Now President Trump will have to pay for it himself.

Cardon has previously supported Trump, donating more than $10,000 to his 2020 reelection campaign. Many of the remaining approximately 22,500 donations (at the time of writing) likely also came from former Trump donors. This time, they have so far raised more than $1.2 million to meet President Trump’s financial needs.

But those needs are very different than when people were contributing in the past.

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As The Washington Post explained on Monday, that $350 million-plus is just a portion of the debt President Trump owes. He was also ordered to pay more than $83 million for defaming author E. Jean Carroll. It also accrues interest, costing more than $100,000 per day. New York Attorney General Letitia James has publicly tallied the amount President Trump currently owes more than $464 million.

Interest alone indicates a problem. Mr. Cardone’s fundraising campaign began more than a week ago, during which time more than $1 million in interest was added to Mr. Trump’s debt. While the GoFundMe is ostensibly intended to raise her $355 million in funds charged by Engoron, it has actually barely raised enough to cover its interest. And, as you might expect, donations have slowed from the initial surge, with less than $100,000 added to the fund in the past two days, from Sunday to Tuesday.

Indeed, since Trump entered politics, he has been effective at getting people to spend money. He accepted private donations after he insisted in the 2016 primary to Republican voters that they could pay for his nomination with their own money. During that cycle, his campaign raised more than $333 million, including about $87 million from small donors. In 2020, his re-election campaign raised nearly $774 million, including about $380 million from small donors.

The latter sum would be enough to cover the debt he owes New York. But that doesn’t happen.

First of all, he has only 30 days to issue a comprehensive judgment if he wants to appeal. Unless the court decides otherwise, you cannot simply avoid payment until the appeal is resolved. He must provide the total amount for that period.

He may find a bond provider to help him do so, but as the Post’s Jonathan O’Connell, Shayna Jacobs and Josh Dorsey write, it means more to Trump than to others. much more difficult. Among other things, the ruling against him focused specifically on the Trump Organization’s misrepresentation of the value of its assets. Is there a bonding company that is confident that the building pledged as collateral is worth what is being claimed?

Mr. Trump has cash on hand, which could be enough to hand it over. But the Trump Organization also needs cash to operate its facilities.

The 30-day grace period means that even if they can convince backers to provide funding, they won’t have two years to do so. He succeeded in persuading the public to donate more than $170 million in less than a month following his 2020 election loss, with the funds ostensibly going to aid his legal efforts. I was concentrating. He will need nearly three times as much money now for causes less directly related to his political ambitions.

Republicans have no intention of bailing him out either. The party paid part of the bill soon after Mr. Trump left office, but that will be difficult as Mr. Trump moves slowly toward renomination as the Republican presidential nominee. Prominent members of the Republican National Committee have proposed a resolution that would prevent the Republican Party from paying for Trump’s legal fees and seek to ban such payments altogether. It’s not like the RNC has the cash anyway. There was just $8 million left in the bank at the beginning of this year.

Needless to say, the central issue here is the magnitude of the punishment that President Trump will incur. Bloomberg News estimates that 178 Americans are among the world’s richest people, with a cumulative wealth worth about $3.7 trillion. But the median net worth of these billionaires is a more modest $9.2 billion, meaning they would have to scrape together about 4 percent of their net worth in less than a month just to get the sentence imposed by Engoron. means.

Trump is not one of the richest people in the United States.

It’s not clear what he’s going to do or even what options he has at his disposal. It’s also unclear what will happen if the appeal is denied and President Trump permanently loses that $500 million. He would have to sell 890,000 pairs of new gold sneakers to earn enough cash to pay off the fines imposed by Engoron, but he keeps all the money from the brand deal. isn’t it.

Mr. Trump has been very successful over the past 50 years in getting people to spend money. He was especially successful when he tried it in a political context. But this amount in this timeline? That’s entirely new territory, and one that he needs to work on personally, which is unusual these days.