International
Barron Trump Shut Out by Bank Amid Cancel Culture Accusations
From Reclaim The Net
Barron Trump, the youngest son of President Donald Trump, recently faced rejection while attempting to open a new bank account, according to claims from his mother, Melania Trump. She attributed the denial to political discrimination, labeling it as part of a larger “cancel culture” that she believes has targeted her family, raising significant concerns about potential civil rights violations.
Melania Trump, who shared this account in her newly released memoir titled “Melania,” expressed her deep frustration with the situation, revealing that she herself had been debanked.
The former first lady disclosed that shortly after the Trumps departed the White House in early 2021, her son, now 18, was blocked from opening an account at the financial institution she had long preferred.
Trump didn’t name the bank.
“I was shocked and dismayed to learn that my long-time bank decided to terminate my account and deny my son the opportunity to open a new one,” Melania wrote. She described the incident as an example of politically motivated bias, going so far as to question whether it constituted a breach of civil rights. Despite the gravity of the accusations, she chose not to reveal the name of the financial institution involved.
This denial, she argues, is just one example of the broader culture of exclusion and suppression her family has endured, a backlash that intensified in the wake of the January 6th Capitol events. According to Melania, this “venomous” form of cancel culture has extended beyond the political sphere, negatively affecting both her charitable efforts and business opportunities.
“The ‘cancel mob’ now includes corporations, traditional media, influential social media figures, and cultural institutions,” she wrote in her memoir, warning of the dangerous precedent this sets in modern society. She goes on to highlight how businesses—both large and small—continue to participate in this “disheartening trend,” one that she finds increasingly pervasive.
Debanking, the practice of denying individuals or organizations access to financial services based on their political, ideological, or social positions, has emerged as a controversial trend within the broader phenomenon of cancel culture. It represents a significant escalation in the methods used to isolate or punish those whose views or actions fall outside mainstream acceptability, raising critical concerns about freedom of expression, civil rights, and the role of private corporations in regulating societal behavior.
While cancel culture initially took root in social and cultural spaces — through boycotts, public shaming, and social media campaigns — its influence has gradually permeated other sectors, including finance. Debanking is a particularly powerful tool because, in an increasingly digital economy, access to financial services is essential for participation in society. Without access to a bank account, credit, or other financial tools, individuals and organizations can be effectively excluded from basic economic functions, making this tactic materially damaging.
By Ken Macon
AI-driven surveillance is shifting from spotting suspects to mapping ordinary life, turning everyday travel into a stream of behavioral data
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U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan declared a mistrial Monday afternoon in the high-profile foreign-agent and corruption case against former New York state official Linda Sun and her husband Chris Hu, after jurors reported they were hopelessly deadlocked on all 19 counts.
After restarting deliberations Monday morning with an alternate juror, the panel sent a note to Judge Cogan stating:
“Your honor, after extensive deliberations and redeliberations the jury remains unable to reach a unanimous verdict. The jurors’ positions are firmly held.”
Cogan brought the jury into court and asked the foreman whether they had reached agreement on any counts. They replied that they were deadlocked on every one. The judge then declared a mistrial.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander Solomon immediately told the court that the government intends to retry the case “as soon as possible.” A status conference is scheduled for January 26, 2026, to determine next steps.
Jury selection began November 10, 2025, and the government called 41 witnesses to the stand, compared with eight for the defense and one rebuttal witness for the prosecution. Deliberations began on December 12, and by this afternoon the jurors had sent three notes to the court — each indicating deadlock.
As The Bureau reported in its exclusive analysis Friday, the panel’s fracture had become visible as jurors headed into a second week of deliberations in a landmark foreign-agent and corruption trial that reached into two governors’ offices — a case asking a jury of New Yorkers to decide whether Sun secretly served Beijing’s interests while she and Hu built a small business and luxury-property empire during the pandemic, cashing in on emergency procurement as other Americans were locked down.
Prosecutors urged jurors to accept their account of a dense web of family and Chinese-community financial transactions through which Sun and Hu allegedly secured many millions of dollars in business deals tied to “United Front” proxies aligned with Beijing. The defense, by contrast, argued that Sun and Hu were simply successful through legitimate, culturally familiar transactions, not any covert scheme directed by a foreign state.
Sun and Hu face 19 charges in total, including allegations that Sun acted as an unregistered foreign agent for the People’s Republic of China; visa-fraud and alien-smuggling counts tied to a 2019 Henan provincial delegation; a multimillion-dollar pandemic PPE kickback scheme; bank-fraud and identity-misuse allegations; and multiple money-laundering and tax-evasion counts.
Prosecutors have argued that the clearest money trail ran through New York’s COVID procurement scramble and a pair of Jiangsu-linked emails. In closing, Solomon told jurors that Sun’s “reward” for steering contracts was “millions of dollars in kickbacks or bribes,” contending the money was routed through accounts opened in Sun’s mother’s name and via friends and relatives.
The government has tied those claims to a broader narrative — laid out in Solomon’s summation and dissected in The Bureau’s reporting — that Sun functioned as a “trusted insider” who repurposed state access and letterhead to advance Beijing’s priorities, including by allegedly forging Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature on invitation letters used for Chinese provincial delegations, while keeping those relationships hidden from colleagues. The defense, in turn, urged jurors to reject the government’s picture of clandestine agency and argued prosecutors had overreached by treating ordinary diaspora networking, trade promotion, and pandemic procurement as criminal conduct — insisting none of the evidence proved the “direction or control” element central to the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Whether a future jury will see the same evidence as corruption and covert foreign agency or as culturally familiar commerce and politics — will now be tested again, on a new timetable, in a courtroom that has already shown just how difficult this record is to unanimously interpret.
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