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Former U.S. President Donald Trump, who fashioned his political persona as a successful billionaire real estate magnate, is facing a day of financial reckoning on Monday that may show he is not as flush with cash as he has led the American public to believe.
Trump, the likely Republican presidential nominee in the November national election, is facing a deadline to put up $454 million in cash or a bond backed by collateral from his assets. That way, he could appeal a judgment last month equaling that amount that he committed civil fraud for years by inflating the value of his holdings to get better terms on business transactions.
If he can't come up with the cash or a bond, New York State Attorney General Letitia James appears poised to start the lengthy process of seizing some of Trump's prominent office skyscrapers in New York City, perhaps a large estate and baronial mansion he owns outside the city, or cash and stock accounts, even his personal jet he calls Trump Force One.
Trump's lawyers have said that securing the bond would be a "practical impossibility" because he would need to pledge about $550 million in cash and liquid investments to the bond company to proceed with the appeal. They said 30 bond companies turned down Trump's request to provide the cash so that he could proceed with his appeal.
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In a post on his Truth Social platform last week, Trump said that he has almost $500 million in cash that he intended to use for his campaign and that James "wants to take it away from him."
But his attorney, Chris Kise, told CNN that was not the case.
"What he's talking about is the money reported on his campaign disclosure forms that he's built up through years of owning and managing successful businesses," Kise said. "That is the very cash that Letitia James and the Democrats are targeting."
Throughout the weekslong civil trial late last year, Trump railed against James for bringing the case against him, saying that his properties were valued for more than the figures on financial forms that James claimed were too high.
In any event, Trump argued in the case that the valuations cited in loan applications were basically irrelevant because banks did their own background checks and that in the end, he fully paid back his loans, so no one was financially hurt.
Trump often assailed New York State Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron in impromptu news conferences as he walked into court to hear several days of trial testimony and called the final $454 million judgment a "shocking number."
On Sunday, Trump criticized both James and Engoron on Truth Social. He misspelled the attorney general's first name, then claimed in all caps that she has a "terrible record on violent crime as New York state attorney general. But at least she goes after Trump for doing absolutely nothing wrong!"
Trump called Engoron "grossly incompetent and corrupt! I should have zero fine."
In a different New York case Monday, a judge could set a trial date, possibly next month, for the first of the four criminal indictments Trump is facing that encompass 91 charges.
In this case, the former U.S. leader is accused of hiding a $130,000 hush money payment to a porn star just ahead of his successful 2016 run for the White House to keep her from talking publicly about her claim of a one-night tryst with Trump a decade earlier.
Trump has denied the affair and all the criminal charges.