Donald Trump is losing everything
Donald Trump has to come up with about $100 million by the end of the week in order to post bond in his $83 million E. Jean Carroll judgment, or else the collection process will begin. Trump has to come up with about half a billion dollars before the end of the month in order to post bond in his New York civil fraud judgement. There’s been a lot of speculation about what Trump will or won’t be able to come up with. But here’s what we do know.
Trump has asked the court to delay the deadline in his Carroll verdict by three days. That’s a brief and oddly specific amount of time. So it points to the possibility that Trump is indeed trying to pull together the $100 million, and just needs a little more time to pull it off. Does this mean that Trump does indeed have $100 million of his own assets available to use for bond? Maybe.
Trump has also asked the courts to cut his half a billion dollar fraud verdict bond down to a small fraction of that amount. That won’t happen. But it is enough to make you wonder if Trump’s plan is to try to post $100 million in the Carroll verdict, post another $100 million in the fraud verdict, and fend off collections in both cases while on appeal.
Even if this is Trump’s plan, this doesn’t mean that he’s actually going to be able to pay it off. When a broke tenant asks the landlord for three more days to come up with the rent money, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to have the rent in three days. It means they want to spend three more days trying to come up with it. It doesn’t mean their aunt is actually going to float them the money. It just means they want time to go ask their aunt.
Of course most of the internet thinks that someone is going to bail Trump out. But that’s overly simplistic fantasyland thinking. If Trump received dirty money from a foreign entity, the courts could just refuse the money. And while everyone seems to think that someone like Musk or Ramaswamy is going to bail Trump out, it’s difficult to imagine such a scenario. Once it inevitably came out who paid Trump’s bond, it would prove to everyone that Trump is 1) broke and 2) owned by someone else. Trump’s ego probably wouldn’t allow #1 to happen, and #2 would finish him off politically.
So the most likely scenario is that Donald Trump cobbles together whatever he can from within his own troubled real estate portfolio, and either pays off the smaller Carroll bond but not the larger New York bond, or begs the courts to let him pay a fraction of each. Either of these scenarios would very likely go poorly for Trump. Remember, there truly are no magic carpet rescue rides in these situations.
