People - President-elect Donald Trump's felony conviction will stand for now, a New York judge ruled on Monday, Dec. 16.The Supreme Court's sweeping presidential immunity ruling in July called Trump's guilty verdict on 34 felonies into question, as his lawyers argued that some evidence shown to jurors would no longer be permitted because it involved his official actions as president. Prosecutors, meanwhile, asserted that the evidence in question was only a "sliver of the mountains" of proof in their case and would not have impacted jurors' ultimate conclusion. In Monday's long-awaited ruling, Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan determined that the Supreme Court's new guidance on presidential immunity does not apply to whether Trump can be held accountable for falsifying business records.
Frank Bruni, NY Times - If Trump fails by established metrics, he’ll declare those metrics bogus and delegitimize the experts and agencies that calculate them. And there’ll be no shortage of partisan players in the Babel of news media and social media to support him in that scheme. We saw that when they indulged his lies after the 2020 election. They’ve grown only more submissive since.
If Americans under Trump are demonstrably and undeniably hurting as much as they were under President Biden, he’ll weave stories and hurl accusations that absolve him of responsibility and assign it to his political foes. And he’ll find many more takers than he would have before we could all customize the reports we receive so that our designated heroes remain unblemished, our appointed villains irredeemable, our biases affirmed.
And before our entrenchments in such cinched corridors of pseudoreality zapped our powers of discernment. “We’re living in a world where facts instantly perish upon contact with human minds,” George Packer wrote in The Atlantic this month. “Local news is disappearing, and a much-depleted national press can barely compete with the media platforms of billionaires who control users algorithmically, with an endless stream of conspiracy theories and deepfakes. The internet, which promised to give everyone information and a voice, has consolidated in just a few hands the power to destroy the very notion of objective truth.”
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