In « Breaking the Law, » I made the case that the nearly-$500 million fined imposed on Donald Trump by Judge Arthur Engeron in Letitia James’s civil fraud case was a cruel and unusual punishment. Today, the courts agreed with me.
In my newly released New York Times bestselling book, Breaking the Law, I made the case that the nearly-$500 million fined imposed on Donald Trump by Judge Arthur Engeron in Letitia “Tish” James’s civil fraud case was a cruel and unusual punishment.
Today, we learned that a panel of five judges in New York’s mid-level Appellate Division believed that the fine imposed on Trump was “excessive,” i.e. it violated the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution.
As I noted in Breaking the Law:
Trump was always going to lose (are you beginning to notice the pattern?), given the Democrat AG, the Democrat judge, and the absence of a jury. The brunt of the penalty for the victimless crime would be financial. Engoron and James came up with a number so obscene it reads like a joke: $354.8 million—plus interest!—adding up to over $450 million.
Yes, this was a juryless trial. And after interest accumulated, the penalty would have been over a half a billion dollars in total. In fact, it has been accumulating at a clip of over $87,000 per day! As of the March 2025 Oval Office interview I conducted with President Trump, they still have his money.
