Is this the moment Trump’s popularity bubble bursts? Don’t bet on it…

He has reached the highest echelons of office by defying political gravity – but after being found guilty of 34 felony charges, will the former president finally come crashing back down to Earth? Jon Sopel explains why yesterday’s verdict may not end up making a jot of difference come November

Former president Donald Trump has been found guilty of 34 felony charges (AP)

Has the day really come when the Harry Houdini of American politics will finally be unable to break free from the chains? The occasion when we discover that Donald Trump – the first former president of the United States to be convicted of a criminal offence – is mortal, and does not have supernatural survival powers? That Newton was right: there really is such a thing as gravity?

I have been here far too many times before to dare say “Well, this really is it...”. He’s walked away from too many train wrecks and dumpster fires for me to dare start writing his political obituary.

But it’s not nothing, either. Though Trump has characterised this entire process as a witch hunt, a political persecution, the improper actions of the Biden justice department (for the record, this trial was not a federal case, but one brought by the district attorney in Manhattan, so has nothing to do with Joe Biden or the Department of Justice), Trump has been found guilty on all 34 counts by a jury of his peers.

Despite his reputation for ill-disciplined and chaotic behaviour, his messaging on this has been utterly focused. Not a day has passed without him drawing attention to the persecution he’s suffering, complaining that the judge is compromised, that Biden has weaponised the justice system.

The trial was “rigged, disgraceful”; the judge “corrupt”; Trump is, in a typically Trumpian flourish, “a very innocent man”. Perhaps most improbably, he is the Nelson Mandela de nos jours – yes, he really has drawn that comparison. Mandela had Robben Island; he’s got Manhattan Island. Exactly the same.

This is not easy to walk away from and say: “So what?” After weeks of tawdry evidence about what happened in a bedroom in Lake Tahoe, and how he got his fixer to pay off a porn star to buy her silence, the jury unanimously found him guilty of a whole series of felony charges.

So what will he do?

Well, the first thing he will seek to do is raise money off the back of this conviction. He will say to his supporters, “If the US justice system can do this to me, just imagine what it can do to you!” He will paint himself as the victim, and argue that this was Biden’s last roll of the dice to stop him from winning in November.

The outward face of Trump will be bravado, but he will be hurting inside. Badly. This is an awful humiliation. He will be raging, and fearful that the polls will now turn against him.

And, in the longer term, they might. Because, added to Trump’s other groundbreaking achievement – of being the first president in US history to be impeached twice – he is also facing three further trials.

In Washington DC last August, he pleaded not guilty to four counts relating to an alleged plot to subvert the transfer of power after the 2020 presidential election – a plot that led to the storming of the US Capitol and left five people dead.

In Georgia, he is to face charges pertaining to an alleged scheme to overturn the state’s 2020 election result.

And in Florida, he is charged with 40 counts related to his alleged mishandling of sensitive government records after leaving the White House, and efforts to obstruct the justice department’s investigation into their disappearance.

Trump has sought to delay any trials until after the presidential election. Were he to win a second term, he could order the justice department to drop the federal prosecutions, or attempt to have himself pardoned – subject to legal challenge, of course.

In recent weeks, Trump has seemed old, shrunken, diminished, tired, irascible. He has dozed off in court. He has lost control of the image that he so loves to project. Even Biden has made jokes about “Sleepy Don”. That’s gotta hurt.

And so, once again with Donald Trump, we enter uncharted territory where there is no road map to guide us – where our satnav has gone on the blink and we are navigating by the stars.

On 11 July, he returns to court for sentencing. But let’s consider what comes before that, and what after it. The first presidential debate is scheduled for 27 June. Will Biden decide he doesn’t want to go head-to-head with a criminal? And then the week after sentencing is the Republican convention in Milwaukee.

Impossible to imagine, I know, but what should be the crowning glory of Trump’s confirmation as the GOP nominee could be... well... “interrupted”, by the former president sitting behind bars in some penitentiary somewhere. That would surely put a dampener on things.

It won’t happen – it is a white-collar, victimless crime; he has no previous; he doesn’t represent a danger to anyone (except, maybe, US democracy). But then again, few thought he would be found guilty on all charges. What a weird occasion it is going to be.

After the guilty verdict came, and the jurors were asked one by one whether this was their unanimous view, and they all affirmed it was, Trump left the court and defiantly addressed the cameras. He went through his litany of complaints and cried foul. But he also said that the only jury that matters is the American people, and how they vote on 5 November.

As things stand, Trump – according to the polls – is (just) ahead in all of the key swing states that will determine the outcome of the presidential election. Perhaps the possibility of the guilty verdict is already baked into Trump’s share price. It is perfectly possible that the dramatic, historic, epoch-defining events in lower Manhattan last night will make not a jot of difference.

And as for Trump’s statement that all that matters is who votes for him on 5 November – well, one person who might not be able to do that is Donald Trump himself. The rules in Florida, where Trump is resident, make clear that anyone convicted of a felony in another state shall not be able to vote. These are strange times indeed.

Jon Sopel is the former BBC North America editor and now presents Global’s ‘The News Agents’ podcast