Trump Low On Cash And May Sell Properties To Pay For Lawsuits

According to Trump biographer Tim O'Brien, Donald Trump doesn't have the cash on hand to survive the lawsuit filed against him in New York, and that could result in him having to short sale his properties in the state just to stay afloat. Michael Cohen has also mentioned this, as both men say that Trump lives off debt and rarely has much cash to his name. If true, this could spell the end of the Trump Organization as we know it, as Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

Trump biographer and editor of the Bloomberg opinion section Tim O'Brien said during a recent interview with MSNBC, that he believes based on what he knows about Donald Trump's financial status, that the twice impeach former president is probably going to have to sell off his properties in New York on what he calls a fire sale, because the guy simply doesn't have enough cash to handle the lawsuit that, uh, New York attorney general Latisha James filed against him. Now that, of course, according to O'Brien only happens, right? Trump only has to sell off his properties if he loses that lawsuit. Because as O'Brien points out, Trump doesn't have the cash. You see all of Trump's value, right? His net worth is tied up in real estate. You know, he may be worth $10 billion as he claims, but that doesn't mean he has 10 billion sitting in the bank. He has properties that when you add all their values up together are worth that much, but he only gets the value out of them if he sells them.

So suddenly being hit with $250 million in fines from a court means he has to pay it immediately. And in order to get that cash, he's gonna have to sell some properties. Now, the reason this is important is because Mr. O'Brien here is not the first person to point that out. Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's former lawyer slash fixer also said something similar several days before Tim O'Brien said these things. So when you have these people again, O'Brien is a biographer of Donald Trump, Michael Cohen. We all know his relationship with Donald Trump. When all these people around him that know him, very intimately are saying that this guy's going to have to sell his properties. I think that's something that should be taken very seriously as a sign of how bad off Trump is financially. Not to mention the fact that if Latia James is successful up there in New York, Trump's gonna have to sell those properties anyway, because he will be barred from doing business in New York.

And O'Brien points out that's kind of where the fire sale comes in because all of the other investors who would be chomping at the bit to get their hands on those properties and rip Trump's name off and start making a profit, they know that he has to sell them. They have to go and he's gonna have to sell them for way below market value. So Trump's gonna lose money on the deal. But what is very interesting of course, is the relationship between Donald Trump being rich, but cash poor and O'Brien and both Michael Cohen, um, have explained it this way, Donald Trump lives off debt, right? He heavily mortgages the properties

He owns in order to get money from the bank so that he can invest it in other properties. And over time they make the money back. He pays the bank back, and then he has the asset, not the cash. If Trump were buying these properties with his own money, right? That's a bit more of a gamble, right? But when you're playing with the bank's money, leveraging your own properties to do that, if the property fails, you still have to pay the bank back, of course, but you can also remortgage the property with another bank, pay off the first bank. Then you have the second mortgage from the, you kind of shift the debts around which these people close to Donald Trump say is what he's been doing of course for decades. But all of that is likely gonna come to an end, regardless of the outcome of Latisha James's lawsuit. Because when you have a guy that they've already said, we've got hard evidence that he has, uh, you know, committed bank fraud, possibly committed tax fraud, possibly good luck trying to find any bank willing to give you a loan after that, this is very public. This is very humiliating for Trump. And as those people who know him closest tend to think this might also be the end of Donald Trump's business empire.