The Appellate Division of the NY court system has reduced the bond to $175 million, in effect saying that Trump can contest the punitive damages without posting a bond for them. That seems right.
Punitive Damages are, well, punitive, and every citizen should have an innate revulsion to the idea. If conduct should be punished, that conduct should be a crime, and the defendant should be given the benefit of reasonable doubt. That logic seems especially applicable where the "damages" are being paid to the state. If it looks like a fine and ti quacks like a fine...
There actually are SCOTUS cases holding some punitive damage awards unconstitutional because they are essentially fines, not damages. .I expect Trump to go to Federal Court to attack the damage award and the associated bond requirement. A stay of execution on the verdict would also make sense.
I am a staunch Never-Trumper. I am perfectly happy for him to rot in prison for the crimes of which he is convicted by a jury of his peers in a criminal trial. But Letitia James is not doing God's work. She is doing the work of the Democrats. And the net effect, I think, is a political boost for Trump. The real bad actors in the Trump "fraud" case are the banks and insurance companies who pretended to believe Trump's valuations so that they could do deals their regulators would find to be unsound.
Do we really want prosecutors who run on whom they will prosecute? It happened in Montgomery Country, PA, where a D.A. got elected on his promise to renege on a deal his predecessor made with Bill Cosby, a deal the State Supreme Court eventually upheld. Anyone who has ever watched Law and Order knows that it is not the D.A.'s job to announce who will be prosecuted before the police determine who has committed a crime.
In politics, two wrongs don't make a right; they make a tradition. One of the worst things Trump has done to us by being so uniquely awful is to create "precedents" for treating ex-Presidents harshly. Even if he loses again and goes to jail, he may nevertheless have broken the government (to the extent Mitch McConnell didn't complete the job).