After serving four years in the White House and withstanding a barrage of political attacks from partisan foes since his term ended, former President Donald Trump evokes strong biases from across the ideological spectrum. That fact — combined with the overwhelmingly Democratic demographics of New York City — has resulted in an arduous task for attorneys seeking to seat an impartial jury for Trump’s ongoing criminal trial in Manhattan.
Lemme get this straight:
A democrat judge, with a daughter working for democrats, is presiding over a trial in a deeply democrat city, within a democrat state, brought by a democrat prosecutor, with an assistant prosecutor on loan from a democrat president’s DOJ, in a state with…— Dan Bongino (@dbongino) April 18, 2024
Nevertheless, as of Friday there had been 12 jurors selected as well as one alternate, meaning only five more alternate jurors needed to be seated in order for arguments to begin in the trial related to alleged hush-money payments Trump made in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
Although they have remained anonymous due to the high-profile nature of the case, several details have emerged from the questioning that preceded their selection to serve on the jury.
Some, including a woman living in the Upper East Side, admitted they harbored anti-Trump sentiments but insisted that they would be able to put those biases aside in order to perform their duties as jurors.
“I do have opinions, yes,” the woman — a speech therapist for the Department of Education — said. “I do not agree with a lot of his politics and his decisions as a president, but I have really taken the past two days to reflect and make sure that I could leave that at the door and be a totally impartial juror, and I feel like I can.”
Another woman, identified as a product development manager living in Upper Manhattan, said that she does not “really follow the news” before going on to criticize Trump.
“I don’t like his persona, how he presents himself in public,” she declared. “I don’t really agree with some of his politics, but that does not mean I can’t be impartial.”
Despite earlier claiming that she did not have any “strong opinions” about the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, she added: “He just seems very selfish and self-serving, so I don’t really appreciate that in any public servant. So I don’t, I mean, I don’t know him as a person, so I don’t know how he is in terms of his integrity or anything in his personal life. But how he is in public and how he himself portrays himself in public, it just seems to me it is not my cup of tea.”
