ELI5 the following essay:

Politics
Inside Trump’s Bond War
How Donald Trump has taken advantage of the courts, the media, and his ties to fellow unscrupulous billionaires to emerge victorious in his ongoing appellate bond crisis—at least for now.
Seth Abramson
Apr 05, 2024
∙ Paid
How Much Damage Are the January 6th Hearings Doing to Trump? | The New Yorker

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Part I: The Latest

Yesterday, Trump’s $175 million bond was preliminarily rejected by the New York court system due to defects in its filing noted by Proof in its two most recent reports on the Trump Bond Crisis (see the Bibliography in Part II, below).

Trump thereafter refiled his bond proposal, this time with a financial statement for his new lender, Knight Specialty Insurance Company of San Diego and Las Vegas (hereafter “Knight”), as well as a corrected listing for that company’s “attorney-in-fact.”

The refiling didn’t fully address the issues first raised by Proof on Tuesday: namely, (1) whether Knight was properly authorized to do business in New York state; (2) whether Knight is in fact adequately capitalized to handle a bond of this size; and (3) sufficient additional information about the Trump-Knight transaction (which is hereafter called the “Knight Bond”) to reassure both the court and the New York Attorney General’s Office (the “NYAG”) that Knight is an appropriate vehicle for a financial transaction of this size and scope. It should be noted—and this is shocking—that Knight has less cash on hand than the amount of the bond.

Then, just a few hours ago, the tale of the Knight Bond took a dramatic turn:

With the filing above, the NYAG asks Trump or Knight to file a motion with the court justifying the Knight Bond in view of the objections noted above, with the NYAG free to thereafter ask for a show cause hearing if its requested motion—which must be filed within ten days—is found insufficient by the NYAG. Normally, the “justification” of a surety requires it to reveal significant additional details about the bond deal it just struck, including exactly how it was paid for and collateralized. For reasons explored at length below, it’s evident that Knight won’t want to provide this information, nor will Trump, which makes the next step in the Trump Bond Crisis very hard to predict.

While these new developments pause the final determination of the sufficiency of the Knight Bond for at least a week and a half, the filing above also notes that if Trump or Knight fail to file a response within ten days, the NYAG will immediately begin seizing Trump properties pursuant to the $454 million judgment against the former president—and with that judgment already entered in two New York counties where Trump has assets (not just properties, but also bank accounts and valuable consumer goods), it’s entirely possible that Trump’s real estate empire will begin its collapse by Tax Day.

This is the first of Mr. Trump’s New York supersedeas (appellate) bonds to be contested by a government entity. The now-pending challenge has the effect, in the view of this publication, of elevating the month-old Trump Bond Crisis to the Trump Bond War.

The next battle in which will, we now know, be held before Judge Arthur Engoron on April 22, 2024:
Photo by @elysiumdesigns_portfolio on April 04, 2024. May be a Twitter screenshot of 1 person and text that says 'Adam Klasfeld @KlasfeldReports In Trump's civil fraud case, Justice Engoron schedules a hearing later this month on the sufficiency of the surety bond. Future Appearance Date: 04/22/2024 Information updated Appearance T”me: 10:00 AM -Information updated On For: Hearing-Other (Action) Information updated Appearance Outcome: Information updated Justice: Engoron, Hon. Arthur Information updated Part: 37 --- Information updated Comments: IN PERSON--IN ROOM 418--AT 60 CENTRE SREET--- Information updated Older appearances may exist but are not shown.'.
Part II: Trump’s Bond War

Donald Trump’s dodgy practices as a historically incompetent businessman who must rely on loans acquired through fraud to survive—thereafter fighting with his lenders over making even fractional repayment of what he owes—are always found out in the end.

It just takes time.

That was a lesson from February’s huge civil judgment against Trump in New York, which Trump knew was coming as of September 2023—when the judge in the case, Arthur Engoron, ruled that Trump had in fact been committing Fraud for years and years and that the matter in dispute in the case henceforth would merely be damages.

But there’s a second lesson to be taken from this case: that a course of fraud Trump and his sons and his company (the Trump Organization) engaged in throughout the 2000s and 2010s remains unpunished as of April 2024. Yes, Trump has been found liable for various frauds, but no, no penalty has yet been paid by him (though it has been ordered).

As a Trump biographer, I know the thinking of the former POTUS in instances like this: that nothing has happened to him at all until any consequences in play have been visited upon him, and as consequences are an eventuality he’s almost never in his life experienced, he does not and cannot visualize them to the degree we might expect.

And in truth, we may yet be months away from consequences in the New York fraud case, even if it does ultimately see Trump pay over half a billion dollars in damages.

Or, he could pay nothing at all.

Until it happens, we simply don’t know. All we know is that the gap in time between Trump’s decades of civil and criminal offenses small and large and any consequences for those offenses has habitually been far too long to deter him from any further misconduct. And we know that that misconduct centers—almost without exception—on his contracts and his loans and his payments, many of which occur in the midst of a seemingly endless swirl of illicit (and often illegal) activity.

Consider what we just learned via breaking news in The Guardian: that in 2022, the very company whose IPO Trump appeared to want to rely on to save himself in his current bond crisis—Truth Social—was rescued from financial collapse via a loan from the nephew of one of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s closest oligarch allies.

This transaction—which appears, in retrospect, to be yet another greasy tendril of the Trump-Russia Scandal, given that the Russian lender at issue has business associates now under federal investigation for money laundering and that two Insider Trading convictions have also just been achieved in the case—certainly presents as yet another instance of the Kremlin, via intermediaries, purchasing Donald Trump by supplying him with the only thing he cares about besides himself and his daughter Ivanka: cash.

Yet Proof asks its readers to note the date above: 2022. These events are already years in the past, and we’re just learning of them now, and we don’t yet know if there will be any meaningful consequences for them on Trump’s end. So far—for Trump’s part at least—the only “consequence” he has experienced is a $3 billion windfall followed by a loss of $1 billion in a single day; the first he has Kremlin allies to thank for, while the latter is attributable to the fact that the whole Truth Social IPO has been a scam from the start. Why? Because the platform is collapsing, and Trump knows it (which is why he has desperately been trying to sell it to various parties, including far-right edgelord and sometime Tesla CEO Elon Musk).

As MSNBC legal analyst Harry Litman has observed, “Truth Social said Monday [on April 1, 2024] that its losses are so severe that company accountants warned they ‘raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern’, i.e. [it] may not survive long, since its underlying value is basically ethereal.”

So the pattern in evidence here is the same one we’ve always seen with Mr. Trump, one which we’ll see reappear as we delve much deeper into the Trump Bond Crisis and the Trump Bond War:

    A clandestine, corrupt, and/or fraudulent transaction (usually a contract or loan or other sizable money transfer) enables Trump to stay afloat financially or achieve a seemingly inexplicable windfall;

    years pass before that transaction is fully reported on by major media as having been in some way illicit;

    additional years pass before the illicit transaction enters any formal record as being dubious (either through a civil or criminal proceeding in which Donald Trump is the defendant);

    Trump is found liable for illicit conduct, but any penalty for that conduct is perpetually delayed as a result of the glacial pace of appellate proceedings—America being a country in which your liberty can and often is taken instantly in criminal proceedings, but your money can only be taken from you following years and years and years of legal wrangling and complex civil litigation, thus ensuring quick consequences for poor defendants and few if any for rich ones like Trump.

So what is the Trump Bond Crisis-cum-Trump Bond War if not just another example of a pattern that’s repeated itself over and over with the former president and 2024 Republican Party presidential nominee? Specifically, in the current bond crisis we find:

    Trump receiving two staggeringly large loans—the Chubb Bond and the Knight Bond—that both appear on their face to be corrupt and possibly illegal;

    major media taking few if any steps to investigate these loans, though one does suppose it will deign to do so many years from now (when the transaction can no longer affect Trump in any meaningful way) at that point finding that some illicit conduct has in fact occurred;

    a lack of legal consequences for Trump, at least for now—in part as a byproduct of the lack of journalistic inquiry into the clandestine misconduct in question—with the result that Trump is empowered and perhaps even emboldened to continue making money and advancing his political career while remaining free of incarceration and (as a sundae-topping soupçon) able to become President of the United States again, therefore someone in a position to end many of the major investigations and federal court proceedings he now faces; and

    that the moment of not just liability but clear and certain and severe punishment for Trump never actually arrives, because America takes decades to even consider punishing this man and he will, of natural causes almost certainly, be deceased by the time these grindingly slow institutional deliberations have been completed.

It has been the project of Proof these last six weeks to try to break the cycle described above by fully investigating Trump loans as they happen to the best of any third party’s capacity: in other words, as much as is possible and practicable without a subpoena.

This work, which major media habitually refuses to do with Trump—preferring to report on his financial transactions as merely ho-hum workaday occurrences and save its hardcore investigative journalism for years down the line, when it has no chance of impacting anything that matters—is summarized in the exhaustive Bibliography below.
Bibliography: Every Proof Report on the Ongoing Trump Bond Scandal

(in chronological order, with each Proof report’s visual “color code,” title, and permalink)
The Trump Bond Crisis: The March 11, 2024 Bond

    #01 | 🟥 | “Source of the Money for $91 Million Bond in Trump’s Defamation and Rape Case Appears to Have Major Kremlin Ties” (link)

    #02 | 🟦 | “The New Questions Federal Investigators Must Ask on An Emergency Basis About Trump’s Eleventh-Hour Bond Proposal—Whose Apparent Kremlin Connections Increase By the Hour” (link)

    #03 | 🟩 | “Experts Said for Weeks That Trump Might Get Bonded By Kremlin Allies. Now It’s Happening—Causing a National Security Crisis—So Why Is Media So Silent About the Greenberg Family?” (link)

    #04 | 🟨 | “Trump, Zuckerberg, Musk, Greenberg, Yass, TikTok—Dozens of Far-Flung Narratives Are Suddenly Coming Together As Trump Seeks a New Surety Bond to Avoid Ruin” (link)

    #05 | 🟧 | “Everything You Need to Know About Donald Trump’s Impending Financial Ruin As a Hard $454 Million Bond Deadline Arrives Monday” (link)

    #06 | ⬜️ | “It Sure Looks Like the Chinese Communist Party Is Trying to Bail Out Donald Trump in Advance of His Monday Bond Deadline” (link)

The Trump Bond War: The April 1, 2024 Bond

    #07 | 🟪 | “New Evidence Suggests That Donald Trump’s $175 Million Bond May Be Every Bit As Dodgy As Almost Every U.S. National Security Expert Feared” (link)

    #08 | 🟫 | “The Story of How Donald Trump Secured His Eleventh-Hour $175 Million Bond Is Already Changing Dramatically—Probably Because None of It Appears to Be True” (link)

    #09 | ⬛️ | “Inside Trump’s Bond War” (see below)

Despite all the foregoing, the Trump Bond Crisis, even as it’s taken on certain warlike dimensions, has, for now, arrived at what many people have long felt was its necessary conclusion: the continued ascendence, across all spheres of activity and in opposition to any norms of decency, of a man the United States simply has no idea whatsoever how to deal with in a way that doesn’t lead to its own demise. Proof can’t pretend that a ten-day delay in the acceptance of a dodgy, highly irregular bond is anything more than a temporary reprieve for our justice system—which will be implicitly indicted yet again if it fails to stop an appellate bond with as many infirmities as the one described below.

While there have now been hundreds of major-media news stories published about the Chubb Bond and Knight Bond, almost none constitute investigate journalism.

They carry the sense of low stakes and even lower journalistic expectations we find in local news reports about, say, a small Midwestern town installing its first traffic circle.

This, despite that it was quite clear, from the first hours of March 2024—as the clock ticked down on Trump’s first deadline to make a staggeringly large appellate bond in one his civil cases in New York—that the former president was going to go to war if he had to rather than in any way be deterred by the potential for consequences for his years of unrepentant skullduggery.

That is, Donald Trump was under no circumstances going to pay a cent to anyone just because he raped a journalist in broad daylight in a department store. He was not going to pay his rape victim for repeatedly defaming her, never mind that he did so with such frequency and in such contemptuous and unprecedentedly vile fashion that it soon became clear to judges and jurors alike that nothing but the man’s death from natural causes would stop him from brutally re-victimizing a woman he’d attacked in public like a ravening monster. Trump was not going to honor the American justice system, seek peace with his opponents in a time of profitable civil-war-mongering and politically advantageous incitements of violence, nor take even a moment to speak the truth to a country that needs it now more than ever.

Trump was determined to win his slowly unfolding Bond War, and he was going to do it with the willing complicity, he believed, of three American institutions: the courts, the media, and the billionaire class to which he ostensibly (but not in any meaningful, which is to say mathematical, way) belongs. He had confidence in his victory because he had confidence in the—respectively—impotence, fecklessness, and shameless of his default wartime allies. Courts could be overcome with a tsunami of frivolous filings and endless confounding threats, he felt (to include threats he might incite via what is known as stochastic terrorism); media could be easily distracted by anything newer than yesterday’s news; and fabulously wealthy money- and power-brokers could be managed simply by acknowledging what makes them tick and feeding that lavishly.

In other words, Donald Trump knows America better than it knows itself, because he has been feeding off the violence and spiritual bleakness and unquenchable anger at the heart of it since he was a schoolboy in a New York military school attempting to murder a classmate via defenestration. It’s a bitter pill, imagining how things might have been different if Trump had murdered just that one child in 1959 rather than causing the deaths of untold hundreds of thousands across the world in this century.

(To be sure, Trump intended murder on the day he tried to throw a boy out a second-story window head-first; it was only the quick thinking of bystanders that kept Trump from becoming the literal “killer” he has always wanted to at least figuratively be.)

The author of Proof and this report used to be a trial attorney, albeit a public defender rather than a prosecutor; he’s a longtime working journalist, though an independent practitioner of the profession rather than a member in good standing of the corporate clubhouses whose blinkered media practices have all but ended American journalism; and he has never been much for wealth—at the age of 39 he was still earning $15,000 a year as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. All of which is to say that, though he has longstanding ties to both the law and journalism, the most this author and Proof can do with respect to the Trump Bond War is to exhaustively source and in timely fashion publish investigative reports on the subject and make them (along with 275+ other fully sourced Proof reports) readily available to anybody who wants to read them for six dollars (or free, for those on a one-week trial of Proof).

The reports above are the reports in question. And they could yet matter if the long roster of domestic and international journalists who have awareness of and/or present access to them read them and choose to do something with the intelligence they offer.

So far, they have not been enough. How could they be? Corporate media doesn’t like to re-report what others have uncovered, as it degrades a media institution’s brand—a notion I taught as a journalism professor at University of New Hampshire—so the moment an independent journalist reveals the depths of a current scandal it makes it slightly less likely that that scandal will be widely reported upon in major media. For an independent journalist who wishes to do their job ethically but also see change in the world, the only alternative—and I once received an offer of just this sort from a leading U.S. political news outlet—is to become an unpaid and uncredited researcher for a series of corporate-media journalists with about the same degree of experience (sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less) in getting to the bottom of things.

So, yes: it could be argued that Donald Trump has just about won the Bond War, that it’s already over but for the predictable gnashing of teeth by irate Trump critics. But in point of fact it’s not quite over yet.

A last chance for an alternate result—something other than an unmitigated Trump victory—has arrived in the form of the NYAG’s aforementioned filing contesting the Knight Bond. This development alone could cause at least a few major-media outlets to do what Proof has been doing for over a month now and push past the obligatory single article on the Knight Bond to something more robust and revelatory. The only alternative is for major-media reports on the Trump Bond Crisis (and now Trump Bond War) to all read as though their authors find the same degree of intensity in this event as in a report on the largest radishes being entered into this spring’s state fairs.

So Trump has, it seems for now, successfully secured—and passed through most of our legal system—two bonds delivered to him on the most favorable terms imaginable, all while leveling threats against those who oppose him that would’ve landed a poorer or less white man in secure pretrial detention perhaps nine to eighteen months ago.

And independent journalists are left with nothing to do but chronicle a smoking, now-empty battlefield even as new battles and conflagrations appear at the horizon line.

With this arrangement of events and institutions in mind, this report will tell the story—in conjunction with the eight completed reports above, which are commended to readers now—of how Trump’s Bond War was won, at least for now, and how it was won, if indeed it’s been won, by the blackest black hat that the United States has seen on its shores in decades and possibly in centuries.