How Do You Find a Jury of Donald Trump’s Peers?

An IT consultant who lives on the Lower East Side walked into a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday and sized Donald Trump up. The excitement rose in his voice as he declared that he found the former president “fascinating and mysterious.”

“He walks into a room and he sets people off one way or another,” the prospective juror went on. “I find that really interesting. Really, this one guy can do all of this. Wow, that’s what I think.”

Trump didn’t seem to register a reaction. “Um, alright,” his lead attorney, Todd Blanche, said, more visibly at a loss. “Thank you.”

Assessments such as these, and not all of them so inspired, have comprised the bulk of the first week of the first criminal trial of a former US president—a series of man-on-the street impressions of the defining cultural-political figure of the last decade delivered as he silently looked on. Jury selection for Trump’s case, in which he has pleaded not guilty to falsifying business records in order to cover up an alleged affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels (which he has also denied), began on Monday, and it has, in some ways, provided a measure of his current grip on our collective attention.

As potential panelists filed into the courtroom throughout the week, they craned their necks to get a look at Trump. As anyone who has been called to serve in New York can attest, jury duty is one of the few unavoidable common denominators shared in a city of extremes. The pool delivered its dependable cross section of New York. One woman giggled and put her hand over her mouth, turning to her seatmate to raise her eyebrows. In most instances, the jury candidates came and went. Many said from the outset that they couldn’t be impartial in this most charged and high-profile case, and so there was no need for them to be questioned by Trump’s lawyers and state prosecutors.

When prospective jurors did advance to take the stand, they generally seemed to have something to get off their chest, even as they maintained that they could remain fair. One woman sighed when asked by Trump’s lawyer Susan Necheles whether she had any strong opinions about the defendant. “I’m born and raised in Brooklyn and New York,” she said, “and I’ve kind of spent my whole life knowing about Donald Trump.” She said she once saw him and his ex-wife Marla Maples shopping for “baby stuff” at ABC Carpet & Home. She said she’d heard positive things about him, but added that “how I feel about him as a president is different.”

“Oh boy,” said another candidate, harkening back to 1989, when Trump took out newspaper ads calling for the execution of the falsely imprisoned Central Park Five. “Here we go. Going back to Central Park, I knew some of the kids, their cousins.”

An Italian man explained that the media in his birthplace “have had a very strong association with Mr. Trump and Silvio Berlusconi,” which made him worry about his ability to retain impartiality. He was excused.

A young Black woman said that as a person of color, she had friends with strong opinions of Trump, but that she wasn’t herself a political person and she appreciated his candor. “President Trump speaks his mind,” she said, “and I’d rather that than someone who’s in office who you don’t know what they’re thinking.” She was the only person in the jury box at the time who was unaware that Trump had been charged in three other criminal cases.

For all the discussion leading up to the trial in heavily Democratic Manhattan, the baseline view was often closer to the IT consultant’s sense of wonder than outright condemnation. “He was our president,” the owner of a construction firm said, describing himself as a fellow entrepreneur. “Pretty amazing. He was a businessman in New York. He forged his way.”