David Gilbert writes at Wired that the Meatballs for God convoy is not going well.
On Monday morning, the organizers of the Take Our Border Back convoy kicked off their road trip to the Texas–Mexico border in Virginia Beach. Though they claimed that up to 40,000 trucks would be joining, only 20 vehicles made up the convoy as it rolled into Jacksonville, Florida, 14 hours later. The promised support had not materialized—not a single truck showed up, tires were reportedly slashed, participants got lost, and paranoia struck the group. In short, the convoy was a complete mess.
Do read the whole thing. It’s hysterical. This crew is going to be lucky to find Texas, although if they keep going west it’s hard to miss.
Our Swami quoted this Business Insider article in the comments to the last post, and I want to be sure everybody sees it. Basically, here’s the box Trump is in:
Sometime in the next few days, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan will issue a written order to Trump to pay the $83.3 million in damages awarded by the E. Jean Carroll jury. Once that is done, Trump has 30 days to file an appeal. Trump will have to put up at least $90 million to do that. The extra is for interest potentially owed to Carroll if Trump loses the appeal.
The court may or may not accept that much money in cash. Judge Kaplan accepted Trump’s payment of $5.5 million after the first trial. That money is sitting in a court-managed bank account. But courts usually prefer a bond from a major financial institution for really big sums, I take it. And it’s possible Trump doesn’t really have that much cash on hand.
If Trump goes with a bond, the article says,
Taking into account interest and other fees, including the potential need to secure an irrevocable letter of credit from a bank, Trump taking the appeal-bond route could bring his total outlay to $100 million and beyond.
A surety company could make Trump provide an extra 10 percent of collateral, and would require he pay a bond premium of anywhere from $250,000 to $1 million. A surety executive who spoke on condition of anonymity said the premium was money Trump would never see again.
Such a large bond could probably be handled only by one of the surety giants — such as Travelers Insurance, Liberty Mutual, Chubb, or JP Morgan Chase, said the expert, whose employer doesn’t allow press statements.
The big wrinkle: Judge Arthur Engoron is expected to issue his decision this week on what penalties Trump will have to pay in the civil fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. James has asked that Trump pay $370 million and be banned from doing business in the state. And James wants a five-year ban on Trump applying for loans from any New York-registered financial institution.
If the latter is imposed, who is going to extend any credit to him to get his bond? What major financial company is not registered in New York?
No wonder Trump seems a tad tense lately.
In another wrinkle, it has been revealed that in 2023 Trump was spending nearly $1 million a week in legal fees, and that money came out of donations to his PACs. Steve Benen:
After Trump’s defeat in 2020, his followers sent millions to his Save America political action committee, hoping the money would go toward overturning the election results, as the Republican bombarded his base with brazen lies. (It didn’t.)
When the former president’s legal fees took a severe toll on Save America’s finances, the PAC did something weird: It asked an allied super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., to give $60 million back, in order to ease the once-flush Save America operation’s financial strains. (The money was supposed to go toward primary-season advertising. Much of the money went to Trump’s lawyers instead.)
Do read the whole thing. The Trump campaign is required to file a financial report with the FEC at the beginning of every month, which is tomorrow. That report will be looked at closely, one suspects.
And then there’s the $48 million loan for Trump’s tower in Chicago that can’t be documented. The Trump organization cannot produce any sort of loan agreement documentation, or any other documentation for that matter, that says the loan existed. Trump and his lawyers and his representatives are on temper tantrum overdrive right now over the revelation of this alleged loan. But all they’d have to do is cough up proof that the load was real and not just something Trump made up to reduce his tax liabilities. Surely there are bank statements somewhere showing that money was here, and now it’s there, and here are payments on the loan, etc.
If they can provid documentation they had better scrape it together really fast, because Judge Engoron could be issuing his ruling any minute now. He could be writing it even now.
One does remember that Trump never held a real job in his life. The only boss he ever had to answer to was his father, who apparently was as big a mess as Donald. Trump has never been part of a corporate structure in which he has had to answer to anybody. Trump apparently has no idea how big companies actually are run. He just wings it. Badly. He should have stuck to real estate.
"In short, the convoy was a complete mess."
Just like the entire magat, wing-nut movement, they really should give up on politics go back to watching "professional" wrestling?
"Trump has 30 days to file an appeal"
Well I'm certain he'll also appeal Engoron's decision and since it will come after E. Jean's the timing may work for him, if Engoron's decision is stayed pending appeal that may make it plausible for Stump to get a loan for the sexual assault fine! I wonder how does that fat lying sack of shit sleep at night, he really must not have a conscience at all. That or he's consuming alot of sleep aides. Rumors are he's on adderall during the day so maybe he's on the xanax at night? Anyway the appeal seems to Stumps only real friend right now. MAGA (make appeals great again)!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcWe5ZffbD4
I once worked for a guy like that for about a year and a half. He was a lot smarter than Trump, really pretty bright actually, but he wound up being a shitty boss and businessman from inability to delegate authority.
His business was fine home furnishings, and it was an established one dating back to just after WWII. It had locations up and down the SE Florida coast from Juno Beach to Miami, south almost to Homestead. All of its operations were run using a computer program written by the boss, back when he was just the heir apparent. In its day the system had been something of a marvel, but in 2003 it was an incomprehensible wad of COBOL code running on a SCO UNIX box (that's a cheap imitation of a "departmental minicomputer"), connected to terminals (weird ones, that could not really be made to work with UNIX, which is something of a feat) via an incredible lashup of leased phone lines and ancient telecom equipment in each store. It was all 2nd-hand junk wired together to get adequate performance for this early-90s-standard mainframe software.
He needed in the worst way to hire 3 guys to write a complete replacement using modern, maintainable technology, with him standing back and limiting himself to telling the new guys how the old system worked. He also needed to give me a budget and purchasing authority and a schedule for replacing his archaeological project with stuff that wasn't junk.
But he could not give up control of his program and he could not authorize me to throw anything away on my own recognizance. And so one week (it'll be 20 years this Thanksgiving) it happened that I quit, and also the two programmers he had working for him quit, and also his warehouse manager quit. I'm not sure how long it took the company to go out of business after that.
But the point I originally wanted to make was that, while this guy was pretty f***ing smart, he had never had peer review for anything in his life. He was a self-taught technologist who graduated from business school, and he'd never had his code looked at by anybody who was better than he was. So he had a really distorted notion of how smart he was, and it was part of his undoing, and also the destruction of a 60-year-old company that had 100s of people's livelihoods in it.
"he had never had peer review for anything in his life"
Pretty typical. I have a couple "friends" who also never worked for anyone but Daddy, same story, entitled, complacent, arrogant. Why work hard to get ahead when you know your going to be in charge when the old man kicks anyway! Though it's not always the case I have one good friend of mine who took over his Dad's firm after being on his own for a decade after school, he works his ass off.
With respect to those walls. I've heard some talk that the filing deadline might be more like 60 days, but the bond requirement jibes with what I've heard elsewhere.
The question I want to see asked is, "what if he just doesn't pay?" The new thing here is that it's going to be kind of a BFD to finance and guarantee the bond, assuming Trump can come up with the scratch. If he can't watch for him to bluster for a while and let that die out before the filing deadline, and then declare that the whole thing was massively unfair and that he's not paying, when he finally has to say something.
What happens then? Does he go to jail?
Multiple news stories I've read today say 30 days.
Good question.
My assumption would be that he'd get a lien put on all of his properties. Essentially he couldn't navigate financially without having to clear up his financial obligations. Nobody is going to go near him in any joint financial venture for fear his liability can be charged in some way to anybody who legally ties themselves financially to Trump. In layman's terms it would be the equivalent of having unprotected sex with sombody who is known to be HIV positive. Aside from that, it is a government entity that he'd be trying to stiff. Not like some small potato contractor that he can run into the ground with his legal wrangling.
I could be wrong, but I'm seeing him as being fucked…big time.
Another thing to consider is that his businesses are under a court monitor and any movement of money has to be approved by the court. His shell games have come to an end. He's already disolved 105 of his 600 LLC's. I wonder what has prompted him to clean house? Spring cleaning? Swedish death cleaning? Or just your normal tidying up?
The bag of shit is on the ropes, folks
Maybe, but then no one reputable has been willing to lend him money for many years. One of the many things our "liberal" media decided to just ignore about Trump is that we elected (sort of) a president of the United States who cannot get a loan in the United States.
Yesterday he was asked about the damages, and he said "What damages? I haven't done anything wrong. That's been proven."
He's just not going to pay. And appeal appeal appeal. Because he doesn't have it. His "fortune" is all money laundering. All of it. Every dime. He owes more to Putin, MBS and God knows who else than he'll ever be able to pay. That's why he won't pay. He doesn't have it.
He's flat broke, and becoming president again and giving these guys our secrets is the only way he's going to stay out of the trunk of a car or avoid mysteriously falling out of a window.
He has no actual money at all. He may have assets but no net worth. Every commenter on this thread has a larger net worth than Donald Trump. It's obvious every time he opens his mouth. It's obvious every time you look at what he does rather than listen to him describe his wealth. It's obvious in everything his kids do.
This clown couldn't manage his privately-held company without grifting (AKA: Lying, cheating, and stealing).
And yet, tens of millions of people voted to make him the most powerful person in the world.
P.T. Barnum vasty underestimated the number of fools born every minute.
To me, the terrifying thing about Trump's shenanigans is that he got away with it for so long, and nobody seemed to care until he ran for President; and even then (and since), nobody has focused on the [broken] systems which should have thrown him in jail *decades* ago.
Trump is not the only reason to believe that the legal systems which are supposed to monitor financial transactions are badly compromised. Does anyone here think that Jared Cushner & family would avoid jail if their finances were properly audited? Does it really make sense that the only person jailed for the massive fraud which blew up the US economy in 2007 was a low-level loan officer at Swiss bank? Am I the only one who thinks that Jeffrey Epstein's "business" wasn't just about renting girls to Zillionaires, but also involved extortion of men in positions of power in our Judicial system(s)?
Sadly, neither the GOP nor Democrats can really investigate that mess, because both Parties have gotten *Billions* of dollars from the Zillionaires who profit[ed] from the lack of enforcement of legal standards around Wall Street. Perhaps worse, with our manufacturing base farmed out to China, the US depends on international finance to (sorta) balance our trade deficits, so exposure of the extent of financial corruption here could lead to a quick collapse of the Dollar as the default Global Currency (and economic havoc).
Of course I'm glad that Trump is finally getting the financial proctological exam he so richly deserves, but IMO, the bigger problem is the corrupt system which let him get away with it.