Normal borrowers, maybe.
To a sane lender, Trump’s creditworthiness is completely in the dumps.
The premise there is that Individual-ONE would seek to kill the guy he owes money to so that there would be no one to collect (everyone else would be afraid to follow up).
It was noted above that statute sets the interest rate for this kind of obligation at 9%. If he will “have it for you in two weeks”, that is over one and a half million dollars accrued.
Right now it stands at $1,132,727 from “20.5 donors.”
What the heck is “20.5 donors”? Is that 20,000 donors plus half of a donor? (Which half?) Or is that 20,500?
BTW, these are the top donations:
Anonymous
$10,000
5 d
Nicholas Minassi
$5,000
2 d
Anonymous
$5,000
3 d
Aaron Jones
$5,000
6 d
Geez, the top gift is only $10,000, and there’s only one. Doesn’t bode well for reaching the balance of $353,867,178. Elena needs 35,387 $10K donors to get there.
If the top doner is $10,000, there is no way to get to $1.1m with 20 (0r 20.5) donors.
I’m leaning towards it’s 20.5 thousand donors, given that no one has given over $10K.
I did a back of the envelope calculation over here.
The way the AG’s office is calculating interest is weird. The statute doesn’t say anything about what kind of interest rate that 9% is. Reverse engineering their calculation by trial and error, pre-judgment they are treating it as a simple rate without compounding:
The judgment was
$168,040,168 with interest from 3/4/19 = 1817 days
$126,828,600 with interest from 5/11/22 = 653 days
$60,000,000 with interest from 6/26/23 = 242 days
Adding interest at 9% * days / 365 without compounding (without increasing the principal owed and charging interest on the interest) gets you to exactly the figure the AG’s office say is owed on 2/23/24 - $454,156,783.05.
But now at 2/23/24 they have suddenly decided to start compounding, to charge interest on the interest accrued up until now, so they have reset the principal to this new higher figure to come up with daily interest of $454,156,783.05 * 9% / 365 = $111,983.86
Very odd, and not in accord with common sense or the way interest is calculated on any financial instrument. Is this some weird statutory way of doing it I haven’t found, or are there no lawyers involved who can calculate compound interest and treat the statutory 9% as an APY?
And the directors of the Scottish company which owns the golf club would apply to strike the lien on the basis that it does not owe anything to FB. Trump does, in this hypothetical, but not the Scottish company.
Yes. As of this moment the total is:
$1,139,749 USD raised of $355,000,000 goal • 20.6K donations
See the K there. That means ‘thousand’.
The fun part is that this money will likely disappear before Trump sees any of it.
It’s grifters all the way down.
I agree. Trump is not running this GoFundMe. I would be genuinely surprised if Trump gets any of that money.
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
So we’re at 454+83= $537 million plus interest.
I don’t know what Trump’s liquid assets, but he said under oath that he had $400 million, and we know Trump is an habitual liar. My pattern recognition – and that is all – says that he can’t cover the $83 million. IF that’s the case, things will get very weird next month.
Any Godzillionaire loaning or giving $537 million to Trump has to face the prospect of looking really foolish when it blows up in his face. The only person who could do this while keeping his reputation intact is Putin. Because for the Russian, US chaos is good.
But say Trump has $400 in the bank (or in Treasury bills). 537 - 400 = $183 million. That’s eg far more than the RNC could cough up. Would some lender make up the difference against good collateral?
So maybe Trump could squeeze through, IF he was telling the truth under oath about the $400 million and IF his net worth is somewhere near the $2.6 billion estimated by Forbes, and IF this lender tells him that Trump needs to hand the reigns to Haley if he wants the moolah. But under that scenario, Trump loses his get out of jail free Presidency. So we’re back to sugar daddies and lenders with bad judgment.
Got all that? Me neither.
Like rowing a boat, we enter the future backwards. All we see are the scenes of the past, and no one can see the views of tomorrow.
Unless Trump actually has a very big pile of cash handy (which I doubt) I think he simply has to start selling assets to cover these debts.
Reminds me of a Sunday Wizard of Id comic decades ago. The first panel, the duke is saying to the King, “The scout has returned with news about an enemy buildup on our northern border!”
“That’s important news! Give the scout this sack of gold as a reward.”
In the next panel the duke is saying to another courtier, “Give this [smaller] bag of gold to the scout.”
It continues on through the castle with ever smaller amounts until a single gold coin is handed to a page. In the final panel the page is with the scout, all scuffed up and two arrows in his back. “The King salutes you!”
I am so stealing this.
Or Vladimir Putin.
And actually, it would be pretty easy Putin to do. He has enough cash, (and can print more rubles to cover it, if anybody inside Russia dares to challenge him ). And in return, Trump would hand Putin whatever secret documents Vlad asks for.
Question: is Trump allowed to pay in installments?
This would make it even easier for Putin to blackmail him…each installment gets paid after Trump hands over another secret.
And of course pull out of NATO. I think that’s Putin’s idea anyway. And Putin was gambling that Trump would be president in 2020. That’s why he was getting ready to attack Ukraine. Putin attacked anyway, but it’s harder since Biden is pres.
I think the idea of Putin, Musk, or some other rich benefactor paying Trump’s fines is fanciful – maybe they could find a way to slip him a few hundred thousand, even a few million, without anyone noticing… but hundreds of millions? That’s not going to just magically appear in Trump’s bank account without traceability.
For all his lies about people doing it to him, I like the thought of Trump, going up to Putin, with tears in his eyes, saying ‘please, sir, i need some money’.
I agree that the idea is fanciful, but it’s not because of the traceability. There’s nothing illegal about giving someone money, and most of those billionaires don’t give a shit what anyone thinks of them. The real issue is that billionaires like their money and prefer to hang onto it and see no particular motivation to bail Trump out of his legal troubles.
They may be motivated to contribute a few hundred thousand to his campaign, but that’s a whole different issue. With regard to his legal troubles, I think the Trumpster will be limited to trying to sell gold-sprayed sneakers and GoFundMe efforts, though I’m sure he’s already approached Harland Crow with tears in his eyes and pleas beginning with “sir”.
Surely with all of the sanctions the US has has placed on Russia in recent years, the financial transaction for the benefit of a US citizen would be noticed, at least, and probably impossible.
Unless our sanctions are more of a sieve, than a barrier.