George Packer's Blog, page 103

A New Trumpist Magazine Débuts at the Harvard Club

Julius Krein is one of a number of people whose life has been complicated by the election of Donald Trump, although in his case it is a happy sort of complication. On Tuesday night, at the launch party for his new journal, American Affairs, he was holding court at the Harvard Club of New York City, celebrating the new enterprise and reminiscing about an old one. “We wanted to preserve some of the elements of the critique that Trump raised,” Krein said. “And then he won.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Trump Talks About Enemies, Again, at CPAC
A Jazz Funeral for the American Presidency
Donald Trump Reviews the Best Picture Oscar Nominees

Trump Talks About Enemies, Again, at CPAC

“I have a friend,” President Donald Trump said on Friday morning, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in Maryland, where the participants seemed very eager to prove that they were Trump’s friends, too. “He’s a very, very substantial guy,” Trump continued, the kind of guy for whom an annual summer trip to Paris with his wife had been “automatic.” And why not? “Jim,” as Trump called him, “loves the City of Lights. He loves Paris.” And then, Trump said, he ran into Jim after not seeing him for a while. “I said, ‘Jim, let me ask you a question: How’s Paris doing?’ ” The President of the United States knitted his eyebrows in a facsimile of a very, very substantial guy’s disdain.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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A New Trumpist Magazine Débuts at the Harvard Club
A Jazz Funeral for the American Presidency
Donald Trump Reviews the Best Picture Oscar Nominees

How Steve Bannon Conquered CPAC—and the Republican Party

On Thursday, Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s most influential adviser, and Reince Priebus, Trump’s frequently embattled chief of staff, spoke together at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering for activists, politicians, and media professionals on the right. Bannon rarely speaks in public, but the two men have been conducting a media tour to tamp down stories about friction between them.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A New Trumpist Magazine Débuts at the Harvard Club
Trump Talks About Enemies, Again, at CPAC
A Jazz Funeral for the American Presidency

Sanity from the Courts on Gun Control in a Time of Trump

It may be small comfort to read a court decision rooted in the desire to prevent another Newtown-style massacre from happening at a time when the President of the United States is eager to listen to a figure from beyond the lunatic fringe like Alex Jones, who claims that the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, never happened at all. But in two court decisions this week, one in Virginia and one in Florida, the fight for gun safety, not to mention gun sanity, continues. The decisions are cheering not only because of their content—which, if not likely to much lower the level of gun violence, is still likely to save the lives of many children—but because of their explanatory manner, their judicial style. In both cases, clear and articulate argument is made, and, for the moment, won, against the same kind of frenzied dishonesty, and the same toxic brew of authoritarian absurdity parading as libertarian choice, that have helped propel Donald Trump to power.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Perils and Possibilities of the Never-Ending Protest
Betsy DeVos’s Spineless Transgender Bathroom Politics
The Woman Arrested by ICE in a Courthouse Speaks Out

Betsy DeVos’s Spineless Transgender Bathroom Politics

When historians write their accounts of the Trump era—assuming the practice of historical scholarship survives it—a small but significant portion of those chronicles will be concerned with the bewildering phenomenon of grown Republican men policing the bathroom habits of vulnerable teen-agers. With the announcement today that Trump has rescinded a civil-rights rule put in place under President Obama, providing transgender students in public schools with the right to use the bathroom of their choice, the President and his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, have scored a political victory. Voters who believe that a hazard is presented by, for example, a transgender eighth grader using the bathroom corresponding to her gender identity will be satisfied by the new policy, which states that local districts will now be at liberty to make their own policies regarding who gets to go to the bathroom where. Schools will, presumably, be able to insist that transgender students use the bathroom that is opposite to their gender identity, or—as is often proposed as a reasonable, middle-ground solution—a separate bathroom altogether, such as one intended for teachers.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Sanity from the Courts on Gun Control in a Time of Trump
The Perils and Possibilities of the Never-Ending Protest
The Woman Arrested by ICE in a Courthouse Speaks Out

The Woman Arrested by ICE in a Courthouse Speaks Out

On the morning of February 9th, Irvin González, a thirty-three-year-old transgender woman, was sitting in a waiting room on the tenth floor of a courthouse in El Paso, Texas. At 9 A.M., a judge was scheduled to hear her request for a protective order against an abusive ex-boyfriend. González was nervous that she’d have to confront him in court, but her caseworker, who was from a local aid agency, reassured her that he might not even be there, and that if he was he wouldn’t be able to get too close. She allowed herself, momentarily, to relax. “I felt very safe and protected in the court,” she said.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Sanity from the Courts on Gun Control in a Time of Trump
The Perils and Possibilities of the Never-Ending Protest
Betsy DeVos’s Spineless Transgender Bathroom Politics

China’s North Korea Problem

For more than a decade, Kim Jong-nam, the exiled half brother of North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, lived in Beijing and Macau under the protection of the Chinese state. But, on February 13th, he looked to be travelling alone when two dark-haired women approached him at Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur International Airport. In what appears to be leaked CCTV footage, one of the women approaches Kim in the check-in area, while the other rushes up from behind and seems to wipe her hands across his face. After the alleged assassins stroll away in opposite directions, Kim is shown, alone, approaching airline personnel and miming the mysterious ambush. Soon after, a direct descendant of North Korea’s ruling dynasty was dead.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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When Immigrants Are No Longer Considered Americans
Donald Trump Through a Loudspeaker, Darkly
Donald Trump’s New World Disorder

What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About Anti-Semitism

“The anti-Semitic threats targeting our Jewish community and community centers are horrible and are painful, and a very sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil,” President Trump said Tuesday at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C. He was referring, rather obliquely, to a spate of recent bomb scares and acts of vandalism, part of an uptick in hate crimes that has occurred since his arrival on the political scene. Trump’s sentiment, however forced, was welcome, given the obtuseness, ambivalence, and even denial that have characterized his past responses to the problem. As a candidate and a President, he has seemed oddly untroubled by the license that anti-Semites derive from the us-against-them motif of his rants. But now, Trump says, the bigotry “has to stop, and it’s going to stop.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Sanity from the Courts on Gun Control in a Time of Trump
The Perils and Possibilities of the Never-Ending Protest
Betsy DeVos’s Spineless Transgender Bathroom Politics

A “Never Trump” Conservative Adjusts to the New Administration

Last Friday, Erick Erickson published a piece on his Web site, The Resurgent, about President Trump’s surprise press conference, in which the President spent seventy-five minutes excoriating his critics and entertaining his faithful with a fresh batch of dubious claims. Like an increasing number of post-election pieces written by Erickson, it was a sort of Trojan-horse critique of Trump, starting with conservative common ground and closing with deep concern. Prior to Trump’s election, Erickson—called the “most powerful conservative in America” by The Atlantic , in 2015—broke with many of his readers, becoming a discordant voice of anti-Trump dissent. But, as a working conservative commentator, he wants and needs his words to reach readers who believe in the President.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Sanity from the Courts on Gun Control in a Time of Trump
The Perils and Possibilities of the Never-Ending Protest
Betsy DeVos’s Spineless Transgender Bathroom Politics

Six Questions Senators Should Ask Neil Gorsuch

Senators love to talk. It’s listening that they can’t abide. This explains the maddening nature of most Senate hearings, especially those for nominees to the Supreme Court. Senators are so busy showing off how much they know, or posturing on issues they care about (which are often unrelated to the work of the courts), that the nominee often has little to do but sit there and appear interested. This, of course, is usually fine with the nominee, who has, in any event, been trained to say as little as possible.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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A Childhood in the Pro-Life Movement