The Wall Street Journal spoke with people they say are "friends" of Donald Trump's who believe the New York case could be his psychological undoing.
The one case that has hit Trump "most personally" continues to be the civil fraud trial he's fighting in Manhattan that will be the undoing of his life's work.
“This is where all his friends are, this is where he lived for 70 years of his life,” New York billionaire John Catsimatidis told the Journal. “It’s a direct attack.”
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Judge Arthur Engoron has already found fraud in one of the cases before his court but there are a few more that are yet to be decided. What has been ruled on, however, already accounts for the end of Trump's empire in New York.
To make things worse, Trump was removed from the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans.
Trump, who inherited his father's success and was funded considerably by that business, thinks of himself as a self-made man, while also describing himself as a billionaire.
“There is no person who has done more to transform the skyline of New York City than my father,” Trump's son Eric Trump, said, according to the Journal. “Our family is under assault for purely political reasons.”
Trump's biographers, Tim O'Brien and David Cay Johnston explained that even if Trump is able to rebuild his business elsewhere, he will never overcome the fact that he was barred from operating in one of the top cities in the country.
"I don't think he's going to stay in business," said O'Brien about the future of Trump's enterprise. "Fraud is a foregone conclusion. All we're talking about now are the kind of the scale of the penalties that are going to be assessed against him."
"Donald is his money and that's the single most important thing to understand and it's the sum and substance of who he is," said Johnston in a different interview. "He was raised by a monster of a father who was involved with the two biggest mafia families in New York and up to his eyeballs. And he taught Donald that getting the money was all that mattered. And the win is all that matters."
"Anything that would take away his appearance of being very wealthy, emphasize that word, appearance, is a threat to his very existence. That's the core of the problem Donald is facing here. This is more threatening to Donald's mind than the prospect of going to prison which he can put off as oh, that's not going to happen. He sees this happening as part of the reason he's sitting there in the courtroom because he doesn't have to be there at this stage," he continued.
Trump is doing campaign events in Iowa and New Hampshire, though he's already winning the GOP primary by a considerable margin
Trump has campaign stops slated in Iowa and New Hampshire, two early states in the primary season. The message is likely to be that he is being prevented from doing more because of his court battles.
“I think it’s better campaigning than going to the states,” said ex-Trump strategist Steve Bannon about Trump bailing from court. “Let New Hampshire and Iowa see what’s going on to stop him from being president.”