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Trump says he has ‘almost $500 million’ cash amid bond deadline

By Erik Larson Washington Post

Donald Trump said he has almost $500 million in cash on hand, a hefty sum that would still fall short of covering the former president’s appeal bond due in three days in New York state’s civil fraud suit.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee said Friday in a post on his Truth Social platform that he intends to use a “substantial” amount of the cash on his campaign, which is already spending millions on his legal fees and lagging behind President Joe Biden in fundraising.

Trump’s post did not say he’d use the cash to post an appeal bond, which is due Monday and represents a major threat to his finances. The bond is set at 120% of the $454 million verdict against him and his company, or about $545 million. Such bonds put judgments on hold during the appeals process.

Trump’s struggle with the bond comes as he’s poised to get a windfall of more than $3 billion through a merger of his Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs Truth Social, with the blank check company Digital World Acquisition Corp., and going public. The profit is only on paper, for now, and won’t help Trump arrange a bond.

If Trump fails to put up the bond, New York Attorney General Letitia James will start seizing his assets. She proved during an 11-week trial that Trump inflated the value of his assets by billions of dollars a year for more than a decade to get better terms on loans.

Trump’s post called the verdict against him a “SHOCKING NUMBER” and accused James and the judge who issued the verdict, Arthur Engoron, of setting the penalty just high enough to wipe out his cash stockpile. Trump said in a sworn deposition in the case last year that he had more than $400 million in cash.

Trump, whose net worth was estimated at $3.1 billion before the verdict, has previously said he’d finance his own presidential campaign without following through, relying instead on small donations from his millions of supporters. Trump has also been known to exaggerate his finances, which are famously opaque.