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Trump ordered to pay $355 million in penalties in New York Fraud case. He's also banned from operating any business in New York for three years, the Trump Organization is banned from borrowing money from any financial institution registered in New York for three years, and Eric and Don Jr each get their own $4 million dollar fines, and the former CFO Alan Wiesselberg owes a million. However the court also reverses its earlier ruling to cancel defendant's business certificates (aka the "corporate death penalty"). Instead an Independent Monitor will continue at the Trump Organisation for three years to ensure that it meets its financial reporting obligations.
All the penalties come with interest, so the defendants collectively owe around $450 million, not counting the $80+ million owed to E Jean Carroll. Even for Trump, that's serious money. Trump has of course said he will appeal, but to do so he will need to put up the full amount in bond first, and it's not clear he has the liquidity to do that - and as mentioned above he's now limited in his ability to borrow. And even if he manages to get the cash together, it doesn't seem to me that his prospects on appeal are at all good. Higher courts typically defer to the trial court's fact-finding, and Judge Engoron is not kind in his assessment of the credibility of Trump and his witnesses.
Farce of a case, the prosecution on the record as targeting Trump for political purposes, the judge a partisan hack, the alleged wrongs being that Trump exaggerated his business assets even though none of his partners were ever apparently harmed. Some of the banks Trump supposedly defrauded testified in his defense. Basic confusion of assessed value and appraised value. And Mar-a-Lago is just worth $18M. Show trial.
This is the kind of stuff that will massively, radially destabilize the country. You don't have a country anymore if hostile partisan judges in one-party states will just sue their political opponents into oblivion. At best, you have slow-boiling political turmoil and lawfare. But it's not really a country or a democracy in any meaningful sense. Critics of Trump who may feel tempted to defend whatever rationalization Engoron and Letitia have established should beware. This puts US down a troubling path.
This demonstrates the US is already well along that path. As AshLael points out, there's no avenue for appeal; Trump can't put up the money and even if he could, the higher courts in NY would rule against him and there's no substantial Federal question. Conservatives will just convince themselves that Trump did bad and deserved it and everything is fine, and the left will keep on winning.
If there’s nobody willing to lend someone with a 40-60% chance of being the next president $400m, they have bigger problems than their debt. Of course Trump can raise the money, at least provided he does so before November.
I'm confident they'll find a way to criminalize it
That’s much more likely to go to the Supreme Court than the current ruling. For example, if the court ruled that they wouldn’t allow a Saudi-affiliated fund or individual of some kind to pay because Trump was a political figure that would be naked interference in federal politics that SCOTUS would be much more interested in. They already tried to skirt around this by suggesting he couldn’t borrow the money from banks ‘registered in New York’ which once including affiliates is pretty much any bank, but even then there are a huge number of funds or individuals-related-to-funds that could lend the Trump Organization the money. NY might try to challenge it, but precedent is tough in these cases (see what happened to the building they tried to seize by claiming it was owned by Iran) and if they draw the lines so expansively that everyone involved in finance is included because Wall Street is technically in New York then SCOTUS is again going to look upon that pretty dimly; preemption rights already limit the state’s authority across a huge number of financial services matters. Preemption precedents in finance strongly suggests that this action - under one interpretation barring Trump from raising money from any major financial organization - already violates existing federal legislation and there would also be extensive commerce clause considerations if, say, a Utah bank with an office in NY was blocked from lending the money.
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