How Trump is using courtroom machinations to his political advantage

By Tim Bakken, United States Military Academy West Point, Karrin Vasby Anderson, Colorado State University

The second week is wrapping up in former President Donald Trump’s first criminal trial on charges from the state of New York related to paying hush money to an adult film star. So far, the jury has been selected, but no other proceedings have begun.

The Conversation U.S. interviewed Tim Bakken, a former New York prosecutor and now a legal scholar teaching at West Point, and Karrin Vasby Anderson, a political communication expert at Colorado State University, to find out what overarching themes they have observed, both in the courtroom and outside it.

Is this trial proceeding normally?

Bakken: It seems like an ordinary trial, but it is an extraordinary trial underneath if we really look at some of the details. The first thing that struck me was on Day 1, when Judge Juan Merchan questioned 96 jurors. Fifty of them said they could not be fair to Trump. On Day 3, 48 of that day’s 96 said the same thing.

That does not bode well for a defendant in a jurisdiction where Democrats outnumber Republicans 9 to 1.

In addition, the judge did not make an accommodation to alleviate the possible difficulty that such antagonism represents. If 50 out of 96 people raised their hands and said they couldn’t be fair because of the color of the defendant’s skin, that would signal a problem. In a trial, that problem is addressed through allowing the defense to ask more questions of the jurors and to get more peremptory challenges, which allows them to dismiss a juror without having to explain why.

There are 10 already allotted because this is a low-level felony trial. In other cases in New York, you would have 20, such as a murder case. And the judge has the discretion to increase that number. He could have done that in this case, but he didn’t.

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