Trump exited the courthouse in his motorcade, smiling out the window at his fans as he typically does. But days of predictions from his allies that the case would end in a hung jury or even in an acquittal did not come to pass.

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The outcome seemed almost unthinkable to the Trump team as recently as last summer, according to several people with knowledge of the discussions.

Back then, the conventional wisdom among Trump’s lawyers was that the New York case would never see daylight. Trump’s lawyers spent relatively little time thinking about it.

Instead, they focused on the cases they viewed as far more serious and perilous: in particular, the two federal cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith.

The Trump team liked its chances in the Florida documents case — with a perceived friendly judge and a friendly jury pool, the sources with knowledge of the discussions said. But the team was pessimistic about the Washington trial, in which Trump would face charges of scheming to hold onto power through lies and intimidation. There, they met a judge, Tanya Chutkan, who seemed to them as hostile as the city’s residents, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic and had a close-up perspective on the violence that was committed on the former president’s behalf at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Trump’s lawyers thought that the Washington trial would surely be held before the election, and they didn’t like their chances. Then, their delay tactics — and moves made by Smith’s team — meant that the two federal cases were stalled. And the New York trial was suddenly the first one on deck.

Some close to Trump noted an irony: Inside the Manhattan district attorney’s office, the hush-money case was nicknamed the “zombie case”. It kept being killed off and then resurrected, according to Mark Pomerantz, who had worked in the office but resigned in early 2022 after the new district attorney, Alvin Bragg, declined to immediately proceed with prosecuting Trump. Bragg was sceptical of relying on the testimony of Michael Cohen, who had pleaded guilty to lying to Congress, and people close to Trump assumed that Bragg was being pressured into a prosecution that he never truly believed in.

But here the case was — back on the calendar, set for an April trial, just three months before the Republican National Convention. And the former president and New Yorker was forced to face a jury in a city that widely despises him. He will now be sentenced on July 11, just a few days before the start of the convention where he is set to be nominated for a third time.

In private conversations with his advisers in recent days and weeks, Trump — who was found liable by two civil juries in the last year-and-a-half in Manhattan — had often seemed resigned to the notion that he would be convicted in this case. He has insisted privately that the verdict can play to his political advantage, just as the indictments energised and consolidated his support in the Republican primaries.

He has telegraphed for almost a year now his playbook for managing the fallout.

Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill and in conservative media assiduously prepared their audiences to be outraged, whatever the outcome. There was no need for talking points to be distributed. Everyone knew what to think and what to say. Minutes after the verdict, Trump’s allies said roughly the same thing in simultaneous posts on social media: This was a threat to the US system of justice.

His allies whom he endorsed were asked by his team to post on social media in support of him. And one of his top advisers warned on the X platform that a Republican candidate for the Senate had “ended” his campaign after having urged people to respect the verdict.

Trump has asserted, relentlessly and without evidence, that the Manhattan charges are part of a sweeping conspiracy against him, orchestrated by President Joe Biden and unnamed henchmen around him. His allies, chief among them his former strategist, Steve Bannon, have already called for congressional Republicans to issue subpoenas to anybody involved in any of the prosecutions of Trump.

For over a year, Trump’s political campaign and legal woes have been completely entwined.

Yet while his indictments empirically helped him in Republican primaries — boosting his standing in the polls and turbocharging his online fundraising — it’s less clear what effect a conviction might have for the broader electorate to whom Trump must appeal to win in November.

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The public’s views of Trump have long been remarkably stable. Trump holds a lead over Biden in five of the six closest swing states, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College polls of the states likely to decide the presidential election. Most swing-state voters said they were not paying much attention to the trial, but Trump has an opening among undecided voters, who were about evenly divided on whether he could get a fair and impartial trial.

Working in Trump’s favour is the fact that, of the four criminal cases Trump is facing, voters across the country consider the hush-money charges to be the least serious. In a national poll taken a month into the trial, Quinnipiac University asked voters if Trump’s conviction in the case would influence their vote. Just 6 per cent of his supporters said that a conviction would make them less likely to vote for him. While the share is small nationally, such voters could be decisive in closely fought states.

“Voters have short memories and even shorter attention spans,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster. Just as the former president’s two impeachments had faded from memory, he said, “a guilty verdict in the hush-money trial may be overshadowed by the first presidential debate”.

“There’s nothing that has come out in this trial that has been a shocker or a surprise to throw this back into the court of public opinion,” Newhouse added.

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It’s almost a certainty that the conviction will intensify what is already a burning Republican anger across the country. In a Fox News poll taken during the trial, the vast majority of Trump’s supporters said he was not being treated fairly by the legal system, and half said he had done nothing wrong regarding the payments.

“So many Republican voters — even those who were maybe lukewarm on Trump — have been angry in a way I’ve never seen our base — more angry than after the 2020 election, more angry than after any impeachment trial,” Republican senator J.D. Vance said.

“There’s a sense of personal resentment,” added the senator, who is on a shortlist to be Trump’s running mate. “Here is this symbol of American law and order — the courtroom — weaponised against the only candidate who ever gave a damn about them.”

Nobody is working harder to stoke that MAGA fury than Trump.

On Wednesday, the day after actor Robert DeNiro joined Biden campaign staff for a news conference outside the lower Manhattan courthouse, Trump regaled reporters about how his supporters had shouted down DeNiro.

“He got MAGA’d. He got MAGA’d yesterday,” Trump said in the hallway outside the courtroom. “He got a big dose of it.”