NYT (“Trump Spurned by 30 Companies as He Seeks Bond in $454 Million Judgment“):
Donald J. Trump’s lawyers disclosed on Monday that he had failed to secure a roughly half-billion dollar bond in his civil fraud case in New York, raising the prospect that the state could seek to freeze some of his bank accounts and seize some of his marquee properties.
The court filing, coming one week before the bond is due, suggested that the former president might soon face a financial crisis unless an appeals court comes to his rescue.
Mr. Trump has asked the appeals court to pause the $454 million judgment that a New York judge imposed on Mr. Trump in the fraud case last month, or accept a bond of only $100 million. Otherwise, the New York attorney general’s office, which brought the case, might soon move to collect from Mr. Trump.
Putting this dilemma in the larger context of the former President’s other financial difficulties, TNR’s Timothy Noah asks, “Is Donald Trump About to Go Bankrupt?“
Debt is becoming a major campaign issue in 2024. I don’t mean the national debt, which today stands at 99 percent of gross domestic product and which, the Congressional Budget Office projects, will total 116 percent of GDP 10 years from now. Nor do I mean student debt, which President Joe Biden has either reduced or eliminated for close to four million people, to the tune of nearly $138 billion.
No, the debt that haunts campaign 2024 is personal debt—specifically the half-billion in fines that former President Donald Trump owes from two recent legal judgments against him. It’s a campaign issue because, judging from Trump’s past behavior, he will pay off this half-billion-dollar debt just as soon as pigs fly. So it was hardly shocking when The New York Times reported Monday that the former president’s plea for a loan to secure a bond against the largest share of his mounting debt was spurned by some 30 companies, prompting his lawyers to tell a New York State judge that raising the money is a “practical impossibility.”But one firm, Chubb, was willing to offer Trump $91 million to secure his bond in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case. Given the extreme unlikelihood that its generosity will be repaid in the traditional way, it’s an eyebrow-raising arrangement, aswhoever lends Trump money will likely have to seek some other, less savory, compensation.
Let’s first take a tally of the red in Trump’s legal ledger. The first judgment against him is an $83 million penalty for continuing to shoot his mouth off on social media about Carroll. This comes after Carroll won a separate $5 million judgment against Trump for sexually abusing her three decades earlier, and for defaming her after she wrote up the incident in 2019.
The second judgment against Trump is a $355 million civil fraud penalty for misleading banks and insurers by pretending to be richer than he really was. Interest accrued before the ruling brought the total to about $454 million as of February 16, the day the judgment was handed down. Since then, additional interest has been piling up at a rate of $112,000 a day, adding another $3 million to the tab thus far.
Between the two court judgments and their attendant penalties, Trump owes $539 million. Even for Trump, that’s a lot of money. Trump is rich but not (as Justice Arthur Engoron, who presided over the second trial, pointed out) anywhere near so rich as he pretends. In April 2023, Trump said in a deposition that he had “substantially more than $400 million in cash,” but Mother Jones’s Julianne McShane says it’s more like $350 million. Forbes puts Trump’s net worth at $2.6 billion; the trajectory over the past decade has been downward. The $539 million Trump owes in penalties represents 20 percent of his fortune. That’s a lot.
Let’s not forget the additional financial liabilities Trump has lately accrued. There’s $392,000 that Trump paid The New York Times a couple of weeks ago for filing a frivolous lawsuit. There’s $938,000 that a judge last year ordered Trump and his attorney to pay Hillary Clinton for filing a frivolous lawsuit. There’s $382,000 that a London judge earlier this month ordered Trump to pay Orbis Business Intelligence, founded by Christopher Steele (of the “Steele dossier”), for filing a frivolous lawsuit. There’s the aforementioned $5 million that Trump paid earlier in the Carroll case. There’s $110,000 in contempt fees that Trump accrued for bad-mouthing New York Attorney General Letitia James during the civil fraud prosecution.
There’s whatever penalty the IRS may impose when it completes its audit of Trump’s 2015–2019 tax returns. There’s whatever lawsuits Trump’s current lawyers will file when he (or various Trump PACs, or the Republican Party) get tired of paying them. On top of all that, Deutsche Bank’s loans to Trump require him to maintain $50 million in “unencumbered liquidity” and a minimum net worth of $2.5 billion. Trump always thinks he’s bleeding money, but right now Trump really is bleeding money—at a hemorrhagic rate.
Were we talking about a random real estate conman without the political baggage, my concern here would be about the seeming injustice of his legal plight in the New York case. Leaving aside whether said person would have been sued by the city to begin with, it seems beyond weird to me that interest on the judgment accrued retroactively to well before the judgment was handed down, thus increasing it by more than a third. And the notion that one should have to post a bond for the entire judgment for the privilege of filing an appeal is essentially a denial of the right to appeal.
But, of course, we’re not talking about an ordinary conman but rather a former President who has a not insignificant chance of being re-elected to that office. One who, in his previous stint, violated pretty much every norm—to say nothing of several Federal laws and the Constitution itself–with respect to financial propriety.* There’s simply no doubt in my mind, then, that he’d be willing to sell his office to wipe out these debts.
Yet, here we are, roughly seven months from the election and he’s leading or even with President Biden in most of the national and swing state polling.
*Obviously, his long effort to set the stage for discrediting the results of the 2020 election were he to lose and his attempts to steal it afterward, including inciting a violent attack on the Capitol, made those acts pale in comparison. But the focus here is on his finances, not his other deficiencies.
