Jamie Dimon has worked carefully to rebuild his broken relationship with President Trump. The fight over Fed chair Jerome Powell is threatening to blow it up again.
The head of JPMorgan Chase, well-known for impassioned stances on policy, had tempered his approach with Trump over the past year, offering overall expressions of support with careful criticism of specific policy details. It appeared to be working—he had met with the president and White House officials several times to discuss economic policy in recent months.
On Tuesday, Dimon joined the voices publicly warning the administration not to interfere with the Federal Reserve. Ironically, the president had offered him the job as Fed chair months prior during a meeting in the White House, according to people briefed on the discussion, though Dimon took the offer as a joke.
After Powell disclosed Justice Department subpoenas against the Fed over the weekend, Dimon spoke out in his defense. He said he didn’t “agree with everything the Fed has done” but said almost everyone knew that “anything that chips away” at the central bank’s independence “is probably not a good idea.”
The response from Trump was swift: Dimon is “wrong” and “it’s fine what I’m doing, and we have a bad Fed person.”
“We should have lower rates,” Trump said on Tuesday. “Jamie Dimon probably wants higher rates, maybe he makes more money that way.”
Dimon, one of the most powerful CEOs in the country, has worked since Trump was re-elected to stay on his good side, agreeing with much of Trump’s agenda in public and reserving his harsher critiques for private conversations with Trump and administration officials.
Among business leaders, Dimon has served as a model in the art of gently pushing back against the president while maintaining a good rapport with the administration—with some inside the White House telling other executives they should act like Dimon. That may have reached its limits with the blowup over Powell.
As the longtime head of the nation’s biggest bank, Dimon has enjoyed a level of celebrity and public respect that few other executives have, giving him a platform to promote policies he says are crucial for American prosperity.
The 69-year-old had been a regular adviser on economic policy in the first Trump administration, but their relationship broke apart when JPMorgan closed Trump’s bank accounts after the Capitol riot in 2021. Trump called Dimon a “highly overrated globalist” in 2023, and just after the inauguration, he slammed Dimon by name for allegedly “debanking” conservatives.
It was a bad position to be in as Trump set out to shake up the economy, greatly expand the government’s role in business and go after those who crossed him.
In April, when Trump’s tariff plans roiled markets, Dimon got through to the president. He went on Fox Business, where in an interview with Maria Bartiromo he lent support to the general idea of tariffs and acknowledged the need to reform U.S. trade policy—but warned specifics of the Trump plan risked causing a recession.
A few hours later, Trump paused the tariffs and said he had been listening to Dimon. “He was very good,” Trump said to the press outside the White House. “He said something has to be done with tariffs and trade. He understood it. He’s very smart.”
In three White House meetings since July, Dimon and the president have talked about consumer spending patterns and how regulations made it harder to build affordable housing, according to people familiar with their talks.
Dozens of CEOs said in interviews they are struggling to get or maintain access to the president while also speaking honestly about disagreements over policy, a growing problem as Trump increasingly inserts himself into business affairs.
Trump said on Sunday he might block Exxon Mobil from drilling in Venezuela after the company’s CEO publicly acknowledged the barriers involved in doing business in the country.
The president has also made clear he will take part in the decision over the deal for Warner Bros. Discovery, instead of leaving it only to regulators.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos has made a $72 billion bid for the movie company and has been seeking to get close to Trump to win his backing, including visits to Trump’s Florida club, Mar-a-Lago. On the other side are David Ellison and his billionaire father, Larry Ellison, who already have close ties to the White House and are trying to overtake Netflix’s deal with one from Paramount Skydance.
One of Trump’s demands is that the new owner sells off cable news giant CNN, a frequent target of the president’s ire.
Dimon and JPMorgan have a lot riding on a good relationship with Washington. The president has accused JPMorgan and other banks of discriminating against conservatives and threatened fines. On Friday, Trump called for a temporary 10% cap on credit-card interest rates—which would be a deep financial hit to many banks. Credit-card interest rates average around 23%.
Dimon is also pitching to have JPMorgan run the initial public offering for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which could happen this year. It will likely be among the biggest stock sales in history, and JPMorgan stands to earn tens of millions of dollars or more in fees if Trump picks it. CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other large banks have also met with the president about the IPO. Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte has said Trump is the ultimate decision maker on all aspects of the Fannie/Freddie deal.
Already, Dimon and others in the banking industry are seeing some of their long-held wishes granted by the administration, including the defanging of a consumer-finance advocate, the easing of bank supervisory rules and the rollback of regulations on high-risk lending. Banks raked in high profits in 2025 amid a strong economy and a pickup in dealmaking that was fueled by the belief that regulators won’t kill deals.
“I think it’s my job and other people’s job in business to help make your country better,” Dimon said on CNBC this summer when asked about The Wall Street Journal’s reporting that he was rebuilding his relationship with Trump. “One of the great lessons anywhere, no matter where you are, is that collaboration works and fighting does not.”
Patricia Wexler, a JPMorgan spokeswoman, said, “This is not new. We show up, advocate for improving the country and engage with any administration, any time.”
The White House said the president has close relationships with countless business leaders across industries that are paying off for the American people. The administration is working with businesses “to secure historic deals to cut drug prices, investments to make and hire in America, and voluntary agreements to drop artificial ingredients from our food supply,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said.
‘Keep your mouth shut’
Dimon, Apple’s Tim Cook and a few other CEOs are now seen as the executives largely representing corporate America to the White House.
Apple in February announced it plans to spend more than $500 billion over the next four years to expand manufacturing in the U.S., part of the president’s pledge to “reshore” manufacturing. In August, Cook presented Trump in the Oval Office with a U.S.-made 24-karat gold and glass statue in honor of an additional $100 billion investment pledge. At that event, Trump announced that tech companies that invested in the U.S. would be exempt from 100% tariffs on chip imports, a win for Apple.
Cook manages to bypass issues where he may disagree with Trump, such as around social policies, and stay focused on business, according to people familiar with the matter.
Some White House officials have told executives to find similar projects to announce to get on the president’s good side. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
Dimon, a registered Democrat, has made clear he and JPMorgan are on board with much of the Trump agenda. He has detailed to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent how his company is working to support small-town banks and Main Street businesses. And JPMorgan recently unveiled a $1.5 trillion commitment to finance and invest in U.S. supply chains and national defense, the kind of “America First” project Trump has championed.
Business leaders in interviews said they are optimistic about the Trump administration’s reduced regulation, tax cuts and broadly pro-business policies, which they see as a welcome shift from the Biden administration. At the same time, some said they harbor private worries about tariffs, executive orders targeting them or their companies, government investments in their industries and the possibility of being singled out publicly or on social media by the head of state.
Trump has been far more involved in the business decisions of companies than previous presidents.
He has called on Intel’s CEO to resign, and the federal government took a stake in the company in exchange for subsidies. He said he negotiated a 25% cut of the revenue from certain chip sales by Nvidia for the U.S. government. He called Jeff Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, to get him to reverse a decision the e-commerce giant made to break out the cost of tariffs in some of the prices consumers saw when shopping online. He’s also put a halt to offshore wind projects, although legal challenges are being addressed by courts. While the Interior Department cited security concerns, the president has railed against the turbines as eyesores and bad for property values. “Big ugly windmills, they ruin your neighborhood,” he said in January 2025.
“CEOs are having to balance what is actually the best for the business and for the shareholders in both the short-term and the long-term,” said Scott Lincicome, a researcher at the Cato Institute. “And in the short-term, it might be best to just keep your mouth shut or even praise the administration.”
Some CEO members of the Business Roundtable and the trade group’s leader, Joshua Bolten, last year informally discussed making a statement opposing government equity stakes into companies and government interventionism, according to leaders familiar with the talks.
Some of the executives ultimately felt speaking out publicly wouldn’t work and that it could be more effective to have private conversations with Trump or other government officials, the leaders said, who added that private discussions with the administration have taken place.
Even in smaller groups, executives have been careful about raising concerns. In late September, a number of business leaders, lawmakers and celebrities—from BlackRock CEO Larry Fink to Harvard President Alan Garber to comedian Jerry Seinfeld—gathered in Aspen, Colo., at the annual VIP conference called “The Weekend.”
The first session on Friday morning was “Leadership in Uncertain Times,” including Michael Dell, Marriott CEO Anthony Capuano and Land O’Lakes CEO Beth Ford, according to an agenda reviewed by the Journal. While some attendees privately expressed frustrations with evolving tariffs and immigration policy, there was muted public conversation about the Trump administration’s policies, attendees said.
On Saturday, during a session on the economic outlook, Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, a big Republican donor, expressed dismay with parts of Trump’s economic and immigration policies, the attendees said. Others didn’t join Griffin in his comments to the group.
In response to questions from the Journal, Griffin said in a statement that securing the border should be paired with policies that continue to attract highly skilled legal immigrants. He said Trump’s policies to cut unnecessary regulation and pursue fair trade have expanded opportunities for businesses and workers. But he said, “I remain opposed to broad tariffs, which act as a regressive tax on consumers, invite cronyism, and erode the competitive forces that drive American innovation.”
Some executives said that they have made a business decision to support the president’s pet projects, such as donating funds to build a ballroom at the White House and launching a prescription drug sale website.
Other executives said they are keeping their heads down. After Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in August indicated the government may take a stake in Lockheed Martin, other defense companies “went into a panic attack,” executives at competitors said. Northrop Grumman’s head of government affairs called around asking advice from other companies in the industry to see if they should do anything. The consensus? “Don’t say anything; it’s so crazy, it’ll go away,” the executives said.
A Northrop Grumman spokeswoman said it’s normal practice to coordinate with other companies and trade groups in the industry on a variety of topics and issues. A Lockheed spokesperson didn’t comment.
Dimon as statesman
Several CEOs, long used to Dimon’s unofficial role as a statesman for corporate America on economic and other policies, said they were surprised he hasn’t been more publicly vocal in this Trump administration compared to his past stances with Trump. Wexler, the JPMorgan spokeswoman, said Dimon’s comments defending Powell on Tuesday “contradicts the anonymous group’s comment.”
During the first Trump administration, Dimon was the chairman of the Business Roundtable and met regularly with the president. He was publicly critical of the Trump administration’s pullout from the Paris climate accords and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as well as rules that made it harder for skilled immigrants to obtain visas. He also distanced himself from Trump after the president said both sides were to blame after violence at a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
Dimon was also openly critical of President Joe Biden and said his administration was “enormously naive” for halting the development of liquefied natural gas export terminals and blamed higher inflation on its Covid-era stimulus checks. He came up with the term “blue tape” to refer to Democrats’ proclivity to add bureaucracy for businesses and backed industry lawsuits against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for attempting to cap customer fees. He didn’t speak often with Biden, who didn’t spend much time with CEOs since aides kept meetings short and controlled access, with top advisers acting as go-betweens, the Journal has reported.
Despite their public disputes, Dimon had a cordial relationship with Trump. After Dimon had emergency heart surgery in March 2020, the president wished him well during a televised briefing on the Covid-19 virus.
That ended following the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. JPMorgan closed many accounts connected to the president, his family and his businesses. People in Trump’s orbit have charged that those closures were politically motivated. JPMorgan denied those claims.
In 2022, Dimon said Trump’s denial that he lost the election was tantamount to treason, and while he later said he sympathized with Trump voters’ anxieties about America, he still distanced himself from the president’s rhetoric.
Now, Dimon is considered by some in the White House as the most actively engaged bank CEO, even though he hasn’t spent as much time with Trump as he did in the first term.
He and his team are in regular contact with Susie Wiles and James Blair, Trump’s chief of staff and her deputy, as well as cabinet members such as Lutnick and Bessent. Executives at other companies said those people are the most receptive to hearing their perspectives on the Trump administration’s policies.
Dimon spent the back half of the year both praising the administration in public while pushing back hard in private against policies that he believed were wrong-footed.
In August, Trump blasted JPMorgan and its peers with an executive order on what he and others say is an anticonservative bias by the nation’s biggest banks. The order has led to regulatory investigations into JPMorgan, Bank of America and others, and their findings could result in financial penalties or more.
Dimon later spoke out in defense in an interview on Fox Business, saying JPMorgan doesn’t debank customers for political reasons and saying he supported the Trump administration’s broader move to modify regulations that could incentivize a bank to close accounts.
Wexler, the JPMorgan spokeswoman, said “we serve more than 85 million customers in all 50 states and have a longstanding practice of serving customers across every political belief, income level and community. Every year, we continue to grow our branch network, hire employees nationwide, lend everywhere, and expand access to banking services for all communities.”
In October, Bessent said the Trump administration wanted to level the playing field between big banks and their smaller competitors. “No longer will regulation serve to entrench big banks and empower Washington bureaucrats to the detriment of community banks,” the Treasury secretary said at a conference.
Dimon spoke with Bessent and told him in what people familiar with the matter called a spirited conversation that JPMorgan was already the biggest banker for smaller financial institutions and also banked millions of small businesses. Bessent and Dimon continue to have a good relationship and speak about economic policy matters, people familiar with the matter said.
Around that time, JPMorgan committed to facilitating $1.5 trillion in investments for companies deemed “critical to national economic security and resiliency” over the next 10 years. That includes up to $10 billion of its own capital it plans to use to take stakes in companies such as defense contractors, rare earth manufacturers and artificial-intelligence firms.
In a press conference where he announced the initiative, Dimon said he didn’t coordinate with anyone at the White House beforehand—but he added, “I hope they’ll appreciate this.”
Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, commended JPMorgan days later for helping protect America’s critical supply chains.
Battles between Trump and Dimon still cropped up. In November, while headlines were dominated by Congress’s release of emails from Jeffrey Epstein, in which the now-deceased convicted sex offender talked about Trump, the president called for investigating JPMorgan, Epstein’s bank until 2013.
The bank, which has said it regrets its ties to the financier, fired back that it had raised red flags with the government, which had failed to act.
And while many CEOs have embraced the White House ballroom building project, Dimon and JPMorgan haven’t been on the list. Dimon said he didn’t want to do something that would get him in trouble with the next administration’s Justice Department.
“We’re quite conscious of the risk we bear by doing anything that looks anything like buying favors or anything like that,” Dimon said on CNN when asked why he hadn’t donated. “We have to be very careful about how anything is perceived and also how the next DOJ is going to deal with it.”
Write to Alexander Saeedy at alexander.saeedy@wsj.com, AnnaMaria Andriotis at annamaria.andriotis@wsj.com, Emily Glazer at Emily.Glazer@wsj.com and Brian Schwartz at brian.schwartz@wsj.com