The news cycle is awash with speculation about whether or not the coup-attempting, oft-indicted, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will be able to pay a nearly half-billion-dollar fine imposed on him by a New York court after finding that Trump engaged in a long-term pattern of falsifying financial records.
On Monday, his lawyers told an appeals court that Trump doesn’t have the money and can’t get it. And now the clock is ticking, because the 30-day “grace period” New York Attorney General Letitia James gave Trump and his co-defendants to pay the fine expires this Monday, March 25. That’s when James can begin seizing Trump’s assets rather than patiently waiting for him to pony up the cash himself.
So what’s going to happen next? Well, this is Donald Trump we’re talking about so the short answer is: Buckle in, because nobody has any idea.
There’s still a good possibility that the appeals court Trump is currently begging for relief will allow him to pay a lesser amount as temporary bond while Trump works through every last nook and cranny of the appeals process. There’s little actual justification for lowering the amount, as James again noted in her most recent response to Trump’s delaying tactics, but if you’ve been paying any attention at all to the current state of the American legal system you’ll know that courts generally despise the thought of handing out big penalties to wealthy financial crooks. It’s simply not something our “justice” system can stomach, not with its innate presumptions about the importance of the rich.
So at any point before next Monday, and at any point after it, it wouldn’t be a shock to have the Appellate Division of Manhattan Supreme Court or a higher court tell James that because Trump is So Very Important, he doesn’t have to abide by the usual rules and will be allowed to post a bond for one-half or even one-quarter of the owed amount in order to keep his appeal churning through the system. It’s possible.
That’s the Hail Mary play Trump is currently attempting with his courtroom claims that he simply can’t come up with the cash. But there are a few other paths Trump can take as well.
It’s not necessarily true that Trump can’t come up with a bond in that amount. As James noted in her office’s response to Trump’s claims, while Trump claims no surety company will grant him a bond for the necessary $464 million, he makes no mention of the more likely scenario for obtaining a bond of that size: splitting it out to multiple surety companies, at $100 million per company. Trump would still have to put up whopping amounts of collateral, and it may well be true that the insurance companies he’s working with don’t like to take illiquid property such as real estate as collateral, but it’s possible.
Trump’s bigger problem is that every company in the world is now well aware of his pattern of inflating the worth of his own assets, so few of them would be sucker enough to take Trump’s valuations of his real estate holdings at face value. That’s a Trump problem, not an insurance company problem.
There’s always the crooked way out. Trump has bristled that the courts want him to hold a “fire sale” of his real estate assets in order to come up with the money—and indeed, a prospective buyer would have to be a stone-cold sucker to rush into a purchase of any of Trump’s properties between now and next Monday, all but abandoning due diligence efforts to make sure the properties were what Trump claimed them to be and that, for example, the supporting columns holding up Trump Tower were not at this point made entirely of load-bearing colonies of rats.
But Trump has always hung out in less-than-reputable circles, and he has an international reputation for being a sleazebag more focused on his own self-interests than on the nation’s welfare or, in fact, on anybody’s welfare.
That’s led to speculation that a foreign power might front Trump the money he needs, just Out Of The Goodness Of Their Hearts. The Saudi royal family pumped $2 billion into Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s new post-White House investment fund despite Kushner having little experience in such a role. Trump himself has also gotten a sprinkle of that Saudi money as part of his usual golf-and-flim-flam business. To a wealthy foreign government, owning a big chunk of a future authoritarian-minded presidency might be worth a half-billion of risk.
But it’d have to be a gift, not a loan, given the distinct possibility that Donald would announce from the Oval Office that from now on presidents don’t have to pay back their loans.
And the prospect of a president previously indicted for financial crookery owing a half-billion-dollar favor to a foreign government, a foreign national, or even a legitimate foreign-owned insurance company is such an enormous national security risk that national security experts are already breaking out in cold sweats.
What about bankruptcy? Will Trump declare bankruptcy? Trump loves bankruptcy! Trump and bankruptcy are lifelong friends; bankruptcy gave the toast at at least two of his wedding receptions.
Not a chance. Not going to happen. Entering bankruptcy protections during a presidential run would make him look weak, and would decimate the story of “business success” that constitutes Trump’s one and only claim to fame. People “close to Trump” are suggesting that he might rather chew his own arms off than take that route, just because of the damage it would do to his presidential run, and Trump needs to be president more than he needs the half-billion dollars.
The half-billion dollars won’t keep him out of prison if he’s found guilty of even one-tenth of the current criminal charges he’s facing. Regaining the presidency will keep him out of prison, even if he has to call up the National Guard to stand between him and any would-be officers of the courts. There’s no question which of the two crises, monetary or political, Trump is more concerned with.
That leaves the last option: Trump could do nothing, sit back, and let James seize his assets in order to pay his bills, and then have an Unholy Frothing Fit for the remainder of the election season about how cruelly the government has been treating him and how he needs to regain the White House in order to put a stop to things like “rich assholes facing the consequences of their own actions.”
Multiple reports now suggest that Trump is leaning harder toward that option than the others, apparently under the belief that he could simply take those properties back after winning his appeal. That does sound like Trump’s typical mindset, to be sure: He’s so convinced he’ll eventually win every battle he’s a part of that nobody can ever talk him out of it. He still likely thinks history will record him as being the “real” winner of the 2020 presidential election and he’s always insisting that any legal battle he doesn’t win was “rigged.” The man is nothing if not sure of himself.
And, again, Trump may well see the presidency as his Magic Consequences Reversal Tool. If the state of New York can seize his assets after proving he engaged in a long-term pattern of financial fraud, well then maybe when he becomes President King Guy he’ll tell federal agencies to go seize them right back. The man’s authoritarian impulses cannot be overstated, and neither can his increasingly tenuous grip on reality.
So that might be precisely what happens in the end: Trump can’t come up with the money, Trump stops trying to come up with the money, and Trump allows the state of New York to seize a half-billion dollars worth of assets so that he can turn the loss into a campaign publicity stunt, riling up his dangerous and most violent base members with new talk of government illegitimacy and supposed oppression.
It’s still possible an appeals court will short-circuit Trump’s comeuppance on the grounds of “Stop Being Mean To Important Rich Guy” between now and Monday. All we can do is wait and see.
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