The Washington Post reports:

As Donald Trump considered another White House run last year, his company’s finances were at risk of spiraling into crisis.

The former president’s longtime lender and several banks with his deposits had cut ties in the days around the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by his supporters, at a time when Trump had hundreds of millions in loans coming due. In February 2022, the accounting firm that had worked for him for two decades dropped Trump and advised against relying on his “statement of financial condition,” a metric banks use to evaluate the risks of a loan.

Unless he found a new lender, Trump’s business empire could have been in jeopardy.

Then a new partner came to the rescue: A little known, online-only financial firm headquartered in a suburban San Diego office park.

Axos Bank, formerly known as Bank of Internet USA, had grown from one of the first digital banks into a profitable, publicly traded company in part by specializing in loans to borrowers other banks had shied away from — all while navigating federal regulator scrutiny over its internal operations and a congressional hearing that cited its involvement in high interest rates on some loans.

One day after the warning by Trump’s accounting firm became public, Axos’s blunt-spoken president and CEO — a Republican donor named Gregory Garrabrants — signed off on a $100 million loan for Trump Tower, the 58-story Manhattan skyscraper that had long been Trump’s home and base of operations, according to the bank.

Three months later, Garrabrants approved a second deal that provided $125 million for Trump’s Doral resort, a sprawling golf course complex in Miami-Dade County he had owned since 2012. Axos also financed part of a loan that helped facilitate the $375 million purchase of Trump’s D.C. hotel by a group of investors. [Continue reading…]