'Jury denialism': Journalist identifies new front in GOP's war on the rule of law

Former President Donald Trump's supporters have long attacked every institution they perceive as a threat to him — from the intelligence community to the FBI to federal, state and local prosecutors who have brought cases against him.

Now, with Trump's first-ever criminal conviction out of Manhattan, MAGA has identified a new target to attack, wrote Will Saletan for The Bulwark: jurors.

Specifically, Saletan noted, their "main line of attack" is that the jurors had it out for Trump from the start because they came from a Democratic-favoring city: "'Twelve New Yorkers decided they were Democrat partisans,' Sen. Ted Cruz scoffed on his podcast, trying to explain away the verdict. Rep. Jim Jordan called the jurors '12 partisans' and vowed that 'the real verdict will be on Nov. 5, when 330 million Americans get to weigh in,' not '12 people from Manhattan.' On CNN, Sen. Tim Scott said the jurors couldn’t be trusted because '96 percent of Manhattan are Democrats.'"

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"Manhattan is liberal, but these depictions of the jury are bogus," wrote Saletan. "Trump’s lawyers vetted prospective jurors, weeding out those whose social media posts exposed them as Trump haters. One of the seated jurors said he watched Fox News. Another said he followed Trump on Truth Social. A third said she liked religious podcasts. One said he disagreed with some of Trump’s policies but agreed with others. Another said she appreciated that 'President Trump speaks his mind.' The most common pattern among the jurors was a lack of strong feelings about politics."

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The GOP's new strategy of "jury denialism" to complement their longstanding election denialism of any vote they lose is not going away anytime soon, Saletan warned. But there's an easy counterargument: the jury had to be unanimous, but Manhattan's politics is anything but.

"It’s true that in 2020, Trump won only 12.3 percent of the vote in Manhattan, while Biden won 86.7 percent," wrote Saletan. "But even with those lopsided numbers, it’s hard to pluck twelve jurors from a random sample of Manhattanites without including a Trump voter. By the time you’ve picked your sixth juror, the odds that your jury doesn’t have a Trump supporter are down to 45 percent. By the time you’re on the twelfth juror, the odds are down to about 20 percent. The most likely outcome, based on random probability, is ten Biden voters and two Trump voters."

Which means that, even leaving aside the extensive vetting for bias done before the trial, it's almost impossible that politics alone could get a room full of 12 jurors to agree to Trump's guilt.

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