George Packer's Blog, page 102

The Shameless Expediency of President Trump’s Address to Congress

In the first sentence of President Trump’s joint address to Congress, on Tuesday night, he noted that it was, at least for a few more hours, Black History Month, which he said was a reminder of the fight for civil rights and “the work that still remains to be done.” In the second sentence, he mentioned the recent threats against Jewish community centers and the vandalism of cemeteries, as well as what he referred to only as “last week’s shooting in Kansas City,” saying that they “remind us that while we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all of its very ugly forms.” It was, in the most basic sense, proper and welcome for the President to acknowledge such crimes. He and his speechwriters might have been counting on observers being grateful that he had brushed against the bottom rung of decent gestures, with the vague sense that something Presidential had been said. But it is worth pausing at that opening and reflecting on its political utility, its incongruity, its evasiveness, and, ultimately, its shamelessness—qualities that characterized the address as a whole. Each instance in those first sentences has a remarkable context; each, in its way, poses questions about what Trump needs to be reminded of, what he wants Americans to pretend never happened, and our own capacity to play make-believe when it comes to his Presidency.

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Trump’s Speech to Congress Was Not “Normal”
A Vichy Scholar Held in Houston
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, March 1st

Don’t Be Fooled. Donald Trump Didn’t Pivot

The instant reviews of President Donald Trump’s speech to Congress on Tuesday night are in, and some of them are raves. Trump had scarcely left the House chamber when Fox News’s Chris Wallace credited him with reinventing the art of giving speeches to joint sessions of Congress. “I feel like, tonight, Donald Trump became the President of the United States,” Wallace opined. His colleague Dana Perino didn’t go quite that far, but she did rate the performance “the best speech he”—Trump—“has ever given.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Speech to Congress Was Not “Normal”
A Vichy Scholar Held in Houston
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, March 1st

The Limits of Charity from a Drug Company

When Stephen Hill, a police sergeant in Louisville, Kentucky, arrived at a McDonald’s parking lot in response to a call about a suspected drug overdose, he found a young man, his lips purple, slumped in the front seat of a car, clearly in respiratory distress. The man’s frantic girlfriend had told the emergency dispatcher that her boyfriend had taken heroin. His breathing was shallow, and the clock was ticking.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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New Health-Care Plans Available Under Trump
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The Kansas Shootings and Trump’s America

Srinivas Kuchibhotla was mourned and cremated in his home town, Hyderabad, India, on Tuesday, six days after a white U.S. Army veteran—who reportedly shouted, “Get out of my country!”—shot him dead in a bar-restaurant in Olathe, Kansas. Kuchibhotla, who was thirty-two years old and a computer engineer, had lived in the United States for more than a decade and had a master’s degree from the University of Texas at El Paso.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Seven Things to Watch For in Trump’s Joint Address to Congress
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, February 28th
Donald Trump Learns That Reforming Health Care Is “Complicated”

A Perfect Storm at Uber

When Susan Fowler, a Bay Area-based writer and engineer who until recently worked for Uber, published a blog post on her personal Web site last week, the piece, which detailed a pattern of gender discrimination at the car-hailing company, quickly went viral. Among the experiences Fowler described in “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber” were communications with a sexually inappropriate and vindictive manager, and the company’s failure to respond properly to Fowler’s reports of his misconduct. As the problems persisted, Fowler wrote, and she was prevented from moving teams and from being promoted, she reported every infraction to H.R. This later led an H.R. representative to ask whether Fowler had considered that she herself might be the issue—a comment that Fowler also diligently noted.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Norman Mailer’s Snarling Encounter with Feminism, Restaged in Trump’s America
The Tech Resistance to the Trump Refugee Ban
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Seven Things to Watch For in Trump’s Joint Address to Congress

On Tuesday night, President Donald J. Trump will deliver a joint address to Congress. It isn’t technically called a State of the Union—it usually isn’t when a President is new—but it will be a reasonable facsimile of one. Here are seven things to listen and look for.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Kansas Shootings and Trump’s America
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, February 28th
Donald Trump Learns That Reforming Health Care Is “Complicated”

Donald Trump Learns That Reforming Health Care Is “Complicated”

“I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject,” President Donald Trump told a group of governors at the White House yesterday. “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Kansas Shootings and Trump’s America
Seven Things to Watch For in Trump’s Joint Address to Congress
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, February 28th

Democratic Last Resorts: The Recall Option

Some five weeks into the Presidency of Donald J. Trump, a Gallup poll shows him with a historically low approval rate—about forty per cent, far worse than any predecessor at this point in his Administration since Gallup began asking the question, in 1953, at the start of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first term. It’s predictably Trumpian, then, that his response to that embarrassing measure of unpopularity was yet another goofy tweet, this one calling for a rally of his supporters: “It would be the biggest of them all!” Perhaps he thinks a big, obedient crowd might lessen the rage that he’s managed to unleash from his non-supporters—a significant majority—almost from the moment of his swearing-in.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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A Moment of Uncertainty for Transgender Rights

Last week, the Trump Administration did exactly what many dreaded regarding transgender students. The Justice Department and the Education Department issued a letter that withdrew the Obama Administration’s letters directing schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity (rather than genitalia, chromosomes, or sex assigned at birth). The same day, the Office of the Solicitor General sent a letter asking the Supreme Court to take note of this about-face in the government’s position on what Title IX requires of schools. The Supreme Court was set to resolve two questions this term in the case of the Gloucester County School Board against Gavin Grimm, a transgender teen-age boy: first, whether the federal government’s view on transgender bathroom use was entitled to deference by courts; and, second, whether the government’s interpretation was correct.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Friday, February 24th
Betsy DeVos’s Spineless Transgender Bathroom Politics
Gavin Grimm’s Transgender-Rights Case and the Problem with Informal Executive Action

Can the White House Pick Its Press?

Even before the White House press corps was born—in 1896, when newspapers assigned reporters to a table outside the office of Grover Cleveland’s secretary—attentive reporters irritated occupants of the White House. To hide the fact that he had a tumor, Cleveland, in 1893, disappeared from Washington for four days to have surgery aboard a friend’s yacht. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson, who hated the press’s fascination with his three daughters, accused “certain evening newspapers” of quoting him on things he meant to stay off the record. He eventually all but abandoned news conferences. It was six years before Warren G. Harding, who had been a newspaper publisher, revived the tradition.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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A New Trumpist Magazine Débuts at the Harvard Club
Trump Talks About Enemies, Again, at CPAC
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