AMAC Exclusive – By Shane Harris
A New York court has officially ordered former President Donald Trump to pay $464.5 million as a result of a civil fraud trial where Trump was accused of inflating the value of parts of his real estate empire to secure favorable loans. The ruling is so egregious that many New York business leaders are reportedly considering fleeing the state, and even former Florida Governor and 2016 GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush – long a top Trump critic – has come to the 45th president’s defense.
In a joint op-ed for The Wall Street Journal with tech entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, Bush warned that the two recent rulings against Trump and Tesla founder Elon Musk call into question the integrity of the judicial system in the United States.
Along with the recent ruling against Trump, a judge in Delaware recently invalidated Musk’s $55.8 billion Tesla compensation package – a package which 80 percent of Tesla’s shareholders had agreed to. Musk and his companies have been subject to what appears to be politically motivated government harassment following his acquisition of Twitter (since renamed X) in 2022.
“Every American has a right to be critical of Mr. Trump’s politics,” Bush and Lonsdale wrote. “But equality before the law is precious, and these rulings represent a crisis not only for the soundness of our courts, but for the business environment that has allowed the U.S. to prosper.”
If the rulings stand, “blue-state politicians may have the satisfaction of ‘sticking it’ to Messrs. Trump and Musk, but the loss to those states will be significant,” the op-ed continues.
That already appears to be the case, as some business leaders have indicated they are shutting down operations in the Empire State.
As Fox Business reported shortly after the Trump ruling was handed down, “Some nationwide real estate investors, like Cardone Capital’s Grant Cardone, have started telling their teams to pack their bags and leave New York after the verdict in former President Trump’s fraud trial.”
Cardone told the network that when he heard about the verdict, “it was like, pencils down. Don’t touch it. Don’t go there.”
“Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary has also announced that he will no longer be investing in “loser” New York, saying that he “can’t even understand or fathom the decision at all.” O’Leary advised other real estate investors to follow suit and told The New York Post that he had heard from several peers in the business world who intended to shun New York.
In a separate interview with NewsNation, O’Leary added that the Trump judgement came from a “rogue judge,” referring to Judge Arthur Engoron, who decided the case. As Rich Lowry wrote for National Review, Engoron’s decision “is the handiwork of an elected Democratic judge in a case brought by an elected Democratic prosecutor [New York Attorney General Letitia James] who pledged in her election campaign to pursue Trump.”
O’Leary and other real estate experts have likewise noted the absurdity of the case against Trump, which is based on claims that he inflated the actual value of his real estate holdings in order to secure more favorable loan terms for future projects. As O’Leary put it when discussing the case last year, “Every single real estate developer everywhere on earth does this. They always talk about their asset being worth a lot and the bank says no. That’s just the way it is.”
As Bush and Lonsdale also noted in the Journal, “Bankers from Deutsche Bank, which lent money to Mr. Trump, testified that they were satisfied with having done so, given they were paid back on time and with interest. They also testified that they were uncertain whether the alleged exaggerations would have affected the terms of the loans to Mr. Trump—a key part of Ms. James’s case.”
In other words, no one was actually financially harmed by Trump’s supposed misrepresentations of the value of his holdings, which is normally a requirement in any fraud case. If Trump is indeed required to pay the $464.5 million, every penny will go to the State of New York.
The ruling appears set to accelerate a now years-long trend of businesses fleeing the Empire State due to its onerous tax policies, incompetent liberal governance, and now outright hostility toward conservatives and the business community in general.
Although not directly related to the Trump case, Remington, the nation’s oldest gunmaker, announced just days before Engoron’s ruling that it would be moving all of its manufacturing to Georgia following years of anti-Second Amendment policies emanating from Albany. In total, between the end of 2019 and August of last year, New York lost 158 companies managing more than $1 trillion in assets according to a report from Bloomberg.
In each of these cases, as jobs and money were pouring out of New York, it was New York residents and businesses who suffered, while liberal lawmakers patted themselves on the back.
The same pattern is playing out in this latest verdict against Trump. Instead of targeting actual criminals victimizing New Yorkers, Attorney General Letitia James is expending taxpayer time and money to target Democrats’ top political enemy. Judge Engoron is doing the same.
Once again, while elected Democrats drown themselves in self-congratulation, it is the people of New York – and the health of the American judicial system as a whole – that are suffering.
Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on X @ShaneHarris513.
