Trump isn’t a sitting president yet, he’s still a former president.
Judge Merchan said that before the guilty verdict, when Trump violated his gag order 10 times consecutively. His next words after “I don’t want to put you in jail” were “…but I will if you continue to jeopardize the judicial process.” (paraphrasing). Obviously, the judge did not want to resort to jail for criminal contempt because the case had a lot of eyes on it and jumping to jail before issuing warnings and fines gives the impression of impropriety or bias, which could have been grounds for a mistrial had he taken Trump’s bait.
Most people think he’s going to walk on the basis that he has no prior criminal convictions and that he’s the presumptive Republican nominee, but there’s also the fact that he’s shown no remorse for his crimes even after the verdict and that allowing him to escape a prison term with a slap on the wrist house arrest or a fine will not realistically deter him or others from committing the same crime.
I’d say it’s still a good possibility that he sees jail. Probably not for the max 3 year sentence, but some token amount of incarceration would be appropriate. He’ll likely be out before taking office should he actually win, and they’ll probably make special provisions for him to continue campaigning, so he probably won’t even spend that much time in an actual cell.
The real kicker is his next conviction will mean he has to contend with a criminal history, which will vastly increase his chances of receiving actual prison time. That all hinges on him not getting elected and pardoning himself for all the federal crimes he’s accused of, the most severe of which being his role in the J6 insurrection and the classified documents case which could easily land him in prison for the rest of his life.
I’ll change my mind about .webp when Microsoft Teams can recognize it as an image and display it correctly.