Trump and his cronies/family committed serial fraud and expressed no remorse to the point that the judge said that Trump and his sons "border on pathological." Then he tore into them for being so imprudent about specific transactions that he chose to reverse the profits from their sale of that shitty post office building. After going on and on, he finally decided to slap everyone gently on the dick and told them they're grounded for 2-3 years and only charged them for the money they saved in interest and completely ignored the billions in assets they gained using false information.
Keep in mind that I'm not a lawyer, but I let one spit in my mouth for $20 once, so I'm pretty qualified.
Here's the thing in my opinion: he doesn't have the cash so he's either going to con supporters out of money (he literally has a GoFundMe), or he's going to illegally use some other source of funding possibly draining coffers he'd use to campaign, or he's going to sell some assets.
All of these scenarios affect him negatively.
Lots of his idiotic supporters are finally cluing into the fact that he's been conning them for years. His stupid ATM scam, the nft scam, his bs charity and university, etc. A lot of them are not smart enough to connect the dots but some of them are.
The using money earmarked for campaigning one could be illegal or not depending but he tends to get people to do illegal things because he thinks he won't personally get in trouble and it's faster and easier to get what he wants that way. People who have donated heavily (large and small donors) might not like this.
Selling assets will expose how leveraged he is. If he was as rich as he said he'd just write a cheque. It will also be a very public transaction that he'll be negotiating at a tremendous disadvantage.
These add up and remove a safety net he will need as he receives further judgements against him.
My understanding is that this limited ruling is still extremely damaging to Trump's finances, and it makes it very difficult for him to appeal on the grounds that there is cause for a mistrial for the judgement being unfair or unnecessarily harsh.
