Donald Trump has to beg for donations after mammoth punishment for fraud

Washington. The verdict had barely been announced when Donald Trump had his campaign organization send a text message to all his supporters. “Message from Trump” was written in bold above the message and behind it in large letters “Election Influence.” The ex-president urged that he needed “a million Trump patriots” to make a donation before the end of the day. You could choose amounts between 20 and 3,300 dollars.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee is in desperate need of cash after Judge Arthur Engoron sentenced him to a massive $355 million fine in the high-profile New York fraud trial on Friday. With interest, the sum is likely to rise to more than $400 million. It was only at the end of January that a jury fined him $83 million in another libel trial involving author E. Jean Carroll.

The flashy politician Trump is cash-strapped

As in the defamation case, Trump will also appeal the fraud verdict. However, he must deposit the money within 30 days. This won’t drive him bankrupt: his fortune is estimated at between $2.6 and $3.1 billion. But the majority of it is stuck in real estate, golf clubs or hotels. The 77-year-old himself estimated his liquid assets in the process at “$400 million plus”. The swank entrepreneur is now at least cash-strapped.

The hefty penalty is the constitutional state’s acknowledgment that Trump manipulated the value of his assets for years in order to get cheap insurance and loans. According to the court, his two sons Donald Jr. and Eric were also involved, and they each have to pay a fine of $4 million. Judge Engoron also banned the senior for three years and the sons for two years from holding management positions in their New York companies. Engoron was particularly annoyed by the fact that Trump did not admit any wrongdoing and that there was therefore a risk of repetition: “Your complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on the pathological,” the lawyer decided.

A question of honour

Unlike the four criminal trials that Trump faces in the next few months, he did not face a prison sentence in the New York civil trial. Nevertheless, this procedure was particularly important to him: after all, it was about his reputation as a supposedly successful businessman. In recent months, the ex-president has repeatedly personally taken part in the negotiations in a court in the financial district of Manhattan. “I will fight for my name and my reputation,” he said and insulted and defamed the judge and Attorney General Letitia James.

The findings of the trial, in which 40 witnesses were heard, diametrically contradict the real estate mogul’s colossal self-image. Trump listed his penthouse in Trump Tower at 2,800 square meters in the business documents, even though it was “only” 1,000 square meters. He estimated the value of his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida at $612 million. However, the estimate did not take into account the municipality’s strict usage and development requirements, which pushed the actual market value down to $28 million. “Donald Trump may have written the book ‘The Art of the Deal,’ but he perfected the art of fraud,” prosecutor James said after the verdict.

According to the court, Trump saved $168 million in interest costs

Trump used the absurdly exaggerated assets information in his business documents to get cheap loans – including from Deutsche Bank. According to the court’s findings, this saved him a total of $168 million in interest costs. But Deutsche Bank really wanted to do business with the real estate mogul and accepted the moon numbers. She didn’t complain either. That’s why Trump claims that no one was harmed by his frauds.

“This is Russia. This is China. “This is all coming from Biden,” the ex-president raged on Friday evening, both angry and confused, at an impromptu press conference in front of his Mar-a-Lago property: “This is a witch hunt the likes of which our country has never seen before. You know something like that from banana republics.”

Next begging letter: “You want to destroy my existence”

Shortly thereafter, his campaign organization sent out the next urgent begging letter. “They want to destroy my existence,” Trump sounded the alarm. In fact, it’s not just the recent sentences that are depressing him, but also the horrendous legal fees in his four criminal proceedings. According to research by the New York Times, the presidential candidate has already misappropriated $50 million in campaign donations for his legal defense.