Trump Hit Where It Hurts Most

The civil fraud ruling is a blow to the former president’s wallet and his image.

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Donald Trump outside the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan in December.

This one’s going to sting

Donald Trump took a huge hit today in the two places where it tends to hurt him most: his wallet and his business-wizard image.

The blows were delivered by a state judge in New York who ordered Trump to pay penalties of nearly $355 million for engaging in years of fraud by lying about the value of his real-estate portfolio. As part of his decision, the judge, Arthur Engoron, also barred Trump from running any New York corporation — including his own, the Trump Organization — for three years.

The company has been at the center of Trump’s public persona as a wealthy businessman for decades. And in the slimmest of silver linings, Justice Engoron did not permanently take control of it away from him. Still, the ruling — if it holds up on appeal — will have significant ramifications for the former president’s holdings.

Whatever financial pain Trump now faces was rivaled by the damage the decision dealt to his ego and to his image as a jet-setting billionaire and take-charge chief executive, a carefully crafted public face that helped to vault him first into reality-television stardom and then into the White House.

“Their complete lack of contrition and remorse border on the pathological,” Justice Engoron wrote of Trump and his co-defendants in the case, including his two adult sons, Eric and Don Jr.

The judge went on to say that the accusation of “inflating asset values to make money” was “not a mortal sin” and that Trump, his sons and two of his top aides at the company “did not rob a bank at gunpoint.” And yet, Justice Engoron concluded, “defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways. Instead, they adopt a ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ posture that the evidence belies.”

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