The former president was just ordered to pay $355 million in his New York fraud case, bringing the tally this year to nearly half a billion dollars in civil damages.

Two recent verdicts have now left Donald Trump on the hook for nearly half a billion dollars.

On Friday, a New York judge handed the former president a $355 million penalty, and banned him from serving in a leadership position in any business in New York for three years, for fraudulently inflating his net worth to lenders in order to receive more favorable loan agreements. And in January, a Manhattan jury ordered Trump to pay the writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her after she accused him of raping her. (A separate jury in May had found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in the 1990s.)

…

“It’s pretty scary from an ethics perspective,” said Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan watchdog group that has chronicled Trump’s abuses of power and filed lawsuits against him.

You don’t have to look far to find the reasons why. Trump’s first term was riddled with conflicts of interest, and that’s in no small part because of his financial well-being (or lack thereof, depending on how you look at it). At the time that he tried to overturn the 2020 election, he was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, largely stemming from loans to help rehabilitate his struggling businesses, and most of which would be coming due over the subsequent four years. Throughout his presidency, he refused to divest from his businesses, which made millions of dollars in revenue from taxpayers and continued to do work with other countries while he was in office — a practice he indicated he would repeat in a second term.

          • peopleproblems
            6•5 months ago

            Ah fuck. That’s the kicker. I was always off the opinion that we lived in a simulation. Now, I’m thinking we’re living in a reality written by AI inside a simulation.

            • @dumpsterlid@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2•5 months ago

              I think the most likely thing given how dumb a lot of the writing is for this reality is that this reality was made as a cheap corporate knockoff of some other handmade reality. It is the only thing that explains both the potential evident in the beauty of our reality and the maddening lack of fulfillment of it in favor of (unbelievably) dumb shit happening over and over again.

        • @hitmyspot@aussie.zone
          8•5 months ago

          Strange you call that a storm. That’s a press release for marketing purposes. The media are falling into the same trap as before. Clicks for them equals incomez so all the crazy and stupid stuff trump does that can be monitored, is.

          Anyone remember press conferences from trump hotels? Not to mention events, conferences, NFTs etc. It’s all a con and we and they need to stop giving it air.

    • Flying Squid
      38•5 months ago

      The line, called Trump Sneakers

      …

      The high tops, which are gold and emblazoned with a “T” on the outside of each shoe, are called the “Never Surrender High Top Sneaker” and are priced at $399 online. The athletic shoes, which feature a “T” and the number 45 on the sides are priced at $199.

      This man (and whoever he works with) does not have an ounce of creativity in his entire body.

      • partial_accumen
        31•5 months ago

        "Never Surrender "

        Wasn’t that Desantis’s tag line before he…well… surrendered?

        • Flying Squid
          23•5 months ago

          It was also Trump’s tagline sold on T-shirts under the mugshot shot picture that was taken when he surrendered to the police.

        • @CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
          10•5 months ago

          These dumbfucks are wearing shirts that commemorate his literal surrender, bearing the slogan “never surrender”. They are fucking stupid, in other words.

      • @CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5•5 months ago

        For the dumbasses that are going to buy and wear these to virtue signal to other dumbasses, no creativity is needed. These are the people that think it’s a real knee-slapper to wear “Let’s Go Brandon” gear (or “Fuck Your Feelings” or “Trump that Bitch” or…).

        If they are spending lots of money to “own the libs” - which really means signal to all family and friends, as well as strangers to stay TF away from them - they are going to spend it on any form of obvious dreck like this.

      • @psycho_driver@lemmy.world
        4•5 months ago

        Fuck me, one of my daughters was randomly assigned #45 for club volleyball this season. Didn’t even think about it but now I feel dirty.

        • @JonEFive@midwest.social
          2•5 months ago

          If you know anything about sneaker-heads, you know they don’t often wear their very expensive sneakers.

          Which makes these things even more stupid. But you and I aren’t the target demographic for throwing $400 in a trash can.

          • @generichate1546@lemmynsfw.com
            2•5 months ago

            I know I don’t wear my USA made Vans I bought when I was young nor do I wear my North Face Vans…but I couldn’t be bothered to think about that trash…hell of but hitops and spray paint them gold first, if I was into that sort of thing.

    • AWildMimicAppearsEnglish
      2•5 months ago

      Those would be prime ATBGE material, if i didn’t know that they are produced so cheaply that you get orange feet cancer wearing them.