Eric Trump said top insurance executives laughed when he asked for more than $400 million in bond money for his father. During a Sunday interview on
Fox News, host Maria Bartiromo asked Trump to clarify how much his father owes in bond payments to appeal his
New York fraud case. "I'm trying to understand how this number came about, $454 million or $464 million, and what the real number is," Bartiromo said. "You know what?" Trump ranted. "It was a crooked number. There are no victims. There is no number. The number should be zero." ALSO READ: 11 ways Trump doesn't become president "This is extraordinary," he continued. "No one's ever seen a bond this size. Every single person, when I came to them saying, hey, can I get a half-billion-dollar bond?" "Maria, they were laughing. They were laughing. Top executives of the largest surety companies had never seen anything of this size. And what, they're going to start seizing assets if he can't put up something that's not available in the United States?" Watch the video below from Fox News. The co-hosts of MSNBC's "The Weekend" had a hard time stopping laughing as one of Donald Trump's biographers explained how the former president found himself in the position of facing having his assets seized on Monday at the same time a court date will likely be set for his hush money trial . Speaking with hosts Michael Steele, Alicia Menendez and Symone Sanders-Townsend, writer and biographer Tim O'Brien kicked off his explanation of Trump's legal travails by saying of the former president "He dumb" which set off the outburst of laughter. O'Brien told the hosts, "You mentioned at the top of the show about Trump , that 'he broke.' He's also, he dumb, And what we found out over this past week, particularly this cash situation, under oath a year ago he said I have $400 million and I'm adding to it monthly and then suddenly you come up to this judgment and you say 'Actually, I don't have it' ... He then takes to
Social Media and said 'Actually, I have $500 million.' That had to make his attorneys pull out their hair and that is because he is ignorant and unsophisticated and he is not a good person, now in a courtroom where he is going to be put on the stand and held accountable for the fact pattern. " ALSO READ: Here's why conservative elites are bailing on Trump now "In this particular case, there is a tape recording of him directing
Michael Cohen to get the money from the CFO so they can pay hush money. When he's on the stand, he doesn't stick to the script that he tends to brag and bloviate," he added. "That is going to hound them during this court proceeding; they have to be worried about that." Watch below or at the link . MSNBC 03 24 2024 09 20 48 youtu.be CONTINUE READING Show less
NBC host Kristen Welker pressed former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel about her past statements suggesting the 2020 presidential
election was not legitimate. "Ronna, ultimately, there were 250 audits," Welker said Sunday on Meet the Press . "They never found any corruption." "Did you not have a responsibility as the RNC chair to say before January 6th that the election is not rigged, that
Donald Trump lost given that there were audits, given that there were more than 60 court cases that occurred all across the country, and that Donald Trump lost?" she asked. "The reality is
Joe Biden won," McDaniel replied. "I have always said, and I continue to say, there were issues in 2020. I believe that both can be true." "But you acknowledge you acknowledge those what you're talking about did not rise to the level in any way of overturning any of the state's election results," Welker pressed. "You know there were precincts that didn't align," she continued. "That's a fact. That's not propaganda. That's a fact. He's the president. He's the legitimate president." ALSO READ: Inside the neo-Nazi hate network grooming children for a race war Welker interrupted: "Let me just let me just stop you because you did say you just said Joe Biden's a legitimately elected president. This is the first time you have said this." The NBC host then presented a video clip of McDaniel telling Chris Wallace that Biden did not win fairly. "Ronna, why has it taken you until now to say that?" Welker wondered. "I'm gonna push back a little because I do think it's fair to say there were problems in 2020," McDaniel quipped. "And to say that does not mean he's not the legitimate president." Welker pointed out, "Even the
Supreme Court , Ronna, didn't take up concerns about the election results in
Pennsylvania and a slew of other states." Watch the video below from NBC or at the link. . CONTINUE READING Show less Former President Donald Trump's Truth Social platform is set for its initial public offering (IPO) as soon as next week after its merger was approved by a special purpose acquisition company. But while Trump himself stands to reap a multibillion-dollar windfall, investors may not be as lucky given Trump's past IPO record. According to NBC News, Trump's last attempt to go public crashed and burned relatively quickly , with investors getting soaked even as Trump reaped significant benefits. A few months before the 2016 presidential election, the
Washington Post reported that when the business mogul took Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts public, it plummeted from a $14 per share IPO to a penny stock in less than a decade. "In its short life, Trump the company greatly enriched Trump the businessman, paying to have his personal jet piloted and buying heaps of Trump-brand merchandise," the Post's Drew Harwell wrote at the time. "Despite losing money every year under Trump’s leadership, the company paid Trump handsomely, including a $5 million bonus in the year the company’s stock plummeted 70 percent." READ MORE: ' No legitimate business purpose': Trump sued by Truth Social business partners NBC reported that Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts performed relatively well for a time, hitting a peak of $35 per share in 1996. However, once it purchased a casino for $100 million more than it was worth, the value of the company's shares started to slide precipitously. "The year the stock peaked, it lost $66 million. In 1999, it lost $134 million," NBC reporter Dareh Gregorian wrote. "And in 2004 — when the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange — it lost $191 million, according to a CNBC review." Truth Social may end up suffering a similar fate after its parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, debuts its IPO on the Nasdaq exchange. Even though Trump himself is expected to net roughly $3.5 billion from the deal, it may be a considerably more risky bet for mom-and-pop investors.
CNN reported that Truth Social is " hemorrhaging users " and has just roughly 860,000 active accounts. That's far less than other far more popular social media networks like
Facebook,
Instagram,
WhatsApp, X/Twitter and TikTok. Truth Social is reportedly not even among the top 100 apps downloaded on Apple's App Store, and the company's own management worried it could go belly-up if its merger wasn't approved. READ MORE: Putin-connected businessman loaned $8M to Trump entity involved in alleged insider trading "It's grossly overvalued,” University of
Florida finance professor Jay Ritter told CNN. "It qualifies as a meme stock for which the price is divorced from fundamental value." All eyes are on Trump's finances as he struggles under the weight of multiple civil judgments nearing $600 million in total. The former president owes roughly $464 million in penalties and interest to the State of New York after Judge Arthur Engoron found him guilty of artificially inflating the value of his real estate portfolio. He also recently posted a $91 million bond in his appeal of writer E. Jean Carroll's defamation verdict against him. That judgment came down after a 2023 judgment in which Trump was found guilty in a separate civil case of
Sexual Abuse. Despite his pending $3.5 billion payday, Trump is prohibited from selling any of his shares for six months, meaning he won't have any immediate help from the IPO in paying his legal costs. READ MORE: Trump's Truth Social merger facing 'catastrophic threat' as deadline looms: report CONTINUE READING Show less