The legal penalty against President Trump that a New York appeals court threw out on Thursday frees him and his family from a potential financial reckoning that once threatened to wipe out all his cash and force a fire sale of some of his most prized businesses.
Mr. Trump boasted of having between $300 million and $400 million in cash when he testified in late 2023 as part of that legal action, a lawsuit brought by the New York attorney general that accused the Trumps of defrauding their lenders. That amount would have been far too little to cover the judgment of about $450 million issued in February 2024. And interest on the total grew each day as he pursued his appeal.
At the time, Mr. Trump’s empire already showed signs of needing cash, court records filed in the case showed. His office building in Lower Manhattan and many of his golf courses had often not been covering their costs. He was no longer receiving the millions of dollars a year that had once come his way as a television celebrity, money that had propped up his other businesses. And he had sold off the rights to his money-losing hotel in Washington, D.C.
But after he clinched the 2024 Republican nomination, Mr. Trump’s finances took a marked turn for the better.
Mr. Trump and his eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, refocused their energies away from the family’s historical base of real estate and golf. Instead, they formed a flurry of partnerships in cryptocurrency that required little work or investment from them but quickly provided hundreds of millions of dollars in income.
Those enterprises, and the Trump family’s windfall from them, have also benefited from Mr. Trump’s official actions as president and his stature as a world leader.
Russ Buettner is an investigative reporter. He has written extensively about the finances of Donald J. Trump.
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