George Packer's Blog, page 106

Losing a Son in the New York State Prisons

When Lonnie Hamilton became a father, in 1993, he gave the baby his own name, making him Lonnie Hamilton III. Growing up, the boy split his time between his father’s home, in the Bronx, and Georgia, where his mother lived. When he was in the Bronx, he liked to go with his grandmother to the church on Crotona Avenue that his great-grandfather had founded. Lonnie started high school in Georgia, but after he began getting into trouble his father brought him back to the Bronx and enrolled him in the same public high school that he had attended. By now, his son spoke with a Southern accent; friends called him “Georgia.”

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Published on February 17, 2017 04:00

Trying (and Failing) Not to Fear So Much About Trump

Rationality is hard to maintain in an irrational world, but, as Alice found on the other side of the mirror, it is mostly worth the effort—and the surest sign of rationality is the ability to imagine that your view might indeed be the backward, mirror-image one. So, as the short weeks pass and the crazy of the Trump time mounts, it seems incumbent on those of us who believe that we are in the middle of a national emergency, rising for the past year and now in full bloom, to try to find out why we might be wrong—to synthesize, if possible, from as many opposing sources as we can, why this might be a hyperbolic or even hysterical view, one not justified by the facts.

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Published on February 16, 2017 21:00

Donald Trump’s Alternative-Reality Press Conference

It was “insane,” a “marathon rant” at the media, and “a press conference for the ages.” Before you accuse me of liberal bias, these were the terms that Fox Business Channel’s Charles Gasparino, the home page of the New York Post, and Fox News’s Shepard Smith used, respectively, to describe the performance that Donald Trump put on during a lengthy press conference in the East Room of the White House on Thursday.

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Published on February 16, 2017 17:14

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Art of Avoidance

Yesterday was supposed to be Benjamin Netanyahu’s day—the first time, during his nearly eleven years as Prime Minister of Israel, that a Republican President greeted him at the White House. Not only had he outlasted Barack Obama but he’d seen the election of a candidate who, during his campaign, seemed to have bought Netanyahu’s pitch. As President-elect, Donald Trump tweeted against the United Nations Security Council’s condemnation of settlements in Palestinian territory, promised to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem, and nominated a hard-line settlement supporter to be his Ambassador to Israel.

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Published on February 16, 2017 14:24

Donald Trump Versus the World

Just when you think things can’t get crazier in the new Trump Administration, they do. On Wednesday, standing beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a White House press conference, Donald Trump blamed the press, the intelligence agencies, and Hillary Clinton for the ouster of Michael Flynn, his former national-security adviser.

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Published on February 15, 2017 17:08

How Elizabeth Warren Found a Villain in Andy Puzder

Last Thursday evening, during an icy and isolating New England storm, my wife and I settled in on the couch to watch “The Big Short,” Adam McKay’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’s great book about the 2008 financial crash. I picked the movie thinking, two weeks into the Trump Administration, that if we weren’t likely to escape the fury and anxiety of the times, then we might at least channel it for two hours into a crisis that was in the past, in which the main menace to the Republic was not incipient authoritarianism but an accumulation of assholes.

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Published on February 15, 2017 15:21

The Rejection of Andy Puzder

The emptiness of President Trump’s campaign promises to lift up the forgotten American worker has been nowhere more starkly exposed than in his nomination of Andy Puzder, a fast-food executive, as his Secretary of Labor—a nomination that fell apart on Wednesday, as Puzder, facing almost certain failure in a confirmation vote, withdrew his name. Puzder did not fail because he was just a rich Republican donor being rewarded with a Cabinet position. That was the case with Betsy DeVos, who was barely confirmed as Secretary of Education. The reasons were richer than that.

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Published on February 15, 2017 15:08

Another Judge Has a Problem with Trump

Judge Leonie Brinkema, of the Eastern District Court in Virginia, had a problem—one that, as it happens, is becoming increasingly common in a country run by Donald Trump. The Commonwealth of Virginia, joined by other plaintiffs, had come to her courtroom with arguments that a Trump executive order, or “EO,” keeping people from seven Muslim-majority countries and all refugees out of America, violated various parts of the Constitution, and it brought evidence of specific harm that the order had already done to Virginians, several of whom it listed by name. In response, the Trump Administration had offered nothing—no logical rationale, no indication, even, of a “deliberative process” behind the order. Brinkema wrote her opinion on Monday, granting a partial preliminary injunction against the order, because “the defendants have responded with no evidence other than the EO, which they have defended primarily with arguments attacking the Commonwealth’s standing to oppose the EO and emphasizing the authority of the president to issue such an EO.”

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Published on February 15, 2017 11:56

The Mistake the Berkeley Protesters Made about Milo Yiannopoulos

Last week, PBS broadcast “Birth of a Movement,” a film about the battle between William Monroe Trotter, a firebrand African-American publisher born a few years after the end of the Civil War, and D. W. Griffith, the filmmaker responsible for the racist classic “Birth of a Nation.” Trotter, a contemporary of W. E. B. Du Bois, was a Boston native and graduate of Harvard University, and an uncompromising advocate for racial equality, if a bit of a loose cannon. Trotter’s contempt for the accommodationist response to Southern racism championed by, among others, Booker T. Washington culminated in his incitement of a riot when Washington attempted to give an address in Boston. The pivotal conflict of his career, however, was his attempt to prevent Griffith’s ode to the Ku Klux Klan from being shown in the city. “Birth of a Nation” was not simply the first blockbuster in American cinematic history; its racialist propaganda inspired a rebirth of the K.K.K., which had all but died out prior to the film’s release. It was screened in the White House, reportedly to accolades from Woodrow Wilson himself. Trotter found himself caught between the First Amendment ideals that allowed him to publish his newspaper, the Guardian, and fighting against the distribution of Griffith’s film and, by extension, the racial terrorism that it facilitated. He chose the latter approach, appealing unsuccessfully to Boston’s political leadership to have the film banned as obscene. Griffith found the protests against his film to be a form of intolerance.

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Published on February 14, 2017 21:00

It’s Time for a Proper Investigation of Trump’s Russia Ties

With Washington still agog at the news that Michael Flynn was forced to resign his post as Donald Trump’s national-security adviser, following revelations about his contacts with Russian officials, the Times, on Tuesday night, dropped another shocker on the capital. Citing four current and former American officials as their sources, the paper’s Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzo wrote, “Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.”

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Published on February 14, 2017 15:39