Originally Published: April 18, 2024 6:30 p.m.

NEW YORK — After two and a half days, a full jury of twelve has been selected for Donald Trump's New York City hush money prosecution.

One alternate has also been selected, with an additional five alternates expected to be chosen at a hearing on Friday.

Throughout the process, Trump and his attorneys have tried to shape the jury through an approach which implicitly upends one of the basic principles on which selection relies.

In a way, it's a simple approach: paint a bedrock assumption of jury selection — that jurors are capable of impartiality — as fallacious.

That strategy has resulted in a bizarre situation unfolding over the past two days. As Trump's attorneys sought to disqualify jurors — using their for-cause challenges to ask Justice Juan Merchan to excuse the prospective panelists — they went further than identifying instances in which the people showed real bias, like one prospective juror who posted "lock him up" during the Trump administration.

Instead, they treated nearly any sign that a potential juror has a political perspective with the assumption that that perspective must put them at odds with Trump, and as an indicator of disqualifying bias. At one point, a juror was forced to admit that she read Andy Borowitz, who until 2023 wrote joke columns for the New Yorker; at another, a juror who described Trump as not her "cup of tea" and "selfish," but conceded that she agreed with some of his policies, earned a vigorous challenge from the former president's attorney Susan Necheles.