Would You Trust the Nation’s Economy to This Man… After Reading this?

Donald Trump is a master businessman, a self-made billionaire who has totally mastered “The Art of the Deal”… if your sole source for believing that is Donald Trump talking about Donald Trump. Aside from the fact that Trump inherited his initial funding basis for investing from his father, who had to bail his son out when Donald got caught in a cash crush, and excluding the six major bankruptcies filed by Trump companies or the $25 million dollar settlement that Trump University paid to settle a fraud claim, even above that, Trump has not exactly lived up to his self-defined business expertise. He almost went totally bankrupt three decades ago.

In the mid-1990s, he faced insolvency in loan repayments and debt service on a 77-acre parcel of land in New York, known as Riverside South, following a crash in the real estate market. Nobody wanted to lend Trump the money, until a consortium of Chinese magnates (led by Vincent Lo) agreed to take over the properties, leaving Trump with a vastly reduced stake in any upside generated by one of the largest residential properties in New York City. A decade later, the Hong Kong consortium sold the property for $1.76 billion. Trump sued (several lawsuits) alleging he was not consulted about the sale and could have generated a better price. After years of litigation, Trump lost and received a significantly lower sum than he believed he was entitled to. So much for Trump’s claim of expertise in dealing with the Chinese, made as part of his 2015 campaign statements. Plain and simple, these Chinese beat Trump at his own game.

In recent cases, where New York prosecuted criminal fraud against several of his companies, resulting in convictions, including a specific conviction of Trump’s trusted longtime financial chief of his real estate business empire, Allen Weisselberg, who wound up doing time as a result. On March 4th, in a follow-up criminal case for perjury stemming from testimony against Trump and his holdings, Weisselberg entered a guilty plea, accepting a five-month sentence.

In an April deposition in one of the numerous civil lawsuits filed against Trump since he was defeated by Joe Biden in 2020, he claimed that he (through his companies) had hundreds of million in accessible cash in various bank accounts, more than enough money to pay any of the possible judgments that might be assessed against him. Like so much of Trump’s bravado, self-aggrandizement, hyperbole and out-and-out mendacity, as Trump attempted to avoid depositing sufficient bond money with various courts (in the E. Jean Carroll defamation cases and the NY Attorney General’s successful determination of significant corporate fraud by Trump, his family and his companies) by claiming he was so rich, that he didn’t need to post a bond to file appeals in those cases. Unfortunately for the ex-President, the courts did not agree with him.

Writing for the March 3rd Puck.com, William Cohan tells it like it is: “The one nice thing I can say about Donald Trump, who cheats at everything including golf, is that he’s insane enough to be able to run for president while trying to figure out how to pay the $465 million (plus interest) he owes the state of New York for defrauding his lenders and the $83.3 million he also owes E. Jean Carroll for defamation, which is coming due in a week. Trump has the assets, but there appears to be a major liquidity challenge. In his April 2023 deposition, which I reported on a few weeks ago, he said he had $400 million in cash available to him, a hoard that was growing every day, or so he claimed. Since he has proven himself to be prone to exaggeration, even if we discount that number by half, I suspect he’ll be able to pay E. Jean what he owes her from the Trump Organization treasury. (Unless of course, he was fibbing. Donald, fibbing?)

“But where do things stand on the massive civil fraud penalty? He did get a little bit of relief—if you could call it that—from a New York State appeals court judge, who said that Trump must still put up a bond for the full amount if he wants to appeal the ruling. (He was prepared to post a bond covering $100 million of the verdict, but that was rejected.) Part of the reason Trump’s lawyers were seeking to post a bond for a lesser amount was because, they claimed, Judge Arthur Engoron’s [fraud] decision also included a provision barring him for three years from borrowing money from any bank chartered in New York State, which of course would preclude most of the banks that could underwrite his bond. The appellate judge paused Engoron’s three-year borrowing ban, giving Trump the opportunity to find a bank that would help him post, or finance, the bond, which would allow him to automatically stay the $465 million judgment against him during the appeals process. Good luck with that Donald.

“Why a money-center bank would do that for Trump is beyond me, given how often he has stiffed them in the past and how they had long ago stopped doing business with him. Even his old standby, Deutsche Bank, won’t do business with him anymore. On the other hand, he might be able to find some bank, somewhere—Russia? Saudi Arabia?—that might finance the bond in exchange for the security of Trump Tower or 40 Wall Street, which seem like his two most valuable real-estate assets, or because they are betting, if he returns to the White House, they’ll have their hooks into him but good, (although they might already, it seems). But whether he can even pledge a security interest in these two buildings to a new lender is an open question. My understanding is both buildings already have debt, or a mortgage, on them. Is there room for a second? And would a second mortgage be sufficient security for a new lender to provide him the bond he’s seeking?” Trump’s civil and criminal legal fees are well over $50 million to date, and he is trying to push as much of that on hapless donors and fools ready to buy his golden sneakers (with no guaranteed delivery date). If Trump cannot duck future trials, just think what his future legal fees will be. Bad for Trump, but his platform is bad for most of us.

But Trump’s monetary and fiscal policies have resulted in massive tax cuts for the rich, generating trillions of dollars added to our national deficit (which we all service), financial deregulation that allows big business to slam ordinary consumers into the ground, and his proposed vengeful tariffs threaten to hurl inflation through the stratosphere as the resulting increase in the cost of ordinary goods will soar… a pain for most of us, irrelevant for the rich… a de facto hidden federal regressive sales tax. For average Americans, not supported by legions of lobbyists and tax advisors, welcome to a further explosion of income inequality

I’m Peter Dekom, and I have to compliment Trump on one extraordinary skillset: the ability to convince a vast swath of Americans that voting against their own best interests is a patriotic duty.