Money is cold. It doesn’t have a pulse, it doesn’t have a manifesto, and despite what the Supreme Court says about corporations, it certainly doesn’t have a soul. But it does have a breaking point. For JPMorgan Chase, that point arrived in early 2021, when the nation’s largest bank decided that maintaining 50 separate accounts for Donald Trump was no longer worth the overhead.

This wasn't a sudden burst of civic virtue. Jamie Dimon didn't wake up and decide he’d finally had enough of the tweets. It was a math problem.

When you’re a bank managing over $3 trillion in assets, a single client—even one who happened to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—is a rounding error. But a "Politically Exposed Person," or PEP in industry shorthand, is a high-maintenance nightmare. Every time a PEP moves a dollar, a compliance officer somewhere in a windowless room has to sign off on it. When that PEP becomes associated with a riot at the Capitol and a flurry of secondary investigations, the cost of doing business spikes.

Fifty accounts. Think about the sheer administrative friction. We’re talking about personal checking, mortgage vehicles, and a labyrinth of LLCs designed to shield assets or manage properties. In the banking world, this is known as "reputational risk." In plain English, it means the client is a pain in the neck.

The bank’s decision to sever ties wasn't just about the optics of January 6th. It was about the regulatory glare that follows. The SEC, the Treasury, and various state AGs don’t just send letters; they send subpoenas. Each subpoena requires a team of lawyers billed at $900 an hour to sift through those 50 accounts. At a certain point, the interest Jamie Dimon is earning on Trump’s golf course loans doesn't cover the legal fees required to keep the accounts open.

Wall Street likes stability. They like boring. They like the kind of wealth that sits quietly in a vault and grows at 7% a year without making the evening news. Trump is the opposite of boring. He is a walking, talking volatility index.

The breakup was quiet, at first. Banks don't usually hold press conferences to announce they’re firing a client. They just send a certified letter giving the customer 30 or 60 days to move their "business relationship" elsewhere. It’s the financial equivalent of "it’s not you, it’s my compliance department." Except, in this case, it definitely was him.

This wasn't an isolated incident, either. Professional Services Network (PSN) and Deutsche Bank—Trump’s long-time lender of last resort—also started looking for the exit around the same time. But JPMorgan’s move was the most clinical. They looked at the spread. They looked at the heat. They realized that being the primary bank for a man under multiple federal and state microscopes was a liability they didn't need to carry.

It’s tempting to frame this as part of a "de-banking" trend, a buzzword the right wing loves to toss around. But that implies a coordinated ideological purge. This was more like an insurance company raising premiums on a guy who keeps juggling chainsaws in his living room. Eventually, they just stop renewing the policy.

The friction here is real. When a bank closes 50 accounts at once, it creates a logistical vacuum. You have to find a new home for tens of millions of dollars, update every automated payment, and renegotiate terms with smaller, more desperate lenders who are willing to take the risk—usually for a much higher price. It’s a tax on chaos.

We live in an era where the plumbing of the global economy is increasingly being used as a gatekeeper. If you can’t get a bank account, you can’t run a business. If you can’t run a business, you can’t project power. Trump found out that while he could survive a couple of impeachments, the cold, hard logic of a balance sheet is much harder to bully.

Jamie Dimon and his cohort didn't "cancel" Trump. They simply performed a cost-benefit analysis and found him wanting. They decided that the profit margin on a former president’s ego wasn't wide enough to cover the incoming legal bills.

If the most powerful bank in the world won’t take your money, what is it actually worth?