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.
GoFundMeās Terms of Service specifically forbid fundraising for āthe legal defense of alleged financial and violent crimes,ā 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 donāt know how this gets regulated.
