Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a Fox News town hall at the Greenville Convention Center in Greenville, South Carolina, on Feb. 20, 2024.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Donald Trump is racing to stave off a pair of civil penalties totaling nearly $540 million, without having to first put up the full amounts in cash or bonds.
The former president’s lawyers claim that he would face “irreparable” harm if required to fully secure his judgments in order to keep them from coming due, and might even have to quickly sell off properties that can’t be rebought.
They also say Trump can’t simply post a cash deposit — at least not in his New York civil business fraud case, where he is facing $454 million in fines and interest alone.
“No one, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Donald Trump, has five hundred million laying around,” Trump’s attorney Chris Kise told an appeals court judge last week.
But legal experts say there’s another option that Trump’s lawyers haven’t mentioned in the court filings: Trump could offer up some of his properties as collateral to borrow what he needs — potentially from private equity sources.
There are “lots of private lenders out there in the debt markets and private equity markets that could lend” to Trump, said Columbia University law professor Eric Talley.
“In all cases, the loans would probably have to be secured with Trump properties, but if there is enough equity in some of them, he should be able to obtain secured credit, even on a compressed timeline,” Talley said.
In this courtroom sketch, former U.S. President Donald Trump looks on as his attorney Alina Habba delivers closing arguments during E. Jean Carroll’s second civil trial in which Carroll accused Trump of raping her decades ago, at Manhattan Federal Court in New York City on Jan. 26, 2024.
Jane Rosenberg | Reuters
The professor underscored the irony of Trump using his real estate to fight a lawsuit in which he was found liable…
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