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Not of the crime of which they were convicted, but that is beside the point. And again, I brought this up as a point in favor of him having serious beliefs. Paying for these ads was not a good business decision, after all.
There is an ancient joke which goes "What is the difference between a used car salesman and a computer salesman?" - "A used car salesman knows when he is lying."
Trump is the computer salesman. A bullshitter rather than a con artist or schemer.
Take the 2020 election results. Now, it might be that his thought process was 'Conceding defeat to Biden will critically weaken my brand. I better lie about the election being stolen to keep my base.'
But that is not my take of his behavior. I think it was genuine cognitive dissonance on his part. "I know that I am a great president, much better than Obama, who won reelection. Therefore, it is impossible that I lost. Thus, the Democrats must have cheated." It is not rare in humans, but it is rare to see it so openly expressed in politicians.
What definitely did not happen was that Trump carefully summed up reported irregularities and decided that they made the election close enough to demand a recount.
I do not think that even Trump's followers believe that his claims are literally true. "Oh, I invested my life savings in a Ukrainian company, because Trump promised that if elected he would settle the conflict before he even became president" is not something which happened a lot. "Stop the steal" might be more correctly understood as "Boo to Biden", though the J6 crowd was mistaking it for a claim on physical reality in some parts.
In the words of Hannah Arendt:
Are the immigrants eating our cats? Is Denmark guarding Greenland with a dogsled? Were the Epstein files on Bondi's desk, or did they not exist at all? Did Pretti plan to shoot ICE officers? These look like claims over physical reality, but for the people making them, they are not. They are more like the hallucinations of a freewheeling LLM. They do not seek to deceive followers into having a wrong but coherent world model, but try to persuade them that trying to have a coherent world model at all is just not worth the trouble.
This is not rational. Your idea of what true MAGA would believe if they believed Trump is not how people actually observably act. The fact that people don't invest life savings in Ukrainian companies (???) is actually good evidence MAGA is serious, because MAGA is grounded in some kind of reality. What you are describing is how people would act in a cult, which, despite all sorts of ideas current online, is not actually how MAGA behaves.
This is cope, plain and simple. MAGA is real and believes the things it says it believes. Trump is real and believes the things he says he believes. It's you who's hallucinating by conflating factual disputes (they stopped counting votes in several swing states simultaneously) with obvious poetic license (Oh, Denmark didn't actually send a dogsled?).
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