The Half Billion Dollar Man

Who Will Cover Trump's A** This Time Around?

Yesterday we learned that the usual suspects among Donald J. Trump’s moneyed friends aren’t willing to pony up the nearly half a billion dollars he has been ordered to post at the Manhattan courthouse next week. Trump has until March 25 to post $464 million to cover a fraud judgment against his business while he appeals. His lawyers claimed that 30 surety companies turned down applications to cover the bond, and that to come up with that cash was “a practical impossibility” for the former president.

Apparently, there hasn’t been time to hit up MAGA political donors, or the prospect of a Trump dictatorship is not yet sufficient assurance that the lenders would get their money back. And daughter-in-law Lara Trump hasn’t pried open the treasure vault as co-chair of the Republican National Committee - or maybe it too is empty. According to CNBC yesterday, big donors are afraid of bad press and something called “small donor fatigue” - was the golden sneaker deal the last straw? - afflicts the suckers reliably clicking Apple Pay for $50 tranches every time they saw a Trump email offering dinner at Mar a Lago to one lucky winner.

Trump has been down this road before and has come out just fine. In one of the anecdotes that make up the legend of Donald, he and girlfriend Marla Maples were walking around New York in 1990 when they passed a man begging for money. "You see that man? Right now he's worth $900 million more than me... Right now I'm worth minus $900 million," Trump told Maples.

He filed for four bankruptcies between 1991 and 2009, or as he has put it, took advantage of “the chapter laws.” He lost his casino jewel, the Trump Taj Mahal first, then the Plaza Hotel, then the rest of his Atlantic City casino empire in 2004 (the same year Mark Burnett created The Apprentice, with Trump playing a successful businessman). Then finally, in 2009, Trump Entertainment Resorts kicked him off its board but kept his name on the brand.

But Trump can rightly claim his bankruptcies were smart. No shame in bankruptcy if bankers think they have no other choice but to cover you.

In debt close to a billion dollars, and faced with reluctant bankers, he nearly lost it. While the bankers were convening and trying to come up with a plan, he holed up with bags of McDonald’s in his bedroom, refusing to speak to anyone for days. Biographer Harry Hurt III even wrote that some people close to him worried about suicide.

The story of how he rose from his bed, outsmarted the bankers, got out of that hole, and managed to survive and thrive, living on to play-act a successful businessman on television for more than a decade, is a master class in coddling and entitlement.

He was simply too big to let fail.

Bankers and investors in 1992 agreed to cut a deal for him in order to avoid foreclosure and bankruptcy court because the debacle of his debt and profligacy was so gigantic that the prospect of years of litigation was more terrible than settling with Boy Wonder. They settled but American bankers were never again as eager to do business with him.

In the following decades, Trump filed two more bankruptcies, but his businesses relied on foreign money - much of it from Russia - to fill in the gaps. In 2008, Donald Jr famously bragged that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” Trump’s former longtime architect, Alan Lapidus, confirmed that in an interview with Foreign Policy ten years later. Trump he said, “could not get anybody in the United States to lend him anything. It was all coming out of Russia. His involvement with Russia was deeper than he’s acknowledged.”

The truth about his epic business failures is mostly forgotten, buried in the avalanche of “flooding the zone with shit” (Bannon’s strategy) that was his presidency. Today it is rarely discussed in the growing panic over his ability to lead millions of cult followers to the edge of the abyss of dictatorship.

It’s worthwhile to occasionally return to the work of the early biographers, especially the late great Wayne Barrett, the earliest and perhaps the finest Trump observer, who chronicled the failures in real time for the Village Voice and then in books. Barrett - in one of the coincidences that paranoiac Q-Anon theorists never bother to add to their Deep State Clue game - died the day before Trump was inaugurated in 2017.

Barrett famously observed that both Trump and his father Fred were “state capitalists,” that is, men who made their millions raiding the public till, milking government programs like the Federal Housing Authority and VA housing loan programs, and demanding state tax abatements, all while scorning social nets for the poor and preening about being self-made. The father and the son leveraged New York political connections to siphon government (taxpayer) money into their businesses, for decades.

“In every single one of his major deals, [Trump] was designated to be a millionaire and subsequently a billionaire by the government officials that he co-opted and compromised,” Barrett said in a 1992 interview as Trump fils was crawling out of his first great business disaster.

Barrett went into greater detail about the scams in an interview with The New Republic shortly before his death. “Both father and son, everything that they did benefitted them one way or another by government program,” he said. “The entire tax abatement program for The Commodore [now the Grand Hyatt New York] was invented for him. It wasn’t like we slotted him into an existing program, we created this entire tax incentive program for Donald. And for Fred. And when Hugh Carey opened his campaign headquarters to run for governor in 1974, Fred Trump put the phones in. These guys were at the ground level of the Brooklyn Democratic machine when it was probably the most powerful machine in the United States. Certainly the most powerful in the state of New York.”

Of course, for a state capitalist, there is no more lucrative government program than four years in the White House.

In any other businessman, Trump’s claim of being unable to pay up would qualify as a myth-wrecking, career-destroying setback. Average Americans who can’t pay bond go to jail. But just when you think he’s down, he’s up again.

One of the aspects of Trumpworld that thrills his followers is the way the man’s whole life is cartoonish, unreal, a careening funhouse ride of near misses, amazing last-minute twists, dreadful failures followed by eye-popping triumphs. And so, of course, there is a deus ex machina ahead.

Only die-hard MAGAs still pay attention to Truth Social, Trump’s middle finger to Twitter, before Musk bought it and invited him back to the platform. But next week, it’s set to make him very rich, on paper anyway. Truth Social and Trump’s larger media company are set to go public via a shell company vehicle called a Special Purpose Acquisitions Company (SPAC).

A SPAC is one of those dubious but legal Wall Street tools that’s been around for years but became popular in recent years as a way to accumulate cash for… nothing. SPACs are also known colloquially as “blank check companies.” They exist to create IPOs to raise money for other companies. The SPAC, in this case, is called Digital World Acquisition Corp., and on March 22, its shareholders are due to vote on whether to acquire Trump’s media company, Trump Media & Technology Group. Trump would hold 78 million shares of the new company, between 58 and 69 percent of its total shares, with a net worth of almost $4 billion.

Like everything Trumpy, the share price of this SPAC deal hinges almost entirely on pumping and dumping his personal brand, which presently hangs on the election in November. Share prices skyrocketed after the Iowa caucuses and again since he won the other primaries. But the deal comes with a restriction - Trump cannot sell his $4 billion shares for six months after the close of the deal - and by then, they could be worth nothing.

What this means is that three days before he’s due to post the nearly half-billion dollar bond that no insurance company will cover, he could suddenly be worth $4 billion on paper. And - who knows - that piece of paper and a Big Mac might get someone - Moldovan Credit Union? Baku Savings and Loan? Viktor Orban? MBS? — to tide him over with some pocket change to make the March 25 court bond deadline.

Average Americans who fail to post bond go directly to jail. He won’t. Whatever happens next, the spectacle of 45 thumbing his nose yet again at the American legal system will only further excite fans who see in him the Second Coming of the Messiah as Artful Dodger.