Two recent verdicts have now left Donald Trump on the hook for nearly half a billion dollars.
On Friday, a New York judge handed the former president a $355 million penalty, and banned him from serving in a leadership position in any business in New York for three years, for fraudulently inflating his net worth to lenders in order to receive more favorable loan agreements. And in January, a Manhattan jury ordered Trump to pay the writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her after she accused him of raping her. (A separate jury in May had found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in the 1990s.)
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“It’s pretty scary from an ethics perspective,” said Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan watchdog group that has chronicled Trump’s abuses of power and filed lawsuits against him.
You don’t have to look far to find the reasons why. Trump’s first term was riddled with conflicts of interest, and that’s in no small part because of his financial well-being (or lack thereof, depending on how you look at it). At the time that he tried to overturn the 2020 election, he was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, largely stemming from loans to help rehabilitate his struggling businesses, and most of which would be coming due over the subsequent four years. Throughout his presidency, he refused to divest from his businesses, which made millions of dollars in revenue from taxpayers and continued to do work with other countries while he was in office — a practice he indicated he would repeat in a second term.
I love that it was announced at Sneaker Con. The writers for our reality are just messing with us now.
Ah fuck. That’s the kicker. I was always off the opinion that we lived in a simulation. Now, I’m thinking we’re living in a reality written by AI inside a simulation.
I think the most likely thing given how dumb a lot of the writing is for this reality is that this reality was made as a cheap corporate knockoff of some other handmade reality. It is the only thing that explains both the potential evident in the beauty of our reality and the maddening lack of fulfillment of it in favor of (unbelievably) dumb shit happening over and over again.