The former president was just ordered to pay $355 million in his New York fraud case, bringing the tally this year to nearly half a billion dollars in civil damages.

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.)

…

“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.

  • Flying Squid
    38•4 months ago

    The line, called Trump Sneakers

    …

    The high tops, which are gold and emblazoned with a “T” on the outside of each shoe, are called the “Never Surrender High Top Sneaker” and are priced at $399 online. The athletic shoes, which feature a “T” and the number 45 on the sides are priced at $199.

    This man (and whoever he works with) does not have an ounce of creativity in his entire body.

    • partial_accumen
      31•4 months ago

      "Never Surrender "

      Wasn’t that Desantis’s tag line before he…well… surrendered?

      • Flying Squid
        23•4 months ago

        It was also Trump’s tagline sold on T-shirts under the mugshot shot picture that was taken when he surrendered to the police.

      • @CharlesDarwinEnglish
        10•4 months ago

        These dumbfucks are wearing shirts that commemorate his literal surrender, bearing the slogan “never surrender”. They are fucking stupid, in other words.

    • @CharlesDarwinEnglish
      5•4 months ago

      For the dumbasses that are going to buy and wear these to virtue signal to other dumbasses, no creativity is needed. These are the people that think it’s a real knee-slapper to wear “Let’s Go Brandon” gear (or “Fuck Your Feelings” or “Trump that Bitch” or…).

      If they are spending lots of money to “own the libs” - which really means signal to all family and friends, as well as strangers to stay TF away from them - they are going to spend it on any form of obvious dreck like this.

    • @psycho_driver
      4•4 months ago

      Fuck me, one of my daughters was randomly assigned #45 for club volleyball this season. Didn’t even think about it but now I feel dirty.