Drug that's going in there. All right, so Donald Trump, they're making that motion, zipping his lips, not speaking, which is interesting in and of itself. Former President Donald Trump took to the stand in his New York civil fraud [00:00:17] trial today to determine the fate of his business empire and what penalties he will likely pay as a result of the summary judgment which has already found him guilty of committing financial fraud. Now, let me remind you all that this is not a jury trial, [00:00:35] mostly due to the incompetence of the lawyers representing him. They had an opportunity to call for a jury trial. They totally rejected that opportunity. And as a result, the judge who has already found Trump guilty of committing financial fraud will get to decide what the penalty will be. [00:00:54] So prior to Trump's testimony, Attorney General Letitia James decided to do a little presser to predict what she's expecting from Trump as he takes the stand. Here's what she predicted this morning. Mr. Trump will take the stand in our trial against him. [00:01:14] The Trump Organization and other defendants. Mr. Trump has repeatedly and consistently misrepresented and inflated the value of his assets. And before he takes the stand, I am certain that he will engage in name [00:01:34] calling and taunts and race baiting. And call this a witch hunt. But at the end of the day, the only thing that matters are the facts and the numbers and numbers. [00:01:51] - My friends don't lie. - Thank you. So her prediction ended up being 100% correct. He went on to bash prosecutors, but more importantly, he went on to specifically bash the very judge who will be making the determination [00:02:08] in regard to what will happen to the Trump Organization and what will happen in regard to any penalties that Donald Trump and his family members, who, of course, are involved in all of this and are also being tried as a result, will have to suffer as a result of all of this. [00:02:24] He just cannot help himself and really does end up becoming his own worst enemy when it comes to these types of situations. Now, I'm going to give you a few examples of what he said on the stand in a moment. But before I do, Jake, why don't you jump in? Yeah. So look, guys, remember Donald Trump said he had $10 million when he [00:02:43] first started running for president. Obviously everybody knows is a lie. But people would give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he's a billionaire. He was never a billionaire. So we've now exhaustively seen, you know, the trail of money that he had. He had about over $400 million that his dad left him. [00:02:58] He squandered all of that, had almost nothing left. And at NBC, he made another $400 million from the hit show apprentice and has squandered that. Now he still has the golf clubs, he still has Mar a Lago and a couple of properties, including Trump Tower. Okay, so that's nothing to sneeze at. It's not a bad amount of money, but it's nowhere near $1 billion. [00:03:16] So this I'd be surprised if it was $250 million. I'd be very surprised. All of it put together. Okay. Because remember, all the properties also have mortgages, debt. They're not just clean and free, right. So this $250 million will likely bankrupt him. [00:03:32] And that will be his seventh bankruptcy. He is the world's worst businessman, and it's not surprising. He's an idiot. He couldn't manage anything if his life depended on it. You remember the stories out of the white House? Can't read past the page. You have to put his name and pictures in the page for him to even look at it. [00:03:49] So how is that guy ever going to do business? You need to have a little bit of common sense to do business. He's the biggest fool I've ever seen. He's good at marketing, so he likes to put Trump on buildings, and that has helped keep his name in the press and and has led to his before getting into politics, his brand having some value. [00:04:06] But overall this is very likely going to bankrupt him. So that is why he is more livid about this case than any of the criminal trials. The criminal trials. He's thinking, oh, I'll get him, just like if I'm going to win. You know, given what's happening in the polling. Right. So all the federal cases will disappear the day he wins and the state cases, [00:04:24] what are they going to do? Put the sitting president in a jail in Fulton County. No, they're not right. And so he's not that he's less worried about the criminal cases. But this this is going to and here he's definitely going to lose here I'll give you some of the he already lost. Yeah. Like he lost in the summary judgment. He has already been found guilty of financial fraud. [00:04:41] But Jake my opinion on this case is actually changing to be honest with you. Because look, look, committing financial fraud is a serious crime. This is a civil suit. Any of us who engage in financial fraud would have, like the book thrown at us. There's no question about that. [00:04:57] But what I'm kind of having an issue with here is that the majority of the focus here, all of the focus actually, so far, I don't know if they're going to focus on anything else. They're just focusing on him lying or inflating the value of his assets in order to obtain loans and insurance. [00:05:13] Now, as far as I know, he has paid back the loans. So there's been no damage to the banks that he, yes, lied to in order to obtain those loans. But I thought there was going to be some focus on the fact that he then deflated his assets in order to lie to the IRS and not pay his taxes. [00:05:30] There's been no attention on that at all. Right. Yeah. So I don't know if that's coming later, but I think that maybe they're worried. Hey, that's in the purview of the IRS and we don't want to get involved in that. But I agree with you. Like you've got to show the two different sets of numbers. [00:05:46] Yes. So if if I'm the judge I'm looking for okay, you're saying that this guy is playing around with the numbers that he gave to the banks? Okay, well, then show me the numbers he gave to the IRS for the same exact properties. So let's see if they go in that direction. But they definitely should. [00:06:01] But in terms of like, oh, there was Anna. The part that I don't accept is, well, he paid back those loans, so no harm. No. Remember he went bankrupt six other times. No I. Agree. So he lied and lied and lied and lied and every time it the creditors got screwed. [00:06:19] This one time, they haven't gotten screwed yet. Right. And he goes, well, what? What? I'm just lying, like I've always lied. - No, no. - You make a good point, Jake. And you're correct in pointing out that this is wrong. And again, if any of us got caught doing the same thing, we would suffer the consequences and no one would shed a tear for us. [00:06:36] So I want to be clear about that. However, to me the most. Horton case is not the civil case, and increasingly based on the video footage that we get, like we don't really have video footage, reporters are kicked out after, like, you know, the proceedings begin [00:06:52] and then the reporters are kicked out. So we don't get video of the testimony. But you have Letitia James during the trial, like posting things on X about it, kind of laughing at Trump. It's just it is not a good look. And you don't want to provide evidence for Trump's point about this being [00:07:11] more of a witch hunt than anything else. Do you get what I'm saying? And I do. I'm worried that it takes away from the credibility of a far more important case having to do with the attempts to overturn the presidential election. Yeah, I'm not worried about the credibility of those two different cases, [00:07:27] but I thought you were going to go somewhere else with it because I the one, number one part of the case that I'm not perfectly comfortable with is $250 million is a hell of an amount to ask for fraud on on this stuff. [00:07:43] So it's fraud. We'd all get charged 100 times, like we said, and we'd pay a very heavy penalty. And obviously he's in a different league with all these different properties, etcetera. And he hasn't been made to pay the 250 yet. That's what part of what the judge has to decide. That's a monster number to ask for. Okay. [00:07:59] So we're fair about all of this, but at the end of the day, there's no question he did fraud. He goes, he's such an idiot. He today he testifies and every analyst on TV is surprised. They're like, why is he saying these things? It'll definitely hurt his case because he's an idiot. [00:08:15] That's why there are just explained to you. So what is what am I talking about? He'll come and go. You know what? We valued him too low. I think we valued them too low. Well, the lawyers, the legal analysts are like. Why would you say that? You're in court. You're being charged with fraud for playing around with the numbers, and [00:08:33] now you're saying you played around with the numbers in the opposite direction. Even if that were true, that doesn't help your case at all. You're supposed to come to court and go, this is what the value of the property was. Here's our evidence to back up our claims about what the value of the property is. And then they ask him, so who determines the property value? [00:08:49] Because you. Now you're saying we went up. We went down based on what I thought, which is terrible. Terrible. If you're in the middle of a fraud trial. Right. He says, well, you know, I know, I know, but, you know, we got to ask the bankers. But wait, do we have to ask the bankers? Are you? [00:09:05] So the thing about Trump is his ego tends to get in the way. So he hates the fact that this trial seems to be humiliating for him, because it's questioning how rich he really is, and he can't stand it. [00:09:23] And so he gets in his own way by antagonizing the one person who's not just going to make a decision about how much Trump is going to have to pay, potentially $250 million, but also the fate of the Trump Organization. So the Trump Organization might be banned from ever doing business again [00:09:40] in the state of New York. Yeah. So and look, I'll give you an example of some of the things he said on the stand today. For instance, let's go to the first graphic here. He said, I'm sure the judge will rule against me because he always rules against me. The judge, Arthur Engoron, demanded that his attorney, Chris Kise, [00:09:56] have Trump answer the simple questions being asked of him, instead of using the time to attack everyone in the courtroom. At one point, Trump testified and said the following. Your case was that I had no money. You sued me on the basis that Trump had no money, and he wrote up phony things and he defrauded banks. [00:10:13] And even though these banks were paid back in full, there was no harm, no anything. Everybody got their money in full. There was no victim. The banks don't even know what they're doing in this case. And at that point, Engoron responded by telling Donald Trump's attorney, [00:10:28] Chris Kise, to control his client. And this is not a political rally. This is a courtroom. But that didn't stop Donald Trump. He continued on, not only attacking the prosecutors, but again attacking the judge himself. The prosecutor from the AG's office, Wallace asked, are you aware that Trump [00:10:48] Chicago loan was paid off last week? And Trump said, I heard it was. I don't know if it was last week. I know it was recently. So it was kind of funny because he went from saying all the banks got their money back. And then a little later, as he was being questioned by the prosecutor, [00:11:04] he was like, oh, it was, I guess. Yeah, I guess it was paid recently. I don't know, I got to check in on that. But that's another element of their defense as well, not just Donald Trump, but his sons. They are trying to say, look, we delegate, right? [00:11:20] We're not the ones in charge of making these financial decisions. So they're just kind of trying to pass the buck to others within the Trump Organization. But that is not really flying at all with the prosecutors here. And it doesn't appear to be flying with the judge either. Yeah. So two more things. [00:11:36] Remember when Donald Trump would asked about, you know, not. Paying his taxes, not paying his debts as he went through bankruptcy after bankruptcy. His famous line was it's smart not to pay your debts. Now his goes into court and he's like, I always pay my debts. [00:11:52] No you don't. That's a preposterous lie. You stiffed so many creditors that you were a laughing stock of New York, and nobody would give you money until you had to go to Deutsche Bank and foreign sources and God knows what other countries to get money. And now you're pretending that. Oh, yeah, I always pay. [00:12:08] Okay. The second thing is, he admitted in court something, as usual that he should not have admitted. So his kids were way more careful. They apparently listened to their lawyers, and they were very circumspect. Circumspect about what they knew and didn't know. [00:12:24] Well, I'm not sure that I had anything to do with that. Right. Whereas Donald Trump comes in and he's like, well, I told him. I told him, did you bring the numbers up? You know, I knew I know, I'm the one who and the lawyers got to be like, oh. I know it's it is, it's I wish I could be in that courtroom [00:12:41] because it sounds super entertaining. But one of the things that he did was talk about the value of the Trump name, right? Where he's like, it's not really about the value of the building. It's about the name on the building. Right? I'm paraphrasing what he said, but the other thing that he said, or the justification for the inflated valuations for some of these properties, was, [00:13:00] well, there were plans to build around those properties, like other structures that would have increased the value. So they were just kind of like predicting what the increased values of the properties would be based on that additional development surrounding those properties. [00:13:15] But you're not supposed to do valuations that way. It doesn't work that way. You know, you have to wait for those developments to happen and then see the value actually go up. Before you claim that these buildings are as valuable as they are. One of the other things that Trump had to confess to was that one of the properties, [00:13:33] a triplex, was noted as 30,000ft², when in reality it's only 10,000ft². - So you just. - Can't help. Little tricks like that which increased the values of these properties, which helped him obtain those loans and helped him obtain the insurance [00:13:50] that he wanted to obtain. Yeah. I mean, this shows you, man, it turns out those top bankers aren't that bright either. Like they'll bust your ass over a mortgage. You're trying to get in your home, right? - By overdrafting. - Yeah, right. - Anything. - But now Trump comes in, he's like, guy. [00:14:06] I think there was a 30,000. Yeah, yeah. That's it. My brand. It's worth billions. Yeah yeah, yeah. That's it. Just give me the money. And they're like okay okay. So oh you went bankrupt six other times. Okay. So I got no love for the bankers who were part of these deals. [00:14:22] And. But that. That's not the point, guys. The point is did you do the fraud or didn't you? And when you get on the stand and you go, I know I told them to move the prices up and they're like, what are you based on? What do I know? I know, but the bankers know what. But do they but do. [00:14:37] They and do you know, this is awful testimony. No lawyer in their right mind would let their client testify like this and totally incriminate themselves. But he's working with bargain basement lawyers, right, who are just trying to get famous and don't know anything. I mean, he's at the very bottom of the legal barrel. [00:14:55] I know, I know, I mean, he's burned so many of his previous lawyers. It's sometimes the chickens come home to roost, even for Donald Trump. 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