppress lawful speech.”
By then, the site’s payment pipelines had already been dismantled. It survived on alternative methods until 2018, when federal authorities seized the domain and charged its operators. The fact that the initial financial blockade stood for years, despite a federal court calling it unlawful coercion, underscored just how much power the processors held.
Gab, the social network that promotes an absolutist free-speech stance, has faced repeated financial exclusion. According to CEO Andrew Torba, Visa blacklisted Gab for “promoting hate speech,” a claim he denies. Torba says the ban extended beyond the company itself, cutting off accounts belonging to his family members.
The experience reinforced a central fact: without the networks, a platform’s ability to transact at scale is permanently crippled.
What makes these cases more consequential than a bad Yelp review is the absence of meaningful alternatives. A business can switch banks if a local branch manager decides it is too controversial. It cannot simply invent a replacement for Visa or Mastercard’s global processing network.
Just recently, independent developers began noticing their games quietly disappearing from Valve’s Steam platform. The titles targeted were not illegal, nor had they been flagged by ratings boards. Most were adult-themed visual novels or indie games. Developers who reached out to Valve were told the removals were driven by “rules and standards” from its payment processors, specifically naming Visa, Mastercard, and their acquiring banks.
These standards, developers said, were being interpreted to prohibit certain depictions outright, regardless of local laws or the games’ ratings. There was no published list of banned content and no transparent appeals process. For some developers, this meant losing their primary source of income overnight.
A similar pattern hit Itch.io, the independent game marketplace known for hosting independent creators, reported being informed that certain adult games could no longer accept credit card payments through the platform.
The stated reason was compliance with payment processor “brand safety” and “high risk” guidelines. While alternative payment methods like cryptocurrency and third-party wallets were offered, they covered only a fraction of potential buyers.
Both incidents showed how the networks’ unpublished content standards now reach deep into digital marketplaces, dictating what kinds of games can be sold not just in the adult industry, but in mainstream online storefronts.
The executive order will get headlines and a signing ceremony, but the power dynamic it claims to tackle remains intact. The same handful of companies still hold the master keys to online commerce, able to lock out any target without court orders, public hearings, or meaningful oversight. The administration’s policy treats them like harmless bystanders rather than the architects of the system it claims to reform.
The order, while a step in the right direction, leaves the most widespread form of financial censorship exactly where it was before the cameras rolled, hidden in corporate terms of service and enforced by compliance officers who answer to no electorate. The banks may have lost the cover of “reputation risk,” but the real gatekeepers never needed it in the first place.