President Donald Trump speaks with the media aboard Air Force One on July 8, 2026. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP via Getty Images)

By New York Daily News Editorial Board

PUBLISHED: July 10, 2026 at 4:00 AM EDT

Donald Trump has been found at fault by courts of many offenses, from phony valuations of his holdings to being guilty of 34 felonies to abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, but he has never had to pay a price. Until now.

Trump has been ordered by a Manhattan federal judge to pay Carroll a $5 million judgement (plus $800,000 in interest) for his sexual abuse and subsequent defamation of her, as determined by a jury. It’s been about three years since this judgement, and Trump has tried everything he can to wriggle out of it, but even running to his pals at the U.S. Supreme Court has not panned out this time. Time’s up, and Trump must finally pay.

The money is a tiny fraction of the amount of cash Trump has raked in off of monetizing the presidency alone. It is not going to cause all too much financial pain to the president, even if it does help gain some measure of restitution for the woman a jury found him liable for assaulting. Nonetheless, it is important that he be forced to pay if only to demonstrate that he does not get to squirrel out of every consequence that would accrue to any other person.

Going back decades, Trump has stiffed contractors, lied to lenders, evaded housing regulations and anti-discrimination rules, cheated on his taxes, evaded the draft and generally acted for his entire life like the rules simply did not apply to him. During his first presidential term, Trump committed not just two but dozens or potentially hundreds of impeachable offenses, yet he was not convicted in either of his two Senate impeachment trials despite oceans of evidence.

He was convicted of 34 felonies in a Manhattan courtroom, but never faced jail time or any consequences at all as a result, and was able to avoid two different federal prosecutions (on trying to steal the 2020 election and purloined classified documents) not by winning acquittal, but by having been elected president once more.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has, if anything, only increased his clip of impeachable offenses as compared to his first term, largely unconstrained now by the institutional actors that stopped his more extravagant power grabs the first time around.

Congress may be abdicating its responsibility to hold the president accountable, but that certainly doesn’t mean he’s acting outside the bounds of his power. He is surrounded by people who are eager to act like he is in fact the king, and the king cannot be expected to have to pay the little people.

That’s the main reason that Trump is so averse to just paying this Carroll judgment, despite now having the resources to do so easily, is because it benefits him to have this sense that he exists fully above the law. This façade has been personally and politically useful for him, and he is probably afraid of any cracks in it. But the truth is that in a country founded at least on the principle of due process and no one being beyond the reaches of our laws.

It has been 250 years of strife and steps forward and back and failures and successes in trying to uphold the ideals of fairness that the Founders enunciated in the Declaration of Independence from the king. Trump paying this judgement is in some small way a vindication of those ideals; then there will be more consequences to come.