Trump Brags About How Rich He Is—and Gets Himself in Trouble

Donald Trump wants you to know that he is absolutely not having a hard time finding the money to pay his legal comeuppance and that he is still totally super, super rich.

The former president was fined $354 million for committing real estate–related fraud in New York. In order to appeal the decision, Trump must post a bond of the full amount plus interest—which has already reached more than $450 million, with an additional $112,000 tacked on per day.

“You have to come up with something like $400 million; how close are you to securing the bond or would you need for that?” asked Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade on Tuesday.

“I have a lot of money, I can do what I want to do, but this was a horrible, illegal decision,” Trump said. “This was a decision made up by a crooked judge, a 100 percent crooked clubhouse judge, a disgrace with an equally crooked attorney general, who campaigned on ‘I will get Trump,’ and we’re appealing that decision and we’ll see how we do.”

So far, the self-purported billionaire has attempted to pause the rapidly growing interest on the order with a $100 million bond in lieu of the full $465 million. That effort was roundly rejected by a New York appeals court judge last month, who did allow Trump to continue borrowing money.

Trump’s legal team is still working to appeal the entirety of the decision—but even that avenue would still require them to put nearly half a billion dollars into an escrow account with the court, or Trump could be hit with more fines or held in contempt.

“So you’re not worried about the money?” Kilmeade clarified.

“No, I don’t worry about money,” Trump snipped.

That’s good to know, because launching a sneaker campaign the day after getting hit with the legal penalty and flagging a fan-funded GoFundMe to help with his bills had definitely raised a lot of eyebrows.

Still, his former allies aren’t so quick to believe Trump, especially since he still owes an additional $88.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for sexually assaulting her and then defaming her twice in his rabid denials. He also owes $400,000 to The New York Times and has racked up thousands more over gag orders he’s violated amid all these trials. And in the realm of non–court ordered debts, Trump’s former right-hand man Rudy Giuliani claimed he still hasn’t been paid for the legal services he provided to the former president and is reportedly waiting on a sum of about $2 million.

“I mean, what is he going to do?” Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, told CNN on Thursday. “What, is he going to call like a J.G. Wentworth and say, ‘I need cash now’? How was he going to raise more than this half a billion?”

Trump has until March 25 to implement a stay on the fraud order, by which he would need to put up the money, assets, or an appeal bond to cover the $465 million disgorgement. Failing to do so could result in the seizure of Trump’s assets, warned New York Attorney General Letitia James.

As he campaigns for a second term for president, Donald Trump has taken his attack on migrants to the next level.

But a shocking new low came during an interview with the right-wing Right Side Broadcasting Network Monday, as Trump proceeded to invoke a horror movie character to describe migrants.

“They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums. You know, insane asylums, that’s Silence of the Lambs stuff,” Trump said. “Hannibal Lecter, anybody know Hannibal Lecter? We don’t want ’em in this country.”

The line drew laughter from the audience at his Mar-a-Lago estate, where the interview was taking place. He also compared migrants’ languages, bizarrely, to languages from Mars, and then made the claim that cities where large numbers of migrants have gone don’t even have youth sports anymore.

“We have children that are no longer going to school. They’re throwing them out of the park. There’s no more Little Leagues, there’s no more sports, there’s no more life in New York and so many of these cities,” Trump said.

This line was seized upon by the Biden campaign, who posted video of it on X, formerly known as Twitter.

It’s only the latest outlandish remark he has made about migrants in recent days. On Thursday, during a visit to the southern border, Trump claimed that many of the migrants arriving in the United States are people “who don’t speak languages.”

And if that anthropological impossibility wasn’t absurd enough, Trump on Saturday confused President Biden with former President Obama and mistook the country of Argentina for a person, among other gaffes.

Meanwhile, media reports are full of stories about Biden’s supposed decline in mental acuity, despite Trump’s slip-ups and missteps veering into far more dangerous territory, echoing rhetoric like that of Adolf Hitler.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Donald Trump’s claim of presidential immunity, the decision could protect him from any legal consequences in his forthcoming election interference trial. But the stakes are even bigger than the threat of jail time for the former reality TV star … at least, according to Trump.

On Monday, the GOP front-runner tried to argue that his preordained innocence is an issue of national security by admitting that he’s actually very susceptible to blackmail.

“Without Presidential Immunity, a President will not be able to properly function, or make decisions, in the best interest of the United States of America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“Presidents will always be concerned, and even paralyzed, by the prospect of wrongful prosecution and retaliation, after they leave office. This could actually lead to extortion and blackmail of a President. The other side would say, ‘If you don’t do something, just the way we want it, we are going to go after you when you leave office, or perhaps even sooner.’ A President has to be free to determine what is right for our Country with no undue pressure,” he continued.

That is, of course, despite the fact that the United States has had 46 presidents in its 248-year history. Of those, Trump is the only one to face criminal charges—some of which relate to insurrection.

“Without Immunity, the Presidency, as we know it, will no longer exist,” he added in a follow-up post. “Many actions for the benefit of our Country will not be taken. This is in no way what the Founders had in mind. Legal Experts and Scholars have stated that the President must have Full Presidential Immunity. A President must be free to make proper decisions. His mind must be clear, and he must not be guided by fear of retribution!”

The Supreme Court has scheduled hearings pertaining to Trump’s immunity claim for the week of April 22.

Under Donald Trump’s leadership, the West Wing operated more like a pill mill than the White House, at least according to a January report by the Department of Defense inspector general, which capped a six-year investigation into the administration’s medical practices.

But sources knowledgeable on the matter paint an even more dramatic image than that, describing the nation’s highest office as “awash in speed,” reported Rolling Stone.

Common pills included modafinil, Adderall, fentanyl, morphine, and ketamine, according to the Pentagon report. But other, unlisted drugs—like Xanax—were equally easy to come by from the White House Medical Unit, according to sources that spoke to the magazine.

At least two senior staffers would regularly mix the depressant with alcohol, a potentially life-threatening combo, to deal with the stress of working with a highly erratic boss.

“You try working for him and not chasing pills with alcohol,” one source told Rolling Stone.

While other presidents were known to take a mix of drug cocktails to fight off back pain (like JFK) or bad moods (like Nixon), no previous administrations matched the level of debauchery of Trump’s, whose in-office pharmacists unquestioningly handed out highly addictive substances to staffers who needed pick-me-ups or energy boosts—no doctor’s exam, referral, or prescription required.

“It was kind of like the Wild West. Things were pretty loose. Whatever someone needs, we were going to fill this,” another source said.

Ultimately, the unmitigated access to controlled substances fostered an environment that would have been considered highly illegal and problematic anywhere else in the nation—if it weren’t inside the very office that helps craft those regulations.

“Is it being done appropriately or legally all the time? No. But are they going to get to that end result that the bosses want? Yeah,” said another, referring to the high demands of the office.

Meanwhile, pharmacists described an atmosphere of fear within the West Wing, claiming they would be “fired” if they spoke out or would receive negative work assignments if they didn’t hand pills over to staffers.

Representative Jamie Raskin has a message for the Supreme Court: challenge accepted.

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Monday that Colorado can’t kick Donald Trump off its 2024 state primary ballot—and by extension, neither can any other state. Although the bench was united in its decision, it was sharply divided in reasoning. Five of the six conservative justices determined that the Fourteenth Amendment can only be enforced through a law passed by Congress, which the three liberal justices strongly opposed.

“I disagree with that interpretation, just because the other parts of the Fourteenth Amendment are self-executing,” Raskin said on CNN.

“In any event, the Supreme Court punted and said it’s up to Congress to act,” the Maryland representative continued. “And so I am working with a number of my colleagues, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Eric Swalwell, to revive legislation that we had to set up a process by which we could determine that someone who committed insurrection is disqualified by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Raskin noted that the House had voted in 2021 to impeach Trump for inciting insurrection. The Senate ultimately acquitted Trump, but only by a vote of 57–43.

The Colorado state Supreme Court ruled in December that Trump had engaged in insurrection during the January 6 attack and was therefore ineligible to appear on the primary ballot. Little more than a week later, Maine’s secretary of state also barred him from the state’s ballot. He was booted from the Illinois state ballot just last week.

The Supreme Court ruling mandates his return to all three ballots and ends dozens of lawsuits weighing whether Trump was eligible to appear on other states’ ballots.

The three liberal justices agreed that Colorado couldn’t make such a massive decision on its own but strongly disputed that the amendment can only be applied through legislation. Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson slammed the majority for overstepping the bounds of the lawsuit at hand and, in doing so, “ruling out enforcement under general federal statutes requiring the government to comply with the law.”

“By resolving these and other questions, the majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office,” the three justices wrote in their dissenting opinion.