Civil Judgments Sting as Criminal Cases Slow

For all the attention paid to Donald Trump’s likely upcoming criminal trial in Manhattan, he’s facing a far more urgent threat in coming days: the prospect that he won’t be able to post a nearly half-billion-dollar bond in the New York civil fraud case against him and his company.

Trump’s lawyers this week revealed in a court filing that the Trump Organization had approached roughly 30 companies in an effort to secure the huge bond, but that none would underwrite one so large without having the former president pledge a lot of cash. At the moment, Trump lacks the liquidity to secure a bond that big.

The bond would prevent the attorney general, Letitia James, from immediately collecting on a $454 million judgment while he appeals the case, in which a judge found that he had fraudulently inflated his net worth. It’s possible that a higher court could pause the judgment or reduce the size of the bond, but, if that doesn’t happen, Trump is facing difficult options.

The financial squeeze on Trump underscores how, even as he faces four criminal trials that are moving ahead slowly, the civil cases against him are already imposing substantial pressure on him. He has had to post a separate $91.6 million bond in a defamation case he recently lost to the writer E. Jean Carroll. And this week, his lawyers asked for a delay in civil cases brought against him in federal court in Washington seeking to hold him accountable for the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

He could get welcome financial news in coming days through a complex transaction in which his social media company, Truth Social, will go public, its share price having been bid up by Trump supporters. But it is not clear that his stake in the social media company can