Convicted felon President Trump’s regime is considering an executive order or some other regulatory action to force retail banks to collect citizenship info by means of requiring new and existing depositors to submit passports and/or birth certificates, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Now assume this is just another bullshit “trial balloon” that you never hear of again, like last September when they spitballed banning trans people from owning guns to Newsmax and were met with immediate blowback from a MAGAmerica capable of seeing the slippery slope that lay immediately beyond such action. Still, the Journal’s correct to take it seriously as this is not so much of a slope as a bottomless chasm for the paper’s constituency of oligarchs and their lowly thralls.

“Discussions about the potential executive order have alarmed banks, which have lobbied Treasury and questioned the legal basis for the proposal,” the Journal writes without having to spell out what it would mean to order banks to hassle existing US citizen depositors for documentation over this shit – on top of abruptly amputating a non-insignificant portion of their current and future customer base. One could also spend quite a while going into the weeds on how that one single sentence summarizes the delta between the “OMG! YES! THE SWING STATE VOTERS SICK OF THE BIDEN BORDER NIGHTMARE JUST GOT US A HUGE TAX CUT AND DEREGULATION WINDFALL!” glee of December 2024 and the “Whoa, pump the breaks there, you fat man-boobed hustler. We didn’t buy you millions of stupid poor people’s votes for this. ICE OUT OF OUR BRANCHES! NO DEPOSITOR IS ILLEGAL ON STOLEN LAND! STOP DEPORTING GRANDMAS WITH SAVINGS ACCOUNTS!” of now but those two disembodied rants from the financial industry donor class button it up succinctly.

The whole caper also speaks to the gutter laziness of the reich. Like they’re more willing to piss off the GOP’s ATM by strongarming them into self-harm than they are willing to just do the actual fucking work themselves. All that shit about deporting 20 million undocumented people and now going on 14 months later they’re “weighing” forcing banks to police their own customer base by means of red tape and private sector bureaucracy. It just drips of the low-testosterone institutional gimmickry of cubicle-dwelling weenies and Excel macros in lieu of the hard-charging coal-rolling blitzkrieg of skull balaclavas and “fuck you libs” door-to-door Insurrection Act dominance. All too fitting that the median-income Trump voter have his daydream of what could have been interrupted by an SMS from Wells Fargo saying “**URGENT** Your checking account has been closed due to non-compliance with updated US Treasury Department requirements for citizenship verification. You will receive a certified check for the $3,129.85 balance in 4 to 6 weeks. Do not reply to this message” but again, it’s all far more likely than not to be yet another quickly deflated “trial balloon.”