Picking the right jurors could “win or lose” Donald Trump his hush money criminal trial, legal experts told The Post as attorneys geared up to resume the painstaking selection process Thursday.

The high-stakes process of selecting 12 jurors and six alternates to decide the fate of the former president got underway this week in Manhattan Supreme Court with the first seven panelists chosen on Tuesday.

“Jury selection is where you can win or lose a trial,” said Michael Bachner, a longtime criminal defense attorney, adding that lawyers on each sides will be pulling out all the stops to choose a panel they believe will be favorable to their case.

Both prosecutors and lawyers for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee will have hired jury consultants to comb through prospective jurors’ social media accounts and help them weed out people with biases either for or against Trump, said Bachner, a former assistant district attorney in the same Manhattan office which is trying the case against the ex-president.

On Tuesday, Trump’s team confronted several possible panelists with social media posts they’d made that were “anti-Trump” — including one man who posted an AI generated video of the real estate tycoon with the title “I’m dumb as f–k.” The man was nixed as a juror by the judge.

A handful of other jurors were also dismissed after being challenged “for cause” – including one man who had claimed that he could be fair but eventually admitted that he wrote, of Trump, in a social media post: “Get him out, lock him up.”

Lawyers should be asking “tough questions” to try to draw out any obvious, or hidden, prejudices potential jurors may have so that Judge Juan Merchan will dismiss them “for cause” — or without requiring either side to use any of their 10 allotted no-questions-asked “peremptory strikes,” said Bachner.

So far both Trump’s camp and prosecutors have each used six of their 10 peremptory strikes in seating the first seven jurors out of an initial pool of nearly 100 people.

On Thursday, another pool of 96 people will arrive, from which the goal is to select the last five jurors and then seat another six alternate jurors — for which the two sides will get additional peremptory strikes.

The remaining jurors could be selected over the next two days, with opening statements expected to start Monday.

“If someone showed any type of bias or positive response to Trump, in terms of politics or personal life, I would be concerned and consider a peremptory challenge,” Jeremy Saland, another ex-Manhattan DA’s Office prosecutor and current criminal defense attorney, told The Post from the prosecutors’ perspective.

But Saland noted, “You have to be judicious with your peremptory challenges because if you run through them … you could be stuck with someone far, far worse.”

Some notable — and sometimes surprising — choices made by lawyers on both sides Tuesday included Trump’s team burning through one peremptory strike to bounce a man born in Mexico who said he was “grateful” to have become a citizen while Trump was president and who promised to be fair.

Meanwhile, prosecutors chose to toss a man who read Trump’s book “The Art of The Deal” and whose wife’s relatives were lobbyists for the Republican Party — despite the fact he promised to be fair and impartial.

But prosecutors declined to use a challenge on a young black woman who praised Trump – saying she respects that the ex-president “speaks his mind.”

“To be completely honest with you, my response is President Trump speaks his mind. I would rather that in a person than someone who’s in office and you don’t know what they are doing behind the scenes,” she said under questioning by Trump lawyer Todd Blanche.

That woman is now on the jury.

Saland explained that it’s not as simple as just asking questions of panelists and getting answers.

He said attorneys need to read body language and look into the subtext of answers “to ascertain” whether the person can follow the law, work with other jurors, set aside their personal beliefs and ensure “they are not going to be an albatross to the jury pool.”

But Bachner — who helped get Sean “Diddy” Combs acquitted on gun charges in 2001 — said if he were on Trump’s team, he’d assume the jurors will want to convict and do everything he could to get a hung jury by trying to chose a panelist who is “a disrupter, like Trump.”

“You want someone who is not going to go with the crowd,” Bachner said. “Because there are certainly going to be a number of people who will want to convict.”

Both Bachner and Saland said the whole Trump jury selection process has been moving more rapidly than expected but that could be, in part, because of how efficiently Judge Merchan runs his courtroom.

“I think it’s moving incredibly fast and efficiently,” Saland said. “As a person who has tried numerous jury trials in Manhattan on both sides, I have been in jury selection for up to a week on far less complicated or salacious cases that involve people that no one has ever heard of.”

Saland said this could be partially due to the fact that Merchan has been taking prospective jurors at their word when they claim to have biases that will interfere with the job of being a fair decision-maker.

“If you had to go through dozens, upon dozens, upon dozens of people who say they can’t serve because they have a bias, one at a time, it would be tedious,” Saland said.

But he said on a “run-of-the-mill trial,” judges don’t normally let people off on their word, and instead probe further to make sure it’s not a gambit to get out of serving.

Trump, 77, claimed on social media Wednesday, inaccurately, that he should have gotten “unlimited” chances to remove jurors – even though state rules allow every defendant the unlimited right to only get rid of jurors for “cause.”

“I thought STRIKES were supposed to be “unlimited” when we were picking our jury?” he wrote on Truth Social. “I was then told we only had 10, not nearly enough when we were purposely given the 2nd Worst Venue in the Country.”

His lawyers did not respond to a request to comment on whether their client was only truly told about the “10-strike” rule after the trial began.

But both Bachner and Saland said Trump’s legal team are highly professional and very experienced and wouldn’t have failed to inform their client of such a basic and important piece of information.

The former commander-in-chief is charged with falsifying business records to cover-up that he had his ex-lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen make a $130,000 payment to former porn star Stormy Daniels in the lead up to the 2016 election to keep her quiet about claims she had sex with the then-candidate.

Trump has denied the charges and said the case is part of a Democratic scheme to keep him out of office in the 2024 election by tying him up in court.

He also faces three other criminal cases that have yet to go to trial.