The suspense is almost over for those waiting on the outcome of the Donald Trump “hush-money” case, which is likely to end later this week with a decision from the jury in New York.

It will be an historic moment, one that will briefly unite a split country as Democrats and Republicans from California to Florida pause to watch, listen or read the news from Manhattan. Guilty or innocent?

Under the old rules of political engagement, a lot more than Donald Trump’s freedom would hang on the answer to that question. A felony conviction of any kind would have automatically ended a political campaign on the basis that no self-respecting democracy would have dreamed of putting a criminal in the highest office. Likewise, it’s unimaginable that any candidate would be daft enough to think it might.

Remember Gary Hart? John Edwards? Only political nerds will be able to give you chapter and verse on how personal and legal indiscretions led to the end of their presidential aspirations.  But Donald Trump is a different kind of cat. He hasn’t merely ripped up the rulebook but doused it in petrol, set it on fire, driven over it with a steamroller, and thrown it down a mineshaft.

In the past seven days the former president has chickened out of giving evidence in his own defence in the criminal case against him, despite promising for months that he would, he has posted a video on social media promising a “unified Riech” if elected, and, unbelievably, he has cemented his narrow lead over Joe Biden in the polls. Any politician would have been exhausted into submission by now but not Trump who, buoyed by the support of a slavish voter base and his own sociopathic ability to compartmentalise chaos, keeps rolling on and on, like The Terminator in a long red tie.

On Thursday evening, the former president held a rally in the mostly ethnic Bronx district in New York, a place where, as a landlord, he was once sued by the Justice Department for discriminating against black tenants. In 2020, he lost the district to Biden by 68%. By all reasonable electoral calculation, and by the human tolerance of shamelessness,  he had no business being anywhere near the Bronx. But there he was - President Bold as Brass and his band of sycophantic surrogates.

“We cannot overlook that Biden’s policies are driving black families deeper into poverty and making them less safe,” Janiyah Thomas, the campaign’s black media director, said in a statement. New York’s GOP  congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who once described Trump as a “whack job” but is now one of the leading candidates to become his vice-presidential nominee, insisted “the state of New York is in play in this next election cycle”.

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The point is not that Republican operatives and elected officials will argue the moon is made of chicken tikka masala if they think it’ll curry favour with the boss but that  the American political world has been given a surrealist makeover, courtesy of Salvador Trump.  Now Biden is racist and Trump is the friend of black people. He used to be a whack job but he’s alright now, to coin a phrase.

Within this political framework, it is reasonable to suggest that when it comes to the impending verdict in Manhattan the question is not “guilty or innocent” but “guilty or innocent - does it really matter?”

Sticking only to court proceedings, things do not look great for Trump. The 34 charges against him for falsifying business records in an attempt to cover by hush payments to former porn star Stormy Daniels were largely based on documents, which were irrefutable. And the majority of prosecution witnesses were damning, none more so than David Pecker, the former CEO of the National Enquirer, the supermarket tabloid which allegedly killed damaging personal stories about Trump in order to help his 2016 presidential election campaign.

Hope Hicks, a former White House adviser to Trump, testified she had been in the presence of the former president and Pecker when they devised a way to keep such stories out of the public arena.

The defence had its best moments when Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer who had helped organise the hush-money scheme, paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 of his own money, which was later reimbursed by his boss using allegedly illegal means. Cohen was the prosecution’s star witness but he was badly tarnished once he took the stand, admitting to having perjured himself in previous court cases and stealing $30,000 from the Trump organisation. If that struck an unsavoury note, things took a turn for the worse with the appearance of the 19th and final witness Robert Costello, a lawyer and a close friend of Trump who had briefly acted as Cohen’s attorney.

The details of Costello’s testimony were forgotten after he got himself into trouble with the presiding judge Juan Merchan, sighing and saying “Jeez” loudly enough to be heard at the back of the court when the judge ordered that a part of his evidence be struck from the record.

Merchan, who has earned widespread praise for his even-handed stewardship of the case, lost his cool at that moment, ordering the court be cleared of the press and public. He turned to Costello, who was sitting a few yards from the bench in the witness box and said: “I want to discuss proper decorum in my courtroom.”

"Right," Costello responded.

"If you don't like my ruling, you don't say, 'Jeez'." Merchan continued.

Costello accepted the admonition with the maturity of a recalcitrant teenager, causing the judge to bark: “Are you rolling your eyes at me?”

Eventually, order was restored but it was a raucous end to a trial that had until then played out like any other trial, albeit that it was the first in history to have a former president of the United States sitting in the dock. The credit goes to Merchan for that, but, beyond issuing the defendant with  $10,000 of fines for contempt, he had virtually no control over what went on outside, and that is where Trump did most of his damage, giving mini-press conferences to the press gaggle every day outlining his grievances - from the courtroom temperature to the fact that his court attendance meant he was absent from the campaign. (In fact, on some days when the court wasn’t in session Trump was spotted playing golf.)

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It was a Trump solo performance for most of the month-long trial but in the last week he was joined by elected Republican officials, including the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who echoed Trump’s complaints that the court case was part of a ploy President Biden to keep his opponent off the campaign trail. Johnson, an avowed born-again Christian, ignored questions about the details and morality of Trump’s encounter with a porn star and stuck to the script. “I wanted to be here myself and call out what is a travesty of justice,” he said.

Johnson’s words, and Trump’s press conferences, were not aimed at the jury, which according to court observers, has done its duty with due seriousness and attention, but at the wider voting public.

Will it work? No predictions are necessary at this end stage, not least because no-one knows what side the jury will fall on. What is certain is that a not guilty verdict will count as a big victory, and perhaps an ultimately decisive boost for the Trump campaign. But if the jury rules he is guilty, then Trump will argue the trial was rigged from the start. It’s a familiar theme. It’s what he does. Heads he wins, tails he also wins. Capeesh?