President Trump’s request to postpone his looming hush-money trial indefinitely, because the vast amount of pre-trial media coverage has “demonized” him, was denied by the presiding New York State Supreme Court Judge, Juan Merchan, on Friday evening. 

“The remedy that Defendant seeks is an indefinite adjournment,” Judge Merchan wrote in his order. “This is not tenable.” 

Defense attorneys had submitted a request to the judge, asking him to adjourn the trial because overwhelming media coverage was negatively influencing the public opinion against Mr. Trump, and had “saturated the venire,” a legal term, which refers to the panel of prospective jurors. “New York County,” they wrote, “is overwhelmingly biased.” 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Mr. Trump is unpopular in New York County, also known as Manhattan, where he received only 12.21 percent of the vote in the 2020 election, compared to 86.42 percent for President Biden.

Mr. Trump’s defense team recently commissioned two studies, “a public opinion survey” and a “review of news coverage,” and both showed, according to the filing, that New Yorkers had been “bombarded with online media coverage relating to this case,” and that Mr. Trump had been “unfairly and improperly ‘demonized’” in the public eye. 

The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, has charged the former president with falsifying business records in an attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Bragg alleges that Mr. Trump directed his former personal lawyer and current nemesis, Michael Cohen, to pay an adult film star, Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, $130,000 in hush money to keep her from publicizing a sexual encounter she claims she had with Mr. Trump in 2006 during a celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe. When Mr. Trump repaid his debt to Cohen, the district attorney says, he covered the payments up as legal expenses. Mr. Trump has pleaded innocent to all charges and denies ever having had sex with Ms. Clifford.

His defense attorneys have tried in vain to postpone the trial, which is set to begin on Monday at a Manhattan courthouse with jury selection. Last week they filed three appeals in three days, trying to convince a mid-level appellate court to stop the trial, which will be the first criminal trial of a former president in American history. If convicted by a jury, Mr. Trump could be sentenced to prison, though legal experts deem that to be an unlikely outcome for a defendant with no prior convictions. But trials are unpredictable. Going to trial is like being on a ship in the open sea. You never know what will hit you.

In addition to inveighing against the Manhattan jury pool, Mr. Trump’s defense team have also urged Judge Merchan to recuse himself because his adult daughter, Loren, is a Democratic political operative who’s worked with committed enemies of Mr. Trump such as Vice President Harris and Rep. Adam Schiff. Judge Merchan, who recently sat for a glowing profile from the Associated Press, has declined to recuse himself.       

The New York juries in two previous civil cases, both brought against Mr. Trump by the writer E. Jean Carroll, found him liable for sexually assaulting her in the upscale department store, Bergdorf Goodman, sometime in the 1990s, and then defaming her when, while president, he denied her accusation. In January, regarding the defamation matter, a jury awarded Ms. Carroll $83.3 million in damages, an enormous sum for calling someone “a total con job”. Mr. Trump said he has never met Ms. Carroll.

Mr. Trump’s defense attorneys in his upcoming hush money trial are using surveys similar to ones that Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, had commissioned during her January defamation trial, when she convinced the jury that Mr. Trump’s remarks about her client, such as calling her a “wack job” during an appearance on CNN, had ruined Ms. Carroll’s career and reputation. 

In a similar fashion, Mr. Trump’s defense attorneys argued that, “For the six-week period between January 15, 2024 and February 24, 2024, the Media Study identified 1,223 online articles relating to President Trump based on search terms relating to criminal, the Carroll matter, the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, and the Trump Organization.” In essence, Mr. Trump’s lawyers are saying that Mr. Trump’s name had been frequently  associated with his previous cases. 

“Prejudicial coverage of allegations and evidence from other cases is extremely problematic,” the lawyers wrote, adding that, “Nearly all Manhattan residents who participated in the Survey, 95%, had been exposed to media relating to President Trump in the past six months.” 

“This is an extraordinary amount of case-specific coverage over a six-week period,” the attorneys continued, especially because “many of the articles… made no mention of the presumption of innocence.”  

The media studies further surveyed the specific mentions of the case at hand. “A large proportion of the sample, 88%, had read or heard information about alleged ‘hush money’ payments in connection with President Trump’s 2016 campaign, and 84% of respondents said they had heard about the charges brought against President Trump by District Attorney Bragg.”  

Prosecutors responded that media coverage about Mr. Trump was “unlikely to recede” any time soon and not an appropriate reason to ask for “an indefinite adjournment.” Furthermore, they said, Mr. Trump himself comments loudly and frequently on the case. “Defendant’s own incessant rhetoric is generating significant publicity,” they wrote.  

The prosecution insisted that a “thorough voir dire”, the process of questioning potential jurors, would enable both parties to select twelve impartial jurors, who will reach a fair verdict, based on the law and not on their personal opinions. 

Judge Merchan agreed. “Media coverage of criminal cases,” he wrote, “is not a novel issue and over the course of time, countless courts have addressed the issue of juror exposure to pretrial publicity.” 

Last Monday, the judge published the questionnaire for the prospective jurors. He will ask New York residents 42 questions about their occupations, marital status, religion, what news outlets they consume, if they have read any of Cohen’s or of Mr. Trump’s books, and if they “have any political, moral, intellectual, or religious beliefs or opinions,” which might taint their opinion in the case, and impede their “ability to render a verdict.”  

Jury selection will begin next Monday, and is expected to last about two weeks.