Protesters held signs in support of the guilty verdict outside Trump Tower in Manhattan. Jeenah Moon for The New York Times.

Darren Van Dreel, a 58-year-old electrician from Oshkosh, Wis., has followed the twists and turns of the investigations into former President Donald Trump over the years: the Mueller report, two impeachments and a flurry of criminal cases, most of which have been mired in delays.

So on Thursday evening, while he and his wife, Misty McPhee, were on a long drive from Wisconsin to the Washington, D.C., area, there was only one thing to do when the verdict came in.

“I high-fived my wife,” said a grinning Van Dreel, as he waited for a sandwich on Friday morning in the liberal Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria, Va. “I was just so pleasantly surprised that finally somebody’s holding him accountable.”

When a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records on Thursday, Trump’s campaign declared that the country had “fallen,” and his allies painted a picture of a nation consumed by rage. His supporters flooded corners of the internet with angry imagery (more on that below), and echoed his claims that the verdict was illegitimate.

Tell that to voters like Van Dreel, a liberal-leaning independent who deeply opposes Trump, and for whom the criminal conviction felt like Christmas in May. After years of watching the investigations into Trump come to nothing in the way of legal consequences, of being maddened by his ability to evade punishment, the guilty verdict made for a rare moment of Trump-related joy, mixed with a sprinkling of “I told you so.”

“I texted my nephew — I’m not a big drinker — and said, ‘I’m having a cocktail tonight,’” said Meg Ryan, 68, a mixed-media artist and a Democrat, as she enjoyed a breakfast of petit pain aux raisins in Del Ray. When she heard the verdict, she did a happy dance around the kitchen, she said, and poured herself a nice big gin and tonic.

But for many Democrats, the conviction is cold comfort. Trump is still expected to be the Republican nominee for president. He has been leading the polls in most swing states. And while it’s far too early to know how anything will play out, some are already worried that his conviction won’t change a thing.

“I’m much more pessimistic that it’s going to make a difference,” said McPhee. “There’s going to be an appeal. It’s going to go on forever. I just feel like the people who follow him will follow him no matter what.”

A conviction becomes a campaign issue

Trump himself, as well as his campaign and his Republican allies, immediately made it clear that they will try to turn his conviction into a feature, not a bug, of his candidacy. On Friday, his campaign declared that it had raised nearly $35 million — an astonishing sum — in the hours after his conviction. And as Trump claimed from Trump Tower that the trial against him had been unfair, his allies suggested that his felon status had left his base more motivated than ever.

“He’s more than just an individual,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican who has allied himself closely with the former president, in a television interview on Friday. “He’s a symbol of fighting back against this government corruption, the deep state, the bureaucracy and all the rest.”

With Trump moving quickly to turn the conviction into campaign fodder, President Biden took the unexpected step of addressing the matter directly on Friday morning — though he took care to limit his remarks to a defense of the process, rather than to include a direct impugning of his opponent over the substance of the case.

“The American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed,” Biden said, speaking soberly from the White House and pushing back on Trump’s claims that the trial had been unfair.

“Our justice system, the justice system, should be respected, and we should never allow anyone to tear it down,” Biden said.

A cautious victory lap

The Democrats who have spent years investigating Trump were less restrained than Biden, describing the guilty verdict as a vindication that barely scratched the surface of years of misdeeds.

“The president has committed so many crimes,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, a Democrat who was the chair of the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment of Trump in 2019. “It’s very important for the American people to know before an election that they’re dealing with a convicted felon.”

Trump was impeached that December, for allegedly pressuring Ukraine to help him dig up compromising information on Biden, and again in early 2021 for his role in whipping up a mob that had stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, but the Senate acquitted him in both cases.

“For years, people have been frustrated because they have felt that there was no way justice could ever be done in any of the Trump cases, and that now looks to be untrue,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a Democrat who was the lead manager of Trump’s second impeachment and served on the House select committee to investigate Jan. 6. “I think it is a vindication of our system of justice, and we can feel good about that.”

Raskin said, however, that it’s too early for opponents of Trump to take a big victory lap.

“We’re still in the fight of our lives politically,” he said. “Ultimately, there is not going to be a resolution to the struggle over democracy and authoritarianism in a courtroom. The people are going to have to make the final statement.”

Nailah Washington, a 38-year-old emergency-room nurse and a Democrat who was reading a book in Del Ray, said she was shocked that Trump hadn’t found a way out of a conviction in New York. And while she doesn’t plan on voting for Trump, she has mostly tuned out the verdict.

“He’ll be made an example of for, like, five minutes,” she said, “and then life will move on.”