George Packer's Blog, page 111

Trump Puts Iran “On Notice”

On Wednesday afternoon, President Trump picked his first foreign-policy fight—and signalled who’s currently in charge of those decisions. Some seven hours before the former ExxonMobil chief Rex Tillerson was sworn in as Secretary of State, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn strode to the podium in a packed White House Briefing Room and, without advance notice, issued a combative warning to a foreign power. “As of today,” he declared, “we are officially putting Iran on notice.” It was the first time the former lieutenant general had appeared publicly on behalf of the Administration, and his performance was in keeping with his feisty reputation and his well-known antipathy toward Iran. Flynn was fired as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency by President Obama partly for his defiant views on the Islamic Republic.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Cover Story: John W. Tomac’s “Liberty’s Flameout”
World Leaders Receive Crank Calls from Someone Claiming to Be President of United States
Chicago’s Violence and Trump’s Ominous Tweets

The Trump Administration’s Dark View of Immigrants

“I feel strongly about this,” Donald Trump said a year before his election, on Steve Bannon’s radio show. “When someone’s going to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Stanford, all the greats, and they graduate, and not only graduate but do great, and we throw them out of the country and they can’t get back in, I think that’s terrible. We’ve got to be able to keep great people in the country. We’ve got to create job creators.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Cover Story: John W. Tomac’s “Liberty’s Flameout”
World Leaders Receive Crank Calls from Someone Claiming to Be President of United States
Chicago’s Violence and Trump’s Ominous Tweets

Advice for Progressives from America’s Radical Feminist Governor

How to resist Trump? Early the other morning, I put the question to Oregon’s Kate Brown, who in November became the first L.G.B.T. person to be elected governor of an American state, after being appointed to the position in 2015. “At my age, I can go pretty solidly for twelve hours,” Brown, who is fifty-six years old, said. “So, if you have a nine-to-five job, that gives you a couple of hours to be at your local airport to protest the immigration order. It gives you time to go to a League of Women Voters meeting to help register people. It gives you time to go online and research which organization you’re going to donate money to. It gives you time to help you connect to your family and friends in states that have key senators.” When I suggested that this sounded pretty onerous, she doubled down: “It’s going to require more than you’re bargaining for. Activism will change your life.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Cover Story: John W. Tomac’s “Liberty’s Flameout”
World Leaders Receive Crank Calls from Someone Claiming to Be President of United States
Chicago’s Violence and Trump’s Ominous Tweets

Donald Trump Through a Loudspeaker, Darkly

If you were a child growing up in China in the late nineteen-eighties, you learned fairly early the universe of things that were less than dependable: hot water, the bus schedule, and, most irritatingly—if you were an introverted second grader—the capricious offerings of the itinerant book cart. But one aspect of our lives, from birth until, it seemed to me, death, remained as constant as the sunrise. This was the voice of the loudspeaker broadcasts in our Army hospital compound (my mother was a military doctor), which woke me every morning before I could witness the dawn, accompanying me through all three meals and, as I brushed my teeth for bed, sometimes long after dusk.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The U.S. Breaks Its Promise to Syrian Refugees in Turkey
A Syrian Doctor with a Visa Is Suing the Trump Administration
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, February 1st

The U.S. Breaks Its Promise to Syrian Refugees in Turkey

Hours before Donald Trump signed an executive order halting all refugees’ admission to the United States, and banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations, including Syria, Sohir, a forty-four-year-old woman living in Istanbul, was imagining a reunion in America with her son. (Sohir, like other refugees interviewed for this article, requested that her full name not be used, out of fear of jeopardizing her resettlement case.) “I think I’m going to Los Angeles, because my sponsor is there. But I can then go to him in Philadelphia,” she said on Friday. “I won’t bother him in his daily life, but I’ll be close to him if he needs me or if I miss him.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump Through a Loudspeaker, Darkly
A Syrian Doctor with a Visa Is Suing the Trump Administration
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, February 1st

A Syrian Doctor with a Visa Is Suing the Trump Administration

Editor’s note: Since this piece was published, Dr. Amer Al Homssi has been cleared to enter the U.S. On Wednesday evening, his lawyers said that he had boarded a flight in Abu Dhabi.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump Through a Loudspeaker, Darkly
The U.S. Breaks Its Promise to Syrian Refugees in Turkey
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, February 1st

Pope Francis Is the Anti-Trump

For readers consumed with the Trumpian chaos of the past ten days, images of a white-robed Pope Francis standing beside a man dressed like a nutcracker—the Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, epauletted and festooned in red and gold—likely seemed absurd and irrelevant. The Pope, one might have read, had forced the resignation of the head of an ancient vestige of Catholic Europe’s cult of aristocracy. Headlines conveyed the impression of a bizarre Vatican dustup sparked by yet more conservative resistance to the liberalizing impulses of the Pope from Argentina. But the contest between Francis and the Order is more than an irrelevant mummers’ play. It is an emblem of the Church’s wider effort to embrace modernity. More than that—and here is the news—it is a front in the now urgent global struggle against all that Donald Trump has come so quickly to represent. Pope Francis is the anti-Trump.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump Through a Loudspeaker, Darkly
The U.S. Breaks Its Promise to Syrian Refugees in Turkey
A Syrian Doctor with a Visa Is Suing the Trump Administration

Neil Gorsuch and Justices Past

There were several ghosts present at the ceremony on Tuesday night, in the East Room of the White House, at which President Donald Trump introduced Judge Neil Gorsuch, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, as his nominee for Supreme Court Justice. Some were mentioned and others ignored, but all together they gave the event an unsettled air. The President didn’t seem to notice. “This may be the most transparent judicial-selection process in history,” he said, before asking Gorsuch—a man who has “an extraordinary résumé, as good as it gets!”—and his wife, Louise, to emerge from the wings. Then Trump mentioned Justice Antonin Scalia, whose death, last February, opened up the seat for which, thanks to the cheap machinations of Republicans in the Senate, Trump was naming a nominee.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump Through a Loudspeaker, Darkly
The U.S. Breaks Its Promise to Syrian Refugees in Turkey
A Syrian Doctor with a Visa Is Suing the Trump Administration

The Many Dangers of Donald Trump’s Executive Order

In November, 2015, the Islamic State mounted devastating attacks in Paris, gunning down more than a hundred people at a rock concert, in restaurants, and outside a soccer stadium. In response, Donald Trump, then preparing for the Iowa caucuses, fulminated about the radical measures he would impose on Muslims seeking to enter the United States, if he were elected President. Trump was hardly alone in announcing rash proposals; on the subject of counterterrorism, it was a time of competitive opportunism among Republican Presidential candidates. Yet, in his nativism and bellicosity, Trump was already separating from his opponents. He began by making a series of loose comments during television interviews, including a suggestion that he might force American Muslims to register in a database. The following month, after a mass shooting in San Bernardino, he issued a formal statement promising “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why Corporate America Must Stand Up to Trump
Poetry in a Time of Protest
“Becoming Warren Buffett,” the Man, Not the Investor

Why Corporate America Must Stand Up to Trump

Over the weekend, Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, the venerable manufacturing conglomerate that dates back to 1892—and Thomas Edison—issued a statement to G.E.’s employees distancing the company from Donald Trump’s travel bans on people from predominantly Muslim nations. “We have many employees from the named countries and we do business all over the region,” Immelt pointed out. He said the firm would “stand with” its employees and customers in the countries affected by Trump’s discriminatory policy.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Many Dangers of Donald Trump’s Executive Order
Poetry in a Time of Protest
“Becoming Warren Buffett,” the Man, Not the Investor