Trump’s Empty Pockets Make Him an Overseas Mark
The financial squeeze on the former president, who says he can’t come up with the cash to appeal his $454 million civil fraud judgment, intensifies his threat to national security.
Donald Trump, the self-described multibillionaire and “king of debt,” said he doesn’t have enough cash on hand to appeal a $454 million civil fraud judgment against him. Embarrassing, of course. ...
...his financial challenges make him a national security threat — something that has been a reality ever since he was elected president in 2016. He’s always been willing to sell his name to the highest bidder. There’s no reason to believe that Trump, whose businesses collected millions of dollars from foreign governments and officials while he was president, won’t have a for-sale sign out now that he’s struggling with the suffocating weight of court judgments.
Trump is being criminally prosecuted for allegedly misappropriating classified documents and stashing them at Mar-a-Lago, his home in Palm Beach, Florida. ...Trump’s motivations for taking the documents are unknown, but it’s reasonable to wonder whether he pondered trying to sell them. Monetizing the White House has been something of a family affair, after all. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been busy trading financially on his proximity to the former president, for example.
All of this was troubling enough during and after Trump’s first stay in the Oval Office. He wasn’t under the kind of financial pressure he’s contending with now, however, and it makes all of his current financial maneuvers even more questionable — and certainly much more threatening. ...
Did Trump flip-flop on his support for banning the social media platform TikTok from the US because Jeff Yass, a huge donor, has a large investment in the Chinese company that owns it? ...Did Trump meet with Elon Musk, the wealthy entrepreneur whose automotive, communication and space exploration assets have relied on close business and financial relationships with the federal government, because he needed to raise money quickly in the wake of the civil fraud judgment? ...
...New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully prosecuted Trump for lying about the value of his assets to banks and other parties, can seize his assets on March 25 to satisfy the $454 million judgment against him.
...In a court filing on Monday, Trump’s lawyers said that the judgment would require him to have cash reserves of $1 billion and that he doesn’t have the money. Trump testified during a deposition last year that he had “substantially in excess of 400 million in cash,” a sum that was “going up very substantially every month.” That was either untrue or Trump, who has a long history of lying, wants to avoid using his own money or somehow burned through that magical pile of cash over the last year.
Trump recently posted a $91.6 million bond to postpone payment of a verdict in his defamation loss to the writer E. Jean Carroll. ...
But bond underwriters balked at sponsoring Trump for the $454 million fraud verdict. Trump’s court filing Monday said that the developer had approached 30 companies to secure a bond but that he came up empty-handed. ...
Trump, who has routinely inflated the value of what he owns, has a net worth of about $3.1 billion, according to Bloomberg News. Most of this is tied up in illiquid real estate holdings...He has also always been fond of borrowing heavily against his assets, so it’s never entirely clear how much debt he’s carrying at any given time.
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...the going is likely to get rough for Trump as this plays out, and he’s likely to become more financially desperate with each passing day. That’s going to make him easy prey for interested lenders — and an easy mark for overseas interests eager to influence US policy.
An EXCELLENT, excellent article by Timothy L. O'Brien for Bloomberg.
