I don’t have the money: it’s the one admission that represents a deep wound to Donald Trump’s vanity and the image he has perpetuated over decades in American public life as the figurehead of unfathomable wealth.
But his latest legal complication leaves him in just that squeeze. As it stands, he has less than a week to honour the $464 million (€426 million) penalty he was ordered to pay to the state of New York in a civil fraud case last month.
On Monday, his lawyers conceded in a court filing that “ongoing diligent efforts have proven that a bond in the judgment’s full amount is a practical impossibility”. Thirty surety companies had been approached to take on the bond. All shied away. Trump’s lawyers appealed the verdict and the punitive sum, requesting the order be reduced to $100 million.
New York attorney general Letitia James brought the fraud case, claiming Trump and other defendants, including his two sons, had inflated the value of properties, golf clubs and hotels to a figure of $2 billion to secure more favourable loans for Trump group interests. As of now, if the penalty is not met in cash or bond, James can take action.
James has been relentless in her pursuit of the case against the former president as he walks through a blizzard of legal cases, and she could next week seek to seize his properties, including his Florida residence.
That spectacle, if it ever occurs, would happen slowly and through the courts but would be incalculably damaging to the Trump brand. And the former president moved quickly to present a dramatic outcome when he commented on the case. “Judge [Arthur] Engoron actually wants me to put up hundreds of millions of dollars for the right to appeal his ridiculous decision,” he told followers on Truth Social on Tuesday.
“In other words, he is trying to take my appellate rights away from me. Nobody has ever heard of anything like this before. I would be forced to mortgage or sell great assets, perhaps at fire sale prices, and if and when I win the appeal, they would be gone. Does that make sense? Witch hunt. Election interference.”
The message is an extension of Trump’s abiding theme on his various indictments: that his legal trials are the result of an ongoing deep state conspiracy. But his claim that this case is unprecedented has substance in the sense of the scale of the penalty he must meet. And his virulent criticism of the judge is a risky attitude to adopt given his legal team has just lodged its appeal.
But the fraud case, which was decided last month, is proving to be one of the stickier legal issues with which Trump is contending even as he stands as the Republican presidential nominee elect.
“He inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself, his family and to cheat the system. Donald Trump may have perfected the art of the deal, but he perfected the art of the steal,” James said in a press conference on the day the verdict went the way of her prosecuting team.
“And so, after 11 weeks of trial we showed the staggering extent of his fraud and exactly how Donald Trump and the other defendants deceived banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions for their own personal gain.”
Although she was not bound to do so, James gave the Trump legal team a grace period to meet the $464 million penalty.
Monday’s announcement was a de facto admission by Trump’s legal team that its client is in a bind. It has already been a horrendously expensive year for the Trump wallet. In early February, he was ordered to pay E Jean Carroll $83 million for defamation: just last week he secured a bond, after a lengthy search, from an insurance company willing to meet it. But obtaining a second bond for a figure four times that size has made other institutions nervous.
And the admission of inability to meet it casts further speculation on the depth of Trump’s wealth. At a deposition last October, he claimed to have cash reserves of “400 plus and going up substantially every month”. More recently, his lawyer Alina Habba made light of the bond issue. “He’s a billionaire. We know that. There will be a bond and there will be no issues with that.”
But now there is. Securing a bond of this scale means providing proof to the bond company there is sufficient liquidity to cover the amount. That none of the 30 companies were convinced of this implies either that Trump is not as wealthy as is believed or that his legal team has been taken unawares by the scale of this punishment. The third possibility is he will, at the last-minute, simply produce the money.
When news of the request for a reduced bond payment broke, Michael Cohen, who served for a decade as Trump’s personal attorney and who testified in the fraud case, made himself available for a CNN interview in which he said, with ill-disguised glee, that what he had told the House of Representatives oversight committee in 2018 – that his former client is “a con man, a fraud and a cheat” – holds true.
Furthermore, he speculated that any fire sale of assets would be doubly damaging to Trump’s overall wealth as it would lead to the quick sale of properties at a bargain price, with tax and outstanding mortgage debt to be repaid before the bond money could be accumulated.
A Wall Street Journal editorial on Monday, however, persisted in the view that the judgment against the former president “is overkill”.
“None of Mr Trump’s business partners lost money lending to him or claimed to have been deceived by his erroneous financial statements,” the editorial pointed out.
“No witness during the trial said his alleged misrepresentations changed its loan terms or prices, and there was no evidence that he profited from his alleged deceptions.”
It could be that the request for a smaller bond will be granted before next Monday and that this latest hyper-drama will blow over. But for the next few days, the Trumpian shirt collar may feel a little bit tighter.
- Listen to our Inside Politics Podcast for the latest analysis and chat
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Find The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date