The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of RedState.com.
UPDATE: PNC has now reinstated the MxM account, asserting that the closure was “a good faith error”:
PNC Financial Services Group reopened an account Friday belonging to the news aggregation app company launched last year by Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich, and said the account was “mistakenly closed due to a good faith error.”
— PNC Bank (@PNCBank) March 3, 2023
Original Story
The stories of businesses and organizations being squeezed or unceremoniously “canceled” by lending institutions and web-hosting services are too numerous to count. Strangely enough, it almost always seems to be groups on the right side of the political spectrum on the receiving end of this type of treatment.
As RedState has reported previously, JPMorgan Chase subsidiary WePay abruptly severed its relationship with the Defense of Liberty PAC less than a month before a scheduled event with Donald Trump Jr. in late 2021. Comic book creator Michael Baron had his crowdfunding effort removed from Kickstarter after the woke mob came calling in early 2023. Just last month, California State Senator Dave Min introduced a bill that would prevent the state from doing business with banks that work with gunmakers. In January 2021, Amazon Web Services dropped conservative social media app Parler off its cloud hosting services while Apple removed it from its app store. And let’s not even get started on what the Twitter Files have revealed.
In short, there is a notably concerted effort by some of the nation’s most powerful institutions to squash conservative and liberty-minded content and activities. Enter PNC Bank.
The financial services institution abruptly closed out the account of MxM News, a news aggregation app founded by Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich in 2022 as an alternative to news aggregation services like Apple News and Google News. Per Fox News Digital:
Budowich told Fox News Digital that he first learned of the abrupt closure of the company’s PNC account when he visited a Florida branch office to pay vendor invoices.
“The teller said he was unable to complete the transfers as the account had been closed and balance had been zeroed out,” Budowich told Fox News Digital.
“After being told to call a generic help line, I was informed by the PNC representative that per the terms and conditions, PNC reserves the right to re-evaluate their business relationships at any time and terminate accounts without cause,” Budowich said.
Budowich and Trump Jr. surmise the move is ideologically driven:
He added: “Woke corporations are using their terms and conditions like a guillotine over the head of every conservative entrepreneur.”
Trump Jr. told Fox News Digital that MxM News was created to “provide curated stories that are being silenced and or suppressed by big tech and the mainstream media.”
“However, as this shows, it’s not just the media that’s become plagued by the woke agenda,” he said. “It’s banks, it’s the entire corporate America.”
Though it offered no explanation as to the reason for terminating the business relationship, PNC insists, “our account closure decisions are never driven by politics.”
Fortunately, for MxM, the account closure presented only a momentary speed bump.
Trump Jr. told Fox News Digital that the closure was “a minor setback for MxM News that we were able to quickly resolve.”
As Trump Jr. notes, however, smaller businesses and start-ups may not be as well-equipped to weather this type of financial disruption, which is rightly cause for concern.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member