Dem
47
GOP
53
Donald Trump has been convicted on 34 counts in New York for cooking the books to hide his payoff to Stormy Daniels. On Friday, he has to appear in court for sentencing. Judge Juan Merchan is in a bit of a bind here. Putting a president-elect in prison would probably not fly, for many reasons. Still, he has a number of options.
First, he could sentence Trump to prison but delay the start of the sentence until Feb. 2029. A second option is sentencing Trump to a year or two of unsupervised probation. If he doesn't commit any more crimes during probation, he gets off with no actual punishment. Trump would hate that because it would treat him like a common (but not dangerous) criminal. Third, the judge could fine Trump some amount of money. If it is a relatively small amount, say $10,000 on each charge, it is very likely appeals courts would uphold that as reasonable. But Trump wouldn't want to pay because that would be an admission that he is, in fact, a criminal.
However, maybe Trump will get lucky again and the judge will just close the case with no punishment. This is called an "unconditional discharge." There is no punishment, but the conviction remains on the books and Trump would henceforth go through life as a convicted criminal.
Can Trump appeal? Yes, but not until after sentencing. Can he prevent sentencing in the first place? It's tricky but his lawyers will probably try. They will certainly ask Merchan to just overturn all the convictions and throw the case out. Will he do that? That's up to him. If the convictions stand, Trump would be forced to provide a DNA sample for New York's criminal database. He is not likely to want to do that.(V)