Donald Trump was convicted on Thursday of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign, capping an extraordinary trial that tested the resilience of the US justice system and transformed the former commander in chief into a felon.

The guilty verdict in Manhattan — across the board, on all 34 counts — will reverberate throughout the nation and the world as it ushers in a new era of presidential politics. Trump will carry the stain of the verdict during his third run for the White House as voters now choose between an unpopular incumbent and a convicted criminal.

While it was once unthinkable that Americans would elect a felon as their leader, Trump’s insurgent behaviour delights his supporters as he bulldozes the country’s norms. Now, the man who refused to accept his 2020 election loss is already seeking to delegitimise his conviction, attempting to assert the primacy of his raw political power over the nation’s rule of law.

As Trump learned his fate on Thursday, he showed little emotion, shutting his eyes and slowly shaking his head while a hush descended over the courtroom. But when he emerged, holding his jaw tense, the former President spoke to the assembled television cameras. He declared that the verdict was “a disgrace” and, with a sombre expression, proclaimed: “The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5, by the people,” referring to Election Day.

The judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan, released Trump on his own recognisance and set his sentencing for July 11, just days before the Republican National Convention convenes and anoints him as the presidential nominee.

Alvin Bragg, the prosecutor who brought the case, declined to reveal on Thursday whether he would seek a prison term. The judge could put Trump behind bars for up to four years, but the former President could receive probation instead, and may never see the inside of a prison cell. His appeal could drag on for months or more, and he will remain free to campaign for the presidency while he awaits his punishment.

The 12 New Yorkers who composed the jury needed nearly 10 hours to decide a case stemming from Trump’s first White House run, when, prosecutors say, he perpetrated a fraud on the American people.

The case — coloured by tabloid intrigue, secret payoffs and an Oval Office pact that echoed the Watergate era — spotlighted months of scheming that begot a hush-money payment to a porn actor and a plot to falsify documents to bury all trace of that deal.

“Guilty,” the jury foreman declared into a microphone 34 times, one for each false record, before he and his fellow jurors, whose names were withheld from the public for their safety, filed out of the courtroom.

Over weeks of testimony, the jury had met a varied cast of characters, including a tabloid maestro, a campaign spokesperson and the porn actor, Stormy Daniels. Their testimony built to an epic showdown between the men at the heart of the case: Trump, a real estate mogul turned reality-television impresario who exported his smash-mouth instincts to presidential politics; and the star witness against him, Michael Cohen, the do-anything fixer whose loyalty he lost.

In the waning days of the 2016 campaign, Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 to silence her story of a sexual liaison with Trump, who then agreed to “cook the books” to reimburse his fixer, prosecutors said. Defence lawyers attacked Cohen’s credibility — they noted that he once pleaded guilty to lying — and argued that Trump had never falsified any records.

But in closing arguments, one of Bragg’s prosecutors said that Cohen had told his lies for Trump. “We didn’t choose Michael Cohen to be our witness; we didn’t pick him up at the witness store,” said the prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass. The former President, he said, had hired Cohen “because he was willing to lie and cheat on Mr Trump’s behalf”.

Trump, who repeatedly violated a judge’s order barring him from attacking Cohen and the jury, attended every day of the trial in a lower Manhattan courthouse that had long ago lost its majesty — a fading hulk with cracked wood panelling and yellowed fluorescent lighting that suited the case’s seedier elements.

There, in the centre of a city justice system that accommodates all manner of mayhem, the former President glowered, muttered and often closed his eyes, spending much of the trial either in a meditative state or apparently asleep.

Trump still faces three other indictments, but with those cases mired in delays, this was likely to be his only trial before Election Day. The other prosecutions concern loftier issues — Trump is charged with mishandling classified documents in Florida and plotting to subvert democracy in Washington and Georgia — but this trial sprang from the seamy milieu that had made him famous, if not notorious, as a New York gossip page fixture.

The conviction — a humiliating defeat for a man who has dwelled in legal grey zones for decades — brings the nation’s highest office to a new low: Trump is the first President to lose, or even to face, a criminal trial.

The prosecution unfolded against the backdrop of a politically polarised nation, and reactions to the verdict could reflect that divide. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, called the verdict a “shameful day in American history” while President Joe Biden urged people to vote, saying, “There’s only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box.”

Trump’s adversaries have long hoped a conviction would wipe the former President from the political map.

For them, the case could represent a rare moment of catharsis: comeuppance for a man who, in their minds, poisoned the institution of the presidency.

Yet nothing in the Constitution prevents a felon from serving in the White House. And to Trump’s base, he remains not just a man but a movement.

The more legal tumult he endures, the more his supporters revere him.

On the campaign trail, Trump is expected to harness that image of an outlaw idol, using his conviction to paint himself as a political prisoner and the victim of a Democratic cabal.

During the trial, he cast the jurors as 12 angry liberals from a hometown that had turned against him, even though they were participating in a tradition so central to American democracy that it is older than the presidency itself. And he attacked Bragg, the elected district attorney, falsely claiming he was an extension of Biden’s campaign.

Trump’s lawyers seized on the novel nature of Bragg’s case. In New York, falsifying records is a misdemeanour, unless they were faked to hide another crime. To elevate the charges to felonies, Bragg argued that Trump had falsified the records to conceal an illegal conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.

The defence argued that Bragg was stretching the law, deploying a little-known state statute in a case involving a federal election. That approach could, they argue, lay the groundwork for an appeal.

Trump’s lead lawyer, Todd Blanche, also sought to play down the importance of the case, deriding the false records as mere “pieces of paper”.

Yet the verdict is a career-defining victory for Bragg, who had characterised the fakery as an affront to New York, the financial capital of the world.

“Our job is to follow the facts without fear or favour, and that’s what we did here,” Bragg said at a news conference in the wake of the verdict. He then paused for a moment.

“I did my job. We did our jobs.” And while he said he anticipated a cacophonous reaction to the conviction, he added that “the only voice that matters is the voice of the jury, and the jury has spoken”.