On Friday, New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron awarded Donald Trump and his company a staggering $355 million for repeatedly and shockingly audaciously lying about the value of their assets. ordered to pay. The ruling came just weeks after a jury awarded Trump $83.3 million in a defamation lawsuit brought by author E. Jean Carroll, also for lying. This is in addition to two previous jury findings. Mr. Trump’s company was convicted of 17 felonies, including fraud, and a previous Carroll civil jury ordered him to pay $5 million for sexual assault and another defamation case. Trump is appealing all decisions.
It’s surprising enough that a candidate who is almost certain to win the Republican presidential nomination carries the stigma of being found by judges and juries to be a fluent liar. But more importantly, over the past few months, Mr. Trump has done exactly what is being tried before our eyes in court, again benefiting his brand. It is. Even after Mr. Trump began to lose and faced real economic and business consequences, there was still a way to profit, or at least try to profit, from the entire process of being sentenced and tried.
Shortly after Engoron’s ruling was filed, one of Trump’s lawyers, Alina Haba, said she planned to appeal. “This sentence is a clear injustice, plain and simple,” she said. “This is the culmination of years of politically motivated witch-hunts aimed at ‘bringing down Donald Trump,'” he said. “It has been proven that there are no victims,” he added.
I’ve watched the two cases in which Mr. Trump sat on the defense stand through daily testimony, and found the corporate fraud trial to be excruciatingly boring, and the Carroll case to be downright excruciating.
Journalists lined up for hours outside the civil courthouse the morning before Trump’s corporate fraud trial. A large number of reporters stood in the courtroom hallway, forming a tight press corps to allow Trump a few minutes to enter and leave. For these press opportunities, the former TV star prepared for filming. He typically stands behind a barricade outside the courtroom door (reminiscent of prison bars) and addresses his supporters, saying, “I should be in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina right now.” should not sit in court.”
He had no obligation to be there, the barricade was for his protection. But photos of Trump behind barricades were repeatedly published on news sites around the world. His fundraising email mentioned a court appearance. He talked about them during the campaign.
When he first ran for president in 2016, Trump said his campaign was self-funded. That year, when I spoke to voters in states like Iowa and Ohio, this was one of the biggest reasons they thought they could trust him: He hadn’t been bought. But his self-funding, recently revealed in a civil fraud trial, was also misguided. He actually lied about his own assets to get artificially low interest rates from Deutsche Bank, a New York lawyer, and released his cash for this 2016 campaign. was. General Letitia James said.
Trump’s success as a developer, TV star and in his first presidential campaign It was primarily based on making people believe they were much richer than they actually were. “So I became president for the brand, okay?” he said in his deposition against James at the second Carroll trial. “I think it’s the most popular brand in the world.”
Trump continues to raise money with lies: A House special committee on January 6 found that Trump and the Republican Party have amassed huge sums of money for political action committees after lying about the 2020 election results. It was revealed that he had been collecting. He spent about $50 million on legal defense in 2023. Promoting his mug shot from the Fulton County Jail raised millions of dollars for the Trump campaign.
During Carroll’s second trial, his lawyers played a video Trump made after his first trial in which he found himself responsible for sexual abuse. In the video, he again called her a liar and a cheater, and the judge and three jurors associated those very words with him and his company. “That’s the truth,” Trump was heard saying from the defense bench as he watched the footage. He also used the video to raise money for his presidential campaign.
Mr. Trump repeatedly broke the fourth wall during his trial, mocked the judges, told Judge Engoron that he was part of a partisan agenda, and went on a tirade in front of the jury before appearing in Manhattan federal court. When Justice Lewis Kaplan admonished Trump, he warned: Trump retorted, saying he “can’t control” himself, and Trump “can’t control you either.”
Other defendants may not get away with this case, but Trump left the courtroom calling the system “rigged” and the judges “Trump haters,” one of the few remaining systems. This further strengthened some people’s suspicions about this. In our democracy, there is some kind of public trust. That doubt is reinforced by the results of the Republican primary and the reluctance of other Republicans to talk about the court’s ruling.
In the final hours of Trump’s second defamation trial against Carroll, her lawyers released a video of a pretrial deposition in the corporate fraud trial that showed Trump speaking about the value of his assets. flowed. He said he could get $1.5 billion for Mar-a-Lago and $2.5 billion for the golf club in Doral, Florida, adding: “I think the cash is effectively over $400 million. This is expensive for developers.” he added. “Developers typically don’t have cash. They have assets, not cash.” Trump then said the cash was “more than $400 and growing very significantly every month.” Ta. Judge Engoron’s decision calls all of this into question, but the jury knew nothing of it.
“He doesn’t care about the law or the truth, but he cares about money. Your decision on punitive damages is your only hope for stopping him,” Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney, said in closing arguments. He said this in his final argument. Pay a “large amount of money”.
Trump certainly cares about money. clearly. Being ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars makes sense. And while he doesn’t have as much money as he would like you to believe, he certainly has assets that he can use to pay off his legal judgment. But that’s mostly beside the point. In his ruling, Judge Engoron said the defendant’s “complete lack of contrition and remorse is pathological.” In other regions, this ruling may induce shame. In Donald Trump, you can see how he uses it to build his own money, power, and influence.