Well, thank god justice has prevailed, and President Donald Trump and his family will not be forced to pay the $500 million penalty in the New York state civil fraud case over their years-long habit of providing inflated property valuations to banks and insurers. Sure, the New York state appellate court that threw out the penalty made sure to say that Trump and his companies did indeed engage in fraud—but decided they don’t have to pay, because the penalty was an excessive fine that violated the Eighth Amendment.
No, really.
Trump is making the rounds and bragging about it, and why wouldn’t he? It’s quite the gift to a president who is basically stripping the nation to the studs and selling it off to crypto grifters to be told that any effort to punish his behavior is simply too much. But according to the court majority, the president and his sons juicing their valuations to deceive banks into giving them more money is “not the cataclysmic harm that can justify a nearly half billion-dollar award to the State.”
There is something so grim about seeing the court provide Trump with the protection of the law while he’s busy dismantling democracy. The tender solicitude for the pocketbook of Donald Trump, who has added over $3 billion to his personal fortune just since taking office in January, is nauseating, particularly when you contrast it with how gleeful Trump has been about forcing “settlements” that require universities to give the administration millions of dollars to access federal money they were already entitled to.
So, while a fine of roughly one-sixth of the amount Trump made in the past seven months is cruel and excessive, these extortions are, apparently, not.
Not excessive: $221 million from Columbia University
The Trump administration squeezed Columbia University, accusing it of allowing antisemitism, for months until it coughed up nine figures so that federal grants would be restored. There’s no real justification for that figure—it’s just the amount the administration settled on as the amount it would accept in order to restore funding. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is busy bragging about how its $21 million portion of that is “the largest EEOC employment discrimination resolution publicly announced in nearly 20 years; the agency’s largest ever for victims of antisemitism; the most significant religious discrimination EEOC settlement for workers of any faith; and is part of a historic multi-agency settlement achieved by the Trump Administration”
Related | Columbia caves to Trump, setting dangerous precedent for higher ed
Sure, we don’t know exactly how many employees were victims of antisemitic discrimination and sure, the administration is fully in charge of how that $21 million gets allocated to those employees, but let’s just pretend that it’s a totally real number rather than just a way to step on Columbia and “woke” higher education institutions.
Not excessive: Demanding $1 billion from UCLA
Yep, that’s the demand from the administration. The University of California-Los Angeles should give it $1 billion to get … $584 million in funding restored. With that threat hanging over its head, UCLA has entirely paused faculty hiring for next year.
To be fair, it’s correct that this isn’t excessive—it’s extortion.
Not excessive: An ever-increasing amount from Harvard University
The administration is furious that Harvard will not bend. Part of how you know that the proposed “fine” Harvard is expected to pay is intended to be punitive is that it’s an entirely arbitrary amount that Trump keeps juicing because he’s mad. A recent New York Times report revealed that Trump wants Harvard to pay $500 million because he wants it to be double what Columbia had to pay.
That report also shows just how much Trump wants to punish Harvard for fighting back: “Every time they fight, they lose another $250 million. Harvard has to understand, the last thing I want to do is hurt them. They’re hurting themselves. They’re fighting.”
Yeah, this isn’t just excessive. It’s abusive.
Not excessive: Taking Harvard’s intellectual property
In the war with the Ivy League school, the Trump administration has also threatened to take away patents Harvard holds that stem from federal grants. Under the Bayh-Dole Act, schools can receive patents for inventions stemming from federally funded research, but the government can step in and take ownership of those patents if certain conditions are violated.
According to the administration, Harvard failed to timely disclose inventions, didn’t use enough U.S.-based manufacturing, and didn’t maximize public benefits. Did the administration detail which patents, exactly, are at issue? Nope. Instead, Harvard is supposed to tell the administration about all of its patents and then maybe, maybe the administration will tell them more.
How would this help address the alleged raging antisemitism that plagues Harvard? It wouldn’t! What it would do is allow the administration to have another point of leverage, another way to wreak harm so that Harvard will give up that same half-billion-dollar amount that was far, far too excessive for Trump to pay.
Not excessive: $50 million to settle … nothing?
Where Donald Trump thinks that Donald Trump would have been irrevocably harmed by coughing up a fraction of his wealth, Donald Trump also thinks that forcing Brown University to pay $50 million in order to unlock millions in grants the administration illegally withheld is just dandy.
With Brown, the administration didn’t even bother to come up with a reason that it was withholding $500 million in already-allocated grants and contracts, nor did it say that Brown violated any law. Without that funding, Brown had to take out a $300 million loan in April and a $500 million loan in July. The administration knew full well that the loss of half a billion dollars in funding was catastrophic and used that to bring Brown to heel. Too bad Brown didn’t have the New York state appellate court looking out for it, like they looked out for poor Donnie.