Donald Trump’s vow to appeal his New York civil fraud verdict is already looking bad for him

Now that the courts have ruled that Donald Trump owes roughly half a billion dollars (including interest) to the state of New York, plus another $83 million to E. Jean Carroll, he’s in a no-win situation. If he wants to appeal the verdict, he’ll have to put up a bond as large as the verdict itself. And if he doesn’t appeal, his assets start getting taken. Either way he’s going to lose a huge amount of money, which he doesn’t have.

Trump’s legal team now says that Trump is going to appeal. We’ll see if that actually happens; he has a thirty day window. But financial experts are already spelling out just how difficult it would be for Trump to come up with the bond. He claims to have $400 million cash on hand, but no one believes him (people who are deeply in debt don’t tend to be able to keep any cash around). And it’s not easy to use real estate holdings as a bond.

More to the point, if Trump is upside down on a property, then there’s no inherent value in that property. In other words, we’re about to start finding out just how far upside down Trump is on his various properties, who all he owes money to, and how quickly his financial house of cards is going to collapse now that half a billion dollars cash is about to be extracted from it.