So punative damages are meant to scale with the wealth of a defendant so as to act as a proper punishment/deterrent of future offenses. Trump being able to crowd fund this punishment defeats the purpose of it. As such, either Trump should not be allowed to crowd fund at all (for anything, because he can always use that to undercut his punishment), or the court should compensate for this and multiply the damages to reflect this money stream into his net wealth.
GoFundMe’s Terms of Service specifically forbid fundraising for “the legal defense of alleged financial and violent crimes,” so this fundraiser should be taken down. The next step would be for Trump to set up the equivalent sort of thing in-house, the way he made his own Twitter, then I really don’t know how this gets regulated.
So punative damages are meant to scale with the wealth of a defendant so as to act as a proper punishment/deterrent of future offenses. Trump being able to crowd fund this punishment defeats the purpose of it. As such, either Trump should not be allowed to crowd fund at all (for anything, because he can always use that to undercut his punishment), or the court should compensate for this and multiply the damages to reflect this money stream into his net wealth.
GoFundMe’s Terms of Service specifically forbid fundraising for “the legal defense of alleged financial and violent crimes,” so this fundraiser should be taken down. The next step would be for Trump to set up the equivalent sort of thing in-house, the way he made his own Twitter, then I really don’t know how this gets regulated.
At 2.9% of $355M, I’d bet $10.3M in fees will win out.
It’s been up for about two weeks. TOS doesn’t matter if you’re Trump - remember r/thedonald, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube…
To be fair, this isn’t for defense, it’s to pay the fine, or post the bond at least.
Plus, it’s their site, they can ignore their own terms of service.
Yeah isn’t this benefit from a crime?