The Trump Organization is suing Capital One, alleging the bank closed its accounts over “woke” beliefs and for political and social reasons. It claims Capital One terminated over 300 of its accounts without cause in 2021 following the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol in Washington, DC.

The account closures also came while the Trump family and the Trump Organization, which is fully owned by the trust, were facing civil and criminal investigations over finances in March 2021.

The “unilateral decision came about as a result of political and social motivations and Capital One’s unsubstantiated, ‘woke’ beliefs that it needed to distance itself from President Trump and his conservative political views,” according to the lawsuit. The Trump Organization claims the decision by Capital One to close the accounts was an attack on free speech and free enterprise.

And, in the lawsuit, Trump also claims more broadly that consumers are losing access to the banking system because of differences in political views.

In response, a Capital One spokesperson said the lender “has not and does not close customer accounts for political reasons.”

In early 2021, shortly after the attack on the Capitol building, Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank stopped doing business with Trump, denying him sources of funding for his golf courses and hotels. Signature Bank specifically said at the time that it was closing Trump’s personal accounts due to the incidents on January 6 and called for the president to resign.

Lender deal in limbo

The lawsuit’s timing is unfortunate for the bank; it arrives just as it seeks final US regulatory approvals for an acquisition of Discover Financial Services. The acquisition would create the biggest credit card lender in the US and a true rival to American Express, Visa, and Mastercard.

So far, the Trump administration has not shown itself to be lenient in the merger and acquisition space. ​

The Justice Department has already filed a lawsuit seeking to block Hewlett Packard Enterprise from acquiring rival Juniper Networks. And Trump’s new Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson, has (so far) kept in place stricter Biden-era standards for policing US mergers.

With that said, the lender did manage to avoid a lawsuit brought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that had been filed less than a week before Trump’s inauguration. It was dropped earlier this month.

That lawsuit had claimed that the bank had cheated customers out of $2 billion by advertising a high-yield savings account that, in fact, paid very little interest. Trump’s newly constituted and defanged CFPB dropped the charges.