Unreliable, procedurally improper and based on a flawed premise
Sir, it’s not our fault that you exaggerated the worth of your properties.
New York Attorney General Letitia James is pushing back on Donald Trump’s “extraordinary” request for a stay of his $464 million civil fraud judgment, arguing the former president’s recent request was unreliable, procedurally improper and based on a flawed premise.
“There is nothing unusual about even billion-dollar judgments being fully bonded on appeal,” Senior Assistant Solicitor General Dennis Fan said in a filing this morning. “Defendants object to a possible ‘fire sale’ if they were to sell assets to generate cash to use as collateral for a bond or as a deposit —but the alternative would be to shift the risk of executing on defendants’ illiquid assets to OAG.”
Of course defendants object to a potential fire sale, but in Trump’s case…well, nobody cares.
The AG argued that the former president has failed to demonstrate his effort to secure a bond using properties as collateral, suggesting the issue is a product of Trump’s doing because his “holdings are not nearly as valuable as defendants claim.”
What do you mean??? They’re all worth at least a trillion dollars each.
“Defendants supply no documentary evidence that demonstrates precisely what real property they offered to sureties, on what terms that property was offered, or precisely why the sureties were unwilling to accept the assets,” the filing said. “As far as the Court can infer, sureties may have refused to accept defendants’ specific holdings as collateral because using Mr. Trump’s real estate will generally need ‘a property appraisal’ … and his holdings are not nearly as valuable as defendants claim.”
Oh, I see. Trump wanted the sureties to just say “Of course, Don, what’s ours is yours, no need for any pesky appraisal, let us know if you need a kidney.”
Meanwhile, because our world is absurd, Trump could possibly generate billions as soon as Monday by selling shares in his completely useless, money-losing sham “media company.”
Trump Media was concocted by two former reality TV hangers-on, and “is losing tens of millions of dollars and generated just $3.3 million in advertising revenue over the first nine months of last year.” In other words, it’s a joke.
And yet it’s poised to generate perhaps several billion dollars on the stock market. Its real value isn’t in what it actually is or does, it’s what it symbolically represents, because that can be speculated and traded on. Like NFTs or Bitcoin — or, these days, condominium real estate — their real product is gambling: by investing, you’re placing a bet that no matter the price you pay for it, there’ll eventually be a dumber buyer out there who’ll pay more.
The fact that so many people are clamoring to invest in the Trump “brand”… it’s quite symbolic of the cynicism and end-times nihilism surrounding Trump and all that he represents. People don’t care anymore that he’s a criminal and that he’s going to blow up the world. He’s inviting the people to get in on his fraud, and the people clearly want a piece of the action. They tell themselves that they’ll deal with the apocalyptic fallout later.
It’s a deal with the devil and soon it’ll come due for all of us.
Urrrrrrrrghhhhhhh