Is it safe to use TOR on laptop with WIFI connected via USB tethering?

Please ask this again in a different way. I don’t fully understand what you are asking.

What’s illegal about connecting to tor?

It doesn’t contradict me. It’s still another server that you have to trust. And, unless you’re the one doing audits on your VPN, you don’t ever know what’s truly being collected, and for how long.

It’ll see fingerprints based on your local setup, whichever device is running TOR so Windows Firefox x.x or something like that, depending on your setup.

And yet it is still a personal preference on whether to use both or not.

It’s not an absolute.

Right so just the second device, nothing from the phone?

Correct, your mobile ISP can still see TOR traffic but that’s all, they have no idea what it is. The website/server can only see your second device’s fingerprint.