Trump 2024

How Trump, suddenly strapped for cash, could raise more than half a billion dollars to satisfy judgments against him
CNN Business
KARA SCANNELL, LAUREN DEL VALLE AND JEANNE SAHADI, CNN
March 1, 2024 at 3:00 AM

How Trump, suddenly strapped for cash, could raise more than half a billion dollars to satisfy judgments against him
Donald Trump is facing a cash crunch as deadlines are quickly approaching to find over half a billion dollars he owes in judgments.

On Wednesday, a New York appeals court judge refused to give the former president additional time to satisfy a $454 million judgment from a civil fraud case. A federal judge is poised to decide whether to grant Trump’s last-ditch legal effort to delay or post a fraction of an $83.3 million judgment he owes E. Jean Carroll from a defamation case.

The scramble over the past week reveals challenges Trump is facing in raising the combined judgments totaling $537 million. In pleading for relief, Trump’s lawyers told judges it could cost him an additional $104 million to post the bonds – their estimate of fees he would need to pay. Trump’s lawyers said he may have to dump some of his properties under “exigent circumstances” to raise cash quickly, tap the capital markets, or find another source of cash. Last month Trump began hawking $399 gold sneakers.


Trump sneakers - Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images


“It is a really substantial problem. He’s really between a rock and a hard place,” said Adam Kaufmann, a criminal defense lawyer.

The cash crunch challenges Trump’s long-projected image of a successful businessman with deep pockets and a maverick’s ability to outmaneuver legal and financial troubles. He rode that reputation to the White House in 2016.

Now, the leading Republican presidential candidate in 2024 could end up heavily indebted to a bank, donor, or some other source of capital. Adding to the uncertainty over Trump’s future earnings are the four criminal indictments he is facing.

On Thursday, lawyers for Carroll pointed to Trump’s growing legal issues when urging the judge to reject Trump’s request to delay or lower the amount of the bond in her case.

“If Trump is convicted of even a subset of the 91 felony charges lodged against him, the implications for his ability to satisfy the judgment here could be significant. And even prior to a conviction, Trump’s ‘brand’— purportedly his most valuable asset, though not one that can easily be utilized to satisfy a civil judgment — may suffer as a result of the various legal proceedings in which he is enmeshed,” Carroll’s lawyers wrote.

Trump’s reputation for not paying lawyers and others could impact his ability to raise cash. Trump can post the cash himself or get an appeals bond, which are often backed by cash, or easily tradable securities, but the size of the judgments complicates the process, underwriters say.

It’s unclear how much cash Trump has on hand. He testified under oath last year that he had more than $400 million in cash. According to the New York attorney general’s office, in 2021 Trump’s 30% stake in a partnership with Vornado, a real estate investment company, was worth about $200 million, but Trump would need to sell that stake to turn it into cash. It’s unlikely Trump would deplete his entire cash position since the properties have bills and payroll.

Trump offered to post a $100 million bond to cover the New York attorney general’s case, but the appeals court judge rejected it. The deadline for the judgment in the Carroll case is in less than two weeks unless that judge grants Trump’s request to delay or lower the payment. He has until the last week of the month to make good on the civil fraud judgment or face the possibility that the state may move to seize properties.

The sheer size of the judgments raises practical questions about how the Trump could feasibly come up with the cash. On Wednesday, the appeals court judge lifted one condition at Trump’s urging – a ban that prohibited him from taking out loans from financial institutions regulated in New York.

Big lenders

Many of the world’s biggest banks stopped lending to Trump decades ago. Deutsche Bank, which he turned to repeatedly to finance property deals, ended its relationship with Trump after January 6, 2021. Signature Bank, another past lender to Trump, also ceased doing business with him after the attack on the US Capitol.

Trump turned to Axos Bank, a California lender, in 2022 for a $100 million loan to refinance Trump Tower, but it isn’t clear whether that bank would lend to Trump again. CNN’s calls to the bank and its chief executive, Greg Garrabrants, were not returned.

Lawyers say Trump could try to take equity out of certain properties, but if there are outstanding mortgages or existing loans that could make it more difficult because a bank wouldn’t want to be second in line to collect money.

Another possible complication: The Trump Organization stopped preparing a personal financial statement for Trump two years ago, so a lender would need to become comfortable with the finances and could request an appraisal of properties, which also takes time.

Fire sale

Trump’s attorneys said without postponing the judgments Trump may have to sell some of his properties in what could amount to a fire sale.

“If he had to sell a property, it’s kind of a tough market, but even if it wasn’t, potential buyers would smell blood in the water and press for some pretty stringent terms,” Kaufmann said.

Trump has owned most of his properties for years so if he is forced to sell, he could incur a big tax bill unless he is able to offset it with losses.

“There are practical issues” to property sales, said Jeremy Saland, a criminal defense attorney. “That’s a nightmare. How many properties is he going to have to come up with to do that?”

Any sale would have to be reviewed by the Trump Organization’s court-appointed monitor, retired judge Barbara Jones, who will remain in place for three years. Transfers above $5 million also must be reported to Jones.

Process of getting a bond

Another possible scenario is securing a bond. Appeal bonds make up only one percent of the bond business, according to the Surety & Fidelity Association of America. As uncommon as appeal bonds are, the need for an individual to secure such a massive bond is significantly less common.

“It’s harder for an individual than a company to secure a very large bond,” said David Shick, co-founder and president of ProSure Group, a broker that secures bonds.

Underwriters typically want cash or easy to sell assets to back the bond, but if they were to accept property it could become more costly. For example, the bond issuer might want, say, $200 million worth of assets as collateral for a $100 million bond to account for the time and effort needed to sell the property, if the client loses an appeal, he said.

Shick said for large judgments it’s possible several insurance carriers could pool together.

“It’s unusual but so is the bond size,” he said, adding, “the court will determine what they will and will not accept.”

In any situation where a company is deciding to back a large bond, especially if the collateral is illiquid like property, Shick said, “it comes down to it being a business decision on who you’re doing business with.”

Trump defeats Haley in nearly every Super Tuesday state, setting stage for 2024 rematch with Biden
Trump, who scored key wins in states such as Texas and California, is now on the verge of becoming the GOP’s presumptive nominee for the third straight election cycle.
Andrew Romano·National Correspondent
Tue, March 5, 2024 at 9:15 PM MST·

Former President Donald Trump swept nearly all of this year’s Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, routing his last major rival for the Republican presidential nomination, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and putting him within striking distance of a November rematch with President Biden, the Democrat who beat him in 2020.

Biden also won lopsided victories on Tuesday across 15 states.

Trump, who gained several hundred delegates with major wins in states such as California and Texas, is now on the verge of becoming the GOP’s presumptive nominee for the third straight election cycle.

His only loss as of 11 p.m. ET was in Vermont, where Haley scored a narrow upset.

“Nov. 5 is right around the corner,” Trump said from his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, referring to Election Day. “Nov. 5 is going to go down as the single most important day in the history of our country.”

In a statement, Biden said that "tonight’s results leave the American people with a clear choice: Are we going to keep moving forward or will we allow Donald Trump to drag us backwards into the chaos, division, and darkness that defined his term in office?"

A full 854 GOP delegates were up for grabs Tuesday — more than a third of this year's total. A candidate needs 1,215 delegates to clinch the 2024 Republican nomination. Trump’s delegate advantage is continuing to grow as results come in from around the country.

In a presidential nominating election, whoever is first to collect a majority of the total available delegates — or whoever remains after everyone else has dropped out — becomes the party’s presumptive nominee. After the last states weigh in, delegates attend their party’s national convention and vote to make the nomination official.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, Trump is on track to reach the 1,215-delegate mark by March 19 at the latest — and to formally claim his party’s nomination when all GOP delegates cast their ballots at the Republican National Convention in July.

Given Tuesday’s results, Haley could exit the race in the days ahead. She did not speak Tuesday night. In previous comments, the former governor has refused to say whether she will keep campaigning beyond this week, telling reporters that Super Tuesday was “as far as I’ve thought in terms of going forward.”

How Trump won Super Tuesday

Haley went into Super Tuesday with a bit of wind at her back. She won the Washington, D.C., primary on Sunday — her first primary victory and the only primary victory ever for a woman Republican presidential candidate. A few days earlier, Haley was endorsed by Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, two centrist Republicans from Super Tuesday states.

But in the end it wasn’t enough. Maine went for Trump, along with other moderate-leaning states where Haley’s campaign had hoped to make inroads, such as Massachusetts and Virginia. Vermont could turn out to be Haley's only Super Tuesday prize.

Until recently, Haley had been able to focus on one state at a time. She spent heavily in New Hampshire and South Carolina, placing second in both with about 40% of the vote — due in large part to her outsize support among independent voters, who were allowed to participate in those states’ open primaries.

But in Michigan's Feb. 27 primary, where Haley invested far less time and money, she hit only 27%.

Super Tuesday was like Michigan on steroids. In contrast to earlier, proportional contests, most of the day’s primaries and caucuses awarded all of their delegates to the candidate who cleared 50% of the vote. And in some, only Republicans could participate.

Both rules helped Trump expand his lead to the point where it’s now mathematically prohibitive for Haley to catch up.

Trump’s grip on GOP tightened after indictments

For a fleeting moment last year, the former president looked wounded. In the weeks after announcing his own comeback bid — which followed the GOP’s historically poor performance in the 2022 midterm elections — national polls showed Trump’s stock falling. Hosting avowed antisemites at Mar-a-Lago and calling for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution didn’t help.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis even led Trump in multiple Yahoo News/YouGov polls from late 2022 and early 2023.

But by the time the actual voting got underway, one year later, Trump had surged to a commanding lead. Formerly reluctant Republicans rallied around him in the wake of his four criminal indictments. DeSantis and others exited the race after meager early results. Only Haley remained.

Once careful not to offend Trump’s MAGA supporters, Haley became increasingly hostile toward her rival as the race continued, criticizing his attitude toward Russia, his chaotic temperament and his expensive legal woes, among other things.

But ultimately, Trump’s grip on the GOP was never really in doubt. Haley lost by 32 percentage points in Iowa; by 11 points in New Hampshire, where she invested heavily; by 20 points in her home state; by more than 40 points in Michigan; and by even wider margins in many of the Super Tuesday states. In the Nevada primary — a contest that Trump skipped — Haley finished 33 points behind “none of these candidates.”

A Trump-Biden rematch?

If and when Haley ends her candidacy — a moment that could come as soon as Wednesday morning — another general-election battle between Trump and Biden will get underway.

It’s a rerun that many Americans don't welcome, even as the campaigns themselves seem eager to engage.

Biden’s team believes that many swing voters barely even realize that Trump will be on the ballot and that the president’s State of the Union speech this Thursday will help clarify the choice. Furthering that contrast, Trump’s first criminal trial — in New York, for making secret hush-money payments to a porn actress during the 2016 campaign — will start on March 25.

At the same time, Trump’s team has been buoyed by recent decisions from the Supreme Court to prevent Colorado from barring the former president from its 2024 primary ballot for his role in the Jan. 6 attack and to delay Trump’s 2020 election interference trial, possibly until after the November election, by considering his claim of absolute presidential immunity later this year.

But while the candidates themselves might be ready to run against each other, more Americans said in a 2023 Yahoo News/YouGov poll that they felt “exhaustion” (38%) over the prospect of a Biden-Trump sequel than any other emotion. No other sentiment — not fear (29%), sadness (23%), hope (23%), anger (23%), excitement (16%), pride (8%) or gratitude (7%) — cracked the 30% mark.

Fatigue is an understandable response to what could be the first general election for president since 1892 to feature the incumbent and his defeated predecessor competing as the major-party nominees — and the only White House race in U.S. history in which one candidate is facing criminal prosecution for conspiring to overturn his prior loss.

What the polls say about November

Both Biden and Trump are strikingly unpopular. On average, 55% of Americans disapprove of Biden’s performance in office; just 38% approve. Those numbers have barely budged for years, despite the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the passage of ambitious legislation and the steadily improving U.S. economy.

Analysts have speculated that widespread concerns about Biden’s age are weighing him down with the electorate. (Already the oldest president in U.S. history, he would be 86 at the end of a second term.)

Trump, meanwhile, left office in 2021 with roughly the same poor approval numbers that Biden has now — and recent polls indicate that a clear majority of Americans still disapprove of him today.

As a result, head-to-head surveys have long shown Biden and Trump roughly tied, with support in the mid-40s; average all the polls together, and Trump might start with a 2-point edge, at best.

In line with those numbers, the latest Yahoo News/YouGov survey finds Trump with the narrowest of leads (45% to 44%). But when voters are asked how they would vote if Trump is convicted of a serious crime, Biden pulls ahead, 46% to 40%.