The historic and solemn criminal trial of former President Donald Trump got off to a rocky start early Monday over one of the biggest hurdles: securing an unbiased jury in the heart of deep-blue Manhattan.
With jury selection expected to last over a week, the former president’s legal team faces the nearly impossible task of weeding through a pool of prospective New York City jurors to find individuals without bias towards the 45th president.
Conservative commentator Megyn Kelly warned last week that prosecutors would use the biased jury to “convict [Trump] pretty easily.”
“Picking an impartial jury on Democratic turf, where President Biden won 87% of the vote in the 2020 election, will be challenging,” trial consultant Alan Tuerkheimer told The Wall Street Journal. “I can’t think of another place where he is more loathed than his hometown of New York City.”
Trump is facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to allegedly cover up a 2016 hush payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
The former president has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and has called the prosecution a political “witch hunt” and said it is election interference. Trump will be required to attend the trial in person once a jury is seated, taking him off the campaign trial.
In the most extreme case, Trump could face more than a decade in jail if he’s convicted.
The charges represent just the first in a string of criminal cases that are set to unfold ahead of the 2024 election, where Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.
His defense has argued Manhattan is too inhospitable for a fair trial due to negative coverage and deep anti-Trump sentiment. The defense commissioned a survey that showed many Democrat residents prejudged Trump’s guilt.
However Trump’s team was unsuccessful in their attempt to have the trial relocated. Now, the difficult task of jury selection is the Trump defensive team’s only opportunity to safeguard his constitutionally protected right to a fair trial.
Prospective jurors will be grilled on news consumption habits, any ties to Trump’s current or past campaigns, and elections, and whether they believe they can be unbiased.
While both sides can dismiss jurors, prosecutors successfully argued to Judge Juan Merchan that disliking Trump shouldn’t automatically disqualify someone if they can remain impartial on evidence.
“They can like him or dislike him,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass stated. “They can still be fair jurors so long as that is not going to affect their ability to fairly judge the evidence.”
Merchan agreed and ruled that “the purpose of jury selection isn’t to determine whether jurors like or dislike the former president but whether those feelings would interfere with their ability to serve without bias.”
Megyn Kelly had previously warned that Trump would almost certainly be convicted because of jury bias.
“Oh, he’s getting convicted. I don’t really think there’s a lot of mystery about that,” Kelly said on her show Tuesday. “He shouldn’t, but he’s going to get convicted. The jury’s going to hate him. Manhattan went 92 percent — between 87 and 92 percent — for Joe Biden. That’s where this is going to be tried. These are not Trump lovers.”
Kelly was also asked if she thought Trump was guilty.
“I believe there was an interlude. I don’t know, ‘affair’ may be too strong,” Kelly said. “Look, I think the jury’s going to believe that he paid off a porn star before the election to make her go away and that he didn’t write down in his books.”
“Because no one in the history of hush money payments has ever written that in any book anywhere. It defeats the whole purpose of a hush money payment,” she said. “So I grant you — yeah, they’re probably going to convict him. They’re going to convict him pretty easily, I think.”
As America’s judicial system is again stress-tested, the hush money trial’s jury selection process will offer its own early verdict on preserving justice and fairness in the age of MAGA.
Stephen Dietrich is the Publisher of The Horn News