Trump’s Got Himself Some Jury Trouble

But there are recent high-profile criminal cases where venue changes did not occur. Robert Gregory Bowers, the gunman who killed 11 people in a shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, unsuccessfully sought to have the case relocated elsewhere. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who faced federal charges for his role in the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, also failed to have his case moved out of eastern Massachusetts. Judges in major American cities appear to be more reluctant to allow venue changes, apparently believing that their jurisdiction’s size will still make it possible to find enough qualified jurors.

But Trump’s efforts are not really about finding unbiased jurors to fairly hear his case. If anything, his incentive is to find biased jurors in his direction, since it would only take one of them to result in a mistrial. Trump has always viewed his legal troubles primarily as a set of political problems, all of which have primarily political solutions. Until this year, this has worked for him fairly well—he’s paid no real price for painting prosecutors, investigators, and judges as his political enemies and rallying his supporters against them. To that end, Trump has repeatedly sought to delay the trials in his ongoing criminal cases until after the presidential election next year. He apparently hopes a victory would allow him to direct the Justice Department to drop the federal cases and raise constitutional barriers to further proceedings in New York and Georgia.

Trump’s particular frustration with D.C. fits within a larger current of hostility toward self-government for the nation’s capital in conservative circles. House Republicans successfully led an effort earlier this year to repeal a major criminal-code rewrite by the D.C. City Council, undermining home rule for a city that already lacks the basic power to elect a voting member of Congress. As I noted at the time, there was an uncomfortable racial aspect to that dispute, which hinged on broader anxieties about crime and came as Republicans sought to limit Black electoral power in other ways and places. Trump himself is venomous when it comes to D.C. proper: In a statement after last week’s indictment, he described driving through D.C. and supposedly seeing “the filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings and walls and the graffiti” since he left office.