Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary laid it all out on what he thinks the Woke left’s policies are doing to America.
It kicked off with a scorched earth rant on New York’s unprecedented violation of American norms to exact political retribution against former President Donald Trump that has since gone viral. It ended with him asking a simple question: “Where are the adults?”
“More importantly, the message about the American brand. You think about America. The reason this is the number one economy on earth is that we have laws and we have due process and we have property rights. It attracts foreign capital from all around the world. All of that is being shaken to the core here.”
“The concept of seizing assets in 30 days on a bond number that’s never been issued,” he added. “No insurance bond company’s ever issued anything near this, so there was no chance it was going to happen. And only giving 30 days notice and time. That’s a really bad message, and I think New Yorkers should think well past Trump, whether he’s president or not, or whether this attorney’s general is gone in four years or not. It’s irrelevant.”
“This is case-setting against the American brand. The most stable country on earth, anywhere, to put capital to work over a long period of time, particularly in real estate, is the United States of America,” he went on.
“This is an assault on what we believe to be core, and I find it extraordinary,” he continued. “I think it’s very troubling. It has absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump at this point, in my view, and it is completely bipartisan.”
“This is an attack on America. I don’t know how you can look at it any other way,” he added. “As an investor, and I know plenty of investors are completely disturbed by this, but I mean, no one is going to put any money to work in New York in these amounts until this thing settles down.”
“The whole world is watching and everybody’s waiting for one thing we haven’t got yet. Adult supervision. Where is it? Where are the adults in this crazy narrative?” he carried on. “Certainly there’s got to be adult supervision at some point, and I understand the war going on here and all the political, yada, yada, woof, woof, woof, but we need an adult in the room.”
O’Leary’s simple but poignant ramp was buttressed by that of Constitutional attorney Jonathan Turley, no conservative by any means, had to say about the egregious judgment.
“Trump does not have much runway left. He is at that point where he is committed, he can’t really stop the plane but he needs it to take off, because at the end of that runway, if he doesn’t get that bond, he could be viewed in default and he can be viewed as losing his right to appeal,” Turley said. “That would be the worst possible prospect not just for Trump, but for the New York legal system.”
“I think what the court did here was outrageous,” Turley continued. “It came out with this figure, none of us can really figure how he could justify that. He could have said a billion or two billion because it would have the same level of relevance in connection to the evidence, but it would also have the same impact. You can’t just go to a person and say produce half a billion dollars if you want any other judge to look at what I did.”
Democratic Attorney General Letitia James campaigned on investigating Trump in 2018, and attacked him as an “illegitimate president.” She sued Trump in September 2022 for civil fraud, claiming he overstated the value of real estate holdings in order to obtain loans.
This is a nearly universal practice by real estate developers, as O’Leary has pointed out before, and the lending firms that Trump did business with did not complain about the practice. Donald Trump, indeed, paid his loans back as agreed. Therefore, there were no “victims.” Trump was nonetheless hit with a $454 million civil penalty issued by Judge Arthur Engoron without giving the former president the benefit of a trial by jury.
“You don’t have to like Trump not to like what is happening here, and this is one of the premier legal jurisdictions that I think is going to have an existential moment here of whether they can separate themselves from the personalities and the passions of the moment,” Turley said.
