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Of four major polls that overlapped with Trump’s conviction Thursday in Manhattan, Biden leads in two of them: He’s ahead by two points in a Reuters/Ipsos survey taken Thursday and Friday and by one point in a Morning Consult survey taken Friday, while the race is tied in an I&I/TIPP survey taken Wednesday to Friday and Trump leads by two points in a HarrisX survey conducted Thursday and Friday.

While the polls appear to be a positive sign for Biden’s campaign, all of the results fall within the polls’ margins of error, and the I&I/TIPP poll shows an improvement for Trump since the group’s May survey, when he trailed Biden by two percentage points.

The polls follow a NPR/PBS/Marist poll released Thursday that found Biden would beat Trump, 50% to 48%, in a two-way matchup, but would lose by four points with third-party candidates—independents Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West, and Green Party nominee Jill Stein—on the ballot.

In the the seven crucial swing states that will likely decide the election—Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania—all of which Biden won narrowly in 2020 with the exception of North Carolina, polls consistently show Trump leads Biden.

A May Cook Political Report survey found Trump up by three points in the seven states, a May Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll found Trump leads Biden by four points overall across the battleground states, and an April New York Times/Siena/Philadelphia Inquirer poll found Trump would beat Biden in five of six swing states (Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Georgia and Nevada), with the exception of Wisconsin.

On a national scale, other May polls show Trump and Biden are virtually tied, including an Economist/YouGov survey that found Trump beating Biden by just one point in a five-way race, a Fox News poll that found Trump leading by one point in a head-to-head matchup, a Reuters/Ipsos poll that found Trump and Biden were tied, while Morning Consult’s weekly poll taken May 26-28 shows Trump leading Biden by two points.

• The Latest
• Photos
• Ukraine’s Taken Children
• Using the West’s Weapons
• U.S. Ammunition Factory
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In Georgia, protesters waving European Union flags have rallied against what they see as their pro-Russia leaders. Moldova’s government is pushing to join the bloc, enraging citizens hoping for closer relations with Moscow. Armenia, too, has reached out to Europe, angered that Moscow, a longtime ally, is courting its enemy, Azerbaijan.

Fueled in part by the Ukraine war, tensions have been mounting within some of the former lands of the Soviet Union, pitting those favoring closer relations with Russia against those orientated more toward Europe.

Many of those tensions predate the war, rooted in longstanding domestic struggles over power, money and other issues, but they have been amplified by geopolitics, with both Russia and the West pushing countries to choose a side.

Across the former Soviet Union “the whole context is now shaped by how the Ukraine war has radicalized competition between Russia and the West,” said Gerard Toal, author of “Near Abroad,” a study of Russia’s relations with former Soviet territories.

Fearful of losing influence, Moscow has issued blunt warnings to countries like Georgia and Moldova: Remember what happened in Ukraine. Without threatening to invade either country, it has pointed to the tumult and bloodshed that followed Ukraine’s tilt toward the West after a popular revolt in 2014 ousted its pro-Russian president.

Russia is also hoping that recent successes on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine can help reverse the many setbacks it suffered to its prestige and influence in a string of former Soviet states earlier in the war.

“Russian information campaigns have been fueling this idea that closer alignment with the West threatens a war that only Russia can win,” said Nicu Popescu, the former foreign minister of Moldova. “Everything depends on Ukraine.”

With the war’s outcome looking increasingly uncertain, “Russia is enjoying the West’s discomfort,” said Thomas de Waal, an expert on the former Soviet Union with Carnegie Europe, a research group.

Russia has much ground to regain, and some of its losses may be irreversible.

Distracted by the war and determined to expand relations with Azerbaijan, a rising energy power, Moscow last year alienated one of its closest allies, Armenia, by ordering Russian peacekeepers to stand aside when Azeri troops took over Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed mountain enclave. Armenia later said it was considering applying to join the European Union and leaving a Moscow-led security pact.

Moldova has ramped up its efforts to join the European Union, which in 2022 granted it candidate status. Last week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken visited Moldova to show American support for Ukraine and neighbors that could potentially be at risk.

But even in Georgia — which was invaded by Russia in 2008, lost 20 percent of its territory to Moscow-backed separatists and harbors deep anti-Russian sentiments — a substantial minority still want to improve at least economic ties with Russia.

“This is not because they like Russia but because they are afraid of Russia,” said Koba Turmanidze, director of the Caucasus Research Resource Center, a research group in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital.

Mr. de Waal of Carnegie Europe said that while Georgia wanted to stay out of the Ukraine conflict, “It sees that the war is blowing more in Russia’s direction. It is tilting more toward Russia while trying to stay nonaligned.”

The Georgian government, though officially striving to join the European Union, a goal widely supported by the population, has used fear of Russian retaliation to justify its refusal to join European sanctions against Moscow.

The governing party, Georgian Dream, Mr. Turmanidze said, would never say it is siding with Russia against Ukraine because “that would be political suicide,” given public hostility to Moscow. But it has taken steps, notably a controversial law on foreign influence that set off weeks of street protests, that “are Russian in style,” he added.

Maintaining influence over former Soviet lands, has been a goal of Moscow since the early 1990s but was given new emphasis in a revised “foreign policy concept” signed by President Vladimir V. Putin last year.

The document committed Russia to preventing “color revolutions,” Moscow’s term for popular uprisings “and other attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of Russia’s allies and partners” and “preventing and countering unfriendly action of foreign states.”

Casting recent street protests in Georgia as a replay of what, in Moscow’s view, was a C.I.A.-orchestrated coup in 2014 in Ukraine, the Russian foreign ministry warned last week that the demonstrations in Tbilisi were “just like what happened in Ukraine.”

And “look how the situation is developing in Moldova,” the ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, added, referring to tensions there ahead of an October referendum on joining the European Union. Opinion is divided in Moldova between those who favor closer integration with Europe and those looking to Russia.

“This looks like the very scenario that was prepared by Western masters for Ukraine,” Ms. Zakharova said.

The 2014 street protests in Kyiv that toppled Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, were triggered by public outrage over his rejection of a trade and political deal with the European Union that he had pledged to sign.

“Russia’s general narrative is that there is a geopolitical conspiracy by the West to subvert the sovereignty of independent states,” Mr. Toal said.

The West, too, has its own Ukraine-framed story, one that Mr. Blinken recited last week in Moldova.

“Moldovans are acutely aware that what happens in Ukraine matters not just to Ukrainians, but to Moldovans, too,” Mr. Blinken said at a news conference with Moldova’s president, Maia Sandu. Left unchallenged, he said, Russia “would not stop at Ukraine.”

A few weeks earlier, customs officers at Moldova’s international airport found more than $1 million in cash in the luggage of some Russia-aligned politicians returning from Moscow.

Mr. Popescu, who stepped down as Moldova’s foreign minister in January and is now a fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the money was for financing political activities ahead of the October referendum and a presidential election at the same time.

“You are allowed to do politics, but you cannot bring in bags of cash from Russia,” he said.

He said the danger of a direct military intervention in Moldova by Moscow, a serious fear at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has receded. But recent advances by Russian troops “are a worry,” he added. “They are still a long way from us, but everything hinges on the outcome of the war.”

The war has become the organizing principle around which even narrow domestic disputes now revolve, turning domestic quarrels into high-stakes geopolitical confrontations.

The recent tumult in Georgia over the foreign influence law was in many ways “a local power struggle between different political networks,” Mr. Toal said, but, the war turned it into a “battle shaped by geopolitics.”

But what protesters see as evidence of their government’s shift away from the West toward Russia is, in the view of some analysts, a sign of narrower concerns ahead of an October election — like getting a Swiss bank to unfreeze billions of dollars belonging to the country’s most powerful oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, the founder of the Georgian Dream party.

Mr. Ivanishvili has been involved in a long dispute with Credit Suisse bank over his money. After winning several court cases and recovering some cash, the Ukraine war added a new hurdle with the 2022 freezing of $2.7 billion because of concerns over its potential Russian origin.

His party believes that Washington forced the freezing of the money to try to get Georgia to side with the West against Russia.

Whatever the truth, the financial blow made him more determined to confront his perceived domestic enemies whatever the cost, Mr. de Waal said.

“He is paranoid and thinks this is part of a worldwide conspiracy against him,” he said.

• Trump Found Guilty
• The Verdict
• Trial Highlights
• Takeaways
• What Happens Next
• Can He Still Run for President?

The revolutionary hero Patrick Henry knew this day would come. He might not have anticipated all the particulars, such as the porn actress in the hotel room and the illicit payoff to keep her quiet. But he feared that eventually a criminal might occupy the presidency and use his powers to thwart anyone who sought to hold him accountable. “Away with your president,” he declared, “we shall have a king.”

That was exactly what the founders sought to avoid, having thrown off the yoke of an all-powerful monarch. But as hard as they worked to establish checks and balances, the system they constructed to hold wayward presidents accountable ultimately has proved to be unsteady.

Whatever rules Americans thought were in place are now being rewritten by Donald J. Trump, the once and perhaps future president who has already shattered many barriers and precedents. The notion that 34 felonies is not automatically disqualifying and a convicted criminal can be a viable candidate for commander in chief upends two and a half centuries of assumptions about American democracy.

And it raises fundamental questions about the limits of power in a second term, should Mr. Trump be returned to office. If he wins, it means he will have survived two impeachments, four criminal indictments, civil judgments for sexual abuse and business fraud, and a felony conviction. Given that, it would be hard to imagine what institutional deterrents could discourage abuses or excesses.

Moreover, the judiciary may not be the check on the executive branch that it has been in the past. If no other cases go to trial before the election, it could be another four years before the courts could even consider whether the newly elected president jeopardized national security or illegally sought to overturn the 2020 election, as he has been charged with doing. As it is, even before the election, the Supreme Court may grant Mr. Trump at least some measure of immunity.

Mr. Trump would still have to operate within the constitutional system, analysts point out, but he has already shown a willingness to push its boundaries. When he was president, he claimed that the Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want.” After leaving office, he advocated “termination” of the Constitution to allow him to return to power right away without another election and vowed to dedicate a second term to “retribution.”

His advisers are already mapping out an extensive plan to increase his power in a second term by clearing out the civil service to install more political appointees. Mr. Trump has threatened to prosecute not only President Biden but others that he considers to be his enemies. In seeking immunity from the Supreme Court, Mr. Trump’s lawyers even embraced the argument that there are circumstances when a president could order the assassination of a political rival without criminal jeopardy.

“There is no useful historical precedent whatsoever,” said Jeffrey A. Engel, the director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. “The interesting matter is not that a former president has been tried and convicted, as the founders might well have anticipated, but that he remains a viable candidate for office, which they would have found astounding and ultimately disheartening.”

The question of how to create an empowered executive without making him an unaccountable monarch absorbed the framers when they designed the Constitution. They divided power among three branches of government and envisioned impeachment as a check on a rogue president. They even explicitly made clear that an impeached president could still be prosecuted for crimes after being removed from office.

But even then, there were voices worried that the limits were not enough. Among them was Henry, the patriot famed for his “give me liberty or give me death” speech. At the Virginia convention on ratifying the Constitution in 1788, he warned of the possibility of “absolute despotism.”

“His point is that if such a criminal president comes to power, that president will realize there are few mechanisms to stop him,” said Corey L. Brettschneider, a Brown University professor who writes about Henry in his forthcoming book, “The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It.” “He goes so far as to claim that such a president will claim the throne of a monarch.”

“My argument,” Mr. Brettschneider added, “is that this warning is even more true now given the possible immunity of a sitting president from indictment and the powerlessness that we have seen after two attempted impeachments.”

Robert Kagan, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, warned in his new book, “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart — Again,” that a second Trump term could result in unfettered abuses of authority.

“With all the immense power of the American presidency, with his ability to control and direct the Justice Department, the F.B.I., the I.R.S., the intelligence services and the military, what will prevent him from using the power of the state to go after his political enemies?” Mr. Kagan wrote.

To Mr. Trump’s supporters and even some of his critics, such concerns go too far. His allies maintain that when Mr. Trump makes provocative comments like being a “dictator” for a day, he is either joking or pushing buttons to get a rise out of his critics. The real crisis is not a lack of accountability for presidents, they argue, but the politicization of the justice system against Mr. Trump.

Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University who was in the Manhattan courtroom on Thursday when the jury returned its guilty verdict, called the case against Mr. Trump “a raw political use of the criminal justice system” and a “thrill kill” by his opponents. “What happened in that room comes at a cost,” he said on Fox News. “It comes at a cost to the rule of law.”

Even some who do not support Mr. Trump argue that warnings of an unchecked executive are overwrought. Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who wrote his own book calling Mr. Trump a demagogue who tests American democracy, said the former president was too “weak” and incompetent to execute a true dictatorship.

“Trump was and is many things, most of them bad,” Mr. Posner wrote last winter in response to a Washington Post column by Mr. Kagan. “But he wasn’t a fascist when he was president, and he won’t be a dictator if he is elected a second time.” While Mr. Trump riled up a mob and spread lies to try to stay in power, Mr. Posner added, “he failed completely.”

American lawmakers have struggled to devise an independent mechanism to enforce presidential accountability without seeming so tainted by politics that it loses credibility with the public. The issue has come up repeatedly over the last half century without a consensus resolution.

Nine out of the last 10 presidents have had a special counsel or independent counsel investigate themselves or someone in their administration — the lone exception being Barack Obama. (Gerald R. Ford’s campaign finances came under scrutiny while he was vice president and resulted in no charges.)

Neither of the two who faced serious risk of criminal charges before Mr. Trump let it get that far. Richard M. Nixon escaped prosecution for the Watergate coverup by resigning and then accepting a pardon from Mr. Ford, his successor. Bill Clinton avoided possible perjury and obstruction of justice charges stemming from his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky by making a deal with prosecutors on his last day in office in which he admitted to providing false testimony under oath and gave up his law license.

Mindful that Nixon fired the first special prosecutor investigating Watergate, Congress passed the independent counsel law creating a prosecutor theoretically insulated from politics. But Republicans grew disenchanted with that model after Lawrence Walsh’s Iran-contra investigation, as did Democrats after Ken Starr’s Whitewater investigation, so Congress let the law lapse.

The special counsels who have investigated subsequent presidents, including both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, were appointed by the attorney general at the time. While they have considerable autonomy, they are not completely independent and therefore their investigations and conclusions have often been assailed as political, even without evidence of interference.

Having endured the Russia investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and the current election interference and classified documents investigations by the special counsel Jack Smith, Mr. Trump is hardly likely to appoint an attorney general who would allow Mr. Smith to continue his work, much less name any new special counsel to look into him.

Instead, Mr. Trump has proved that pushing ahead relentlessly regardless of scandal, investigation and trial can work for him politically — at least so far. He is on track to win the Republican presidential nomination for a third time and has at least an even chance of beating Mr. Biden to return to the White House. If he does, he will set a new standard for what is considered acceptable in a president.

“I think my biggest takeaway is how lucky we’ve been as a nation to have presidents who have mostly comported themselves with dignity, or at least respected the dignity of the office,” said Lindsay M. Chervinsky, the incoming executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library and the author of “Making the Presidency,” a book about John Adams to be published in September. “This conviction brings into stark relief how violently Trump has rejected that tradition.”