Donald Trump awoke on Saturday facing a stark new reality of legal obligations in excess of half a billion dollars after his stunning defeat in his civil fraud trial a day earlier, and questions swirled over his ability, or intention, to pay.
Yet the former president remained defiant late on Friday, insisting in a vitriolic rant from his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida that he would win an appeal against a New York judge’s ruling that he must pay more than $350m plus pre-judgment interest for intentional financial fraud stretching more than a decade.
Lashing out at the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who brought the case, and state judge Arthur Engoron, who issued the penalty, as “totally corrupt”, Trump slammed what he said was a “sham prosecution” driven by Joe Biden and the Democratic party to prevent him from returning to the White House.
“We’ll appeal, we’ll be successful,” he said. “A crooked New York judge ruled that I have to pay $355m for having built the perfect company. Great cash, great buildings, great everything.”
The precise amount Trump was ordered to pay is not entirely clear. At a press conference on Friday night, James put the figure at $463.9m. “That represents $363.9m in disgorgement, plus $100m in interest, which will continue to increase every single day until it is paid,” she said.
But with the ruling adding to the $83.3m he must pay writer E Jean Carroll from a defamation hearing last month, plus another $5m from the original case last year that found he sexually abused her, Trump’s legal debts are mounting quickly – and are estimated now at about $542m, including interest.
Nikki Haley, Trump’s sole remaining rival for the Republican presidential nomination, speculated he would siphon campaign cash from the Republican National Committee (RNC) to pay at least some of it.
“I don’t want the RNC to become his piggy bank for his personal court cases,” she told CNN’s The Source.
“We’ve already seen him spend $50m worth of campaign contributions … Now we see him trying to get control of the RNC so that he can continue not to have to pay his own legal fees.”
Trump has moved to install his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair of the RNC, with other loyalists in leadership positions.
Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, predicted that Trump would have to liquidate assets to satisfy the penalty against him.
“What else is he supposed to do at this point?” said Cohen, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to tax evasion as well as campaign finance violations and who testified against Trump in the fraud case brought by James.
Analysts say it’s possible he can delay paying up by appealing Engoron’s ruling. That’s what he did in the first Carroll case by depositing the $5m into a court-controlled account, plus an additional $500,000 in interest required by New York law.
But such a strategy would also be costly. One alternative is securing a bond paying only a portion upfront, which would come with interest and fees and the challenge of finding a financial institution willing to front him the money.
In the civil fraud case, it will be up to the courts to decide how much Trump must put up as he mounts his appeal. And he may be required to pay the full sum immediately after the appellate court rules, which could come as soon as this summer, according to University of Michigan law professor Will Thomas.
“New York’s judicial system has shown a willingness to move quickly on some of these Trump issues,” Thomas said.
“When we hear from the first appellate court, that’s a point where money is almost certainly going to change hands.”
Bloomberg estimates Trump’s net worth at $2.3bn. But it is unclear how much cash he has on hand. Much of his wealth is tied up in a global real estate portfolio, and James’s team determined in 2020 he had less than $100m in liquid assets.
Under the ruling, Trump would still be liable even if the Trump Organization declared bankruptcy. Enforcement of the judgment would be paused with a personal declaration of bankruptcy, but that would further harm his credibility as he pursues a return to the presidency.
The ruling, meanwhile, also makes it hard for any family member to run the Trump Organization in the near future.
Trump’s adult sons – Eric, the company’s chief executive, and Donald Jr – were each fined $4m and banned from serving as officers or directors of any corporation or entity in New York for two years. Donald Trump and two other executives were barred for three.
For James, the ruling marks the successful culmination of a case years in the making. Her office has been investigating Trump’s business since 2019, finding that it consistently overvalued its properties and other assets to illegally obtain favorable terms on loans and insurance.
One of the most striking examples concerned Trump’s triplex apartment in Manhattan’s Trump Tower, which records showed was reported to be 30,000 sq ft but is closer to 11,000 sq ft.
Another was the worth of Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort. While Engoron valued it at a conservative $18m, Trump continues to insist it is worth “50 to 100 times” that figure.
In determining the size of the fine, Engoron agreed with prosecutors that Trump saved about $168m in interest by inflating the value of assets. Another $126m profit came from selling the Old Post Office building in Washington DC that Engoron said Trump could not have bought without false financial statements.
In her own press conference on Friday night in Manhattan, James mocked the title of Trump’s bestselling 1987 business advice book.
“Donald Trump may have authored The Art of the Deal, but he perfected the art of the steal,” she said. “[He] falsely, knowingly inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself, his family and to cheat the system. This long-running fraud was intentional, egregious, illegal, and he did it, all of this, with the help of the other defendants, his two adult sons, and senior executives at the Trump Organization.
“The scale and the scope of Donald Trump’s fraud is staggering. And so is his ego, and his belief that the rules do not apply to him.
“We are holding him accountable for lying, cheating and a lack of contrition, and for flouting the rules of all of us. There cannot be different rules for different people in this country, and former presidents are no exception.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting
