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Days after his lawyers claimed that Donald Trump would be unable to post a bond of $454 million for the appeal of his New York civil fraud conviction, the former president took to his Truth Social site to boast that he has “ALMOST FIVE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS IN CASH.”
If you don’t speak Trump, what this means is that he does not have $500 million in cash and is incredibly concerned that some of his assets will be seized starting next week.
And that version squares with a court filing from earlier this week, in which his attorneys said the former president does not have the money to post bond.
Even by Trump’s low standards, his post is rife with lies and nonsense.
First of all, he claims that he has amassed this vast cash fortune through “hard work, talent, and luck.” Of course, the truth is that he got untold millions of dollars from his dad (while benefiting from tax laws favoring the rich) and then ran some of his businesses in the ground (while benefiting from lax bankruptcy laws that also favor the rich).
Most hilariously, in keeping with his claim that facing accountability for various alleged and adjudicated crimes and misdeeds constitutes “election interference,” Trump then suggests that he cannot use the money for bond because he plans to spend “A SUBSTANTIAL AMOUNT” of it on his presidential campaign.
That is not only very likely to be a lie, it is also especially funny because the opposite has been true.
On the one hand, Trump has spent millions of dollars in campaign contributions on his lawyers (as well as $400,000 on his wife Melania’s stylist), and, in the past, he has enriched himself from the money he has raised to the tune of millions of dollars more.
On the other hand, he did not use any of his purported vast fortune during the 2020 campaign.
The former president then suggests that his true crime was not overstating the value of his properties to obtain favorable loans from banks, which is what he was found guilty of.
Instead, he laments that the thing he did wrong was winning the 2016 election and doing “EVEN BETTER IN 2020,” which is true if you believe that losing the election and being bested in the popular vote by 7 million votes is “even better” than eking out an Electoral College win with the timely assistance from Russia and a media looking to make a buck instead of properly covering the race.
In his post, Trump concludes that all of this “IS COMMUNISM IN AMERICA!” which is an incredibly dumb thing to say but probably plays well with the average Truth Social reader.
It remains to be seen what New York Attorney General Letitia James will do with Trump’s post.
