Former President Donald Trump appears at Manhattan criminal court during jury deliberations in his criminal hush money trial in New York, on May 30.Mark Peterson/The Associated Press
I find myself, amid the hurricane of coverage following the first criminal conviction of a former president in U.S. history, obsessing about Juror No. 2.
That’s the member of the jury that convicted Donald Trump who, asked in jury selection what media he read, said he relied on Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s personal social-media site. That, and X, the former Twitter.
Other jurors said they got their news from CNN, or The New York Times, or The Wall Street Journal. Only Juror No. 2 cited Truth Social, and only Juror No. 2 said he got his news exclusively from social media.
I don’t know if we can necessarily conclude that Juror No. 2 is a Trump supporter. But he would certainly appear to be what pollsters call a “low-information” voter, which is a pretty close correlate. According to The New York Times, he also told the court he works in finance, lives in Hell’s Kitchen, and believes Mr. Trump has “done some good for the country.”
To convict Mr. Trump, the burden was on prosecutors to persuade all 12 jurors of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. If even one juror had remained unconvinced, a mistrial would have resulted. Yet all 12 voted to convict, on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. Including Juror No. 2.
Much has been written about the courage of the jury, knowing as they must of the harassment and intimidation that would follow, in nevertheless doing their duty and applying the law without fear or favour, as so many others before them – the Senate, for example, in its two trials of Mr. Trump – had declined to do.
It is indeed a stunning vindication of the jury system, and of the core insight that underlies it: that a randomly selected group of ordinary folk, relying on their own experiences, common sense and moral intuition, may prove to be a more dependable barometer of justice than a panel of experts.
The journalist G. K. Chesterton wrote feelingly of his time as a juror in his famous essay The Twelve Men. Observing the paradox that “the more a man looks at a thing, the less he can see it,” he contrasted the jaded professionalism of court officials (“They do not see the awful court of judgment; they only see their own workshop”) with his own naive shock at seeing the prisoner in the dock.
“Our civilisation has decided,” he wrote, “and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. If it wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box.”
But what the experience of Juror No. 2 may remind us of is the corollary: that it is only when those ordinary folk come into contact with the dread majesty of the law – sitting together in the quiet gravity of the courtroom, with the fate of the accused in their hands – that they become such Solomons.
Had Mr. Trump’s case been put to a vote of the general public, I doubt the result would have been the same, even among those who took the trouble to follow the trial closely. There is no substitute for being physically present in the courtroom, enveloped by its solemn dignity, immersed for days in its quaint customs and language.
It is not just, in other words, the effect that ordinary jurors have on the law that is the key. It is the effect the law has on them.
I suppose Juror No. 2 underwent something of the same transformation. I imagine he entered the court with his head filled with the bunk he had absorbed on social media, and had it knocked out of him. In the outside world, Mr. Trump’s torrent of lies can be overwhelming, such that people are no longer able to tell truth and falsehood apart, or even much care about the distinction.
But the slow, sure methods of the legal system, developed over the centuries, put truth back in the ring. Obliged as they are to sit there and take it all in, jury members are given the gift we all need to make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: the gift of time. After five weeks in court, Juror No. 2 came to see what Mr. Trump and his Republican enablers have been able to prevent so many millions of Americans from seeing – that he is a criminal.
The question now is how to connect the two worlds. Convicting Mr. Trump was essential, the first step in the broader defence of truth and the rule of law against Mr. Trump’s revolutionary nihilism. But now comes the much harder task of convicting him in the court of public opinion – persuading other Trump supporters to make the same journey as Juror No. 2, without the supportive apparatus of the law that made it possible.