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in reply to @pervocracy's post:
My understanding is that he has a good chance of facing prison time eventually, because New York is pretty strict on appeals and as a state thing he can't pardon himself
my concern is that the judge is going to think "oh no they're going to say it's political, they're going to threaten my family and there'll be riots and it'll be a whole big mess" and chicken out and impose some extremely boring fine
but this seems like an arena where I am sometimes pleasantly surprised!
Honestly, this judge in particular seems pretty combative. I guess appeals could be different.
But my instinct is that judges are so used to being essentially petty kings in their little domains that they respond extremely poorly to threats, even if it would be rational to back down.
Trump was also never exactly associated with honest business practices. Even before he got into politics, if someone told me "he used company money to keep a story about him cheating on his pregnant wife out of the tabloids", I would have believed them 100%. He tricked people into thinking he was a good businessman (and I'm not sure how, he repeatedly went bankrupt running casinos), but he always had a reputation for doing scummy and possibly illegal shit.