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Was There Anything Actually True in Trump’s State of the Union?

Harold Meyerson on Trump, and Meehan Crist and Tim Requarth on phony forensics.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

January 31, 2018

US President Donald Trump delivers his first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress inside the House Chamber on Capitol Hill, January 30, 2018. (Reuters / Win McNamee / Pool)

Trump’s Teleprompter reading of his State of the Union speech was reprehensible in so many ways—why bother listening at all? Don’t we already know enough about him? Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect comments on the lies, and the inadvertent truths, in the president’s speech.

Plus, injustice in America: It’s not just the police, it’s also the prosecutors—and their reliance on “forensics”—who create much of the injustice in the American justice system. Despite the portrayal on TV of forensic analysts on the show CSI as crime-solving seekers of truth, prominent scientists, and criminal-justice experts have questioned whether suspects can really be identified by forensic techniques like matching bite marks, hairs, shoe prints, tire tracks, or even fingerprints. According to the Innocence Project, faulty forensic science is a factor in nearly 50 percent of wrongful convictions. Meehan Crist and Tim Requarth explain in their Nation article, “The Crisis of American Forensics,” live on Thursday.

 

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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