George Packer's Blog, page 127

Barack Obama’s Sanity-Affirming Press Conference

“I guess part of my over-all message here as I leave for the holidays is that, if we look for one explanation or one silver bullet or one easy fix for our politics, then we’re probably going to be disappointed,” President Obama said in a press conference on Friday. He will be in Hawaii for the next couple of weeks; that comment came in response to a question about whether, while he was gone, members of the Electoral College, which meets on Monday, should do something dramatic, and whether the whole electoral-college system needed scrambling. He demurred: “With respect to the electors, I’m not going to wade into that issue because, again, it’s the American people’s job, and now the electors’ job, to decide my successor. It is not my job to decide my successor.” It was his job, he said, to provide good information about the election, and during the campaign that came before, and he believed that he had done so. There had been “a lot of information,” above all, from the candidates: “The President-elect, I think, has been very explicit about what he cares about and what he believes in. So it’s not in my hands now; it’s up to them.”

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Published on December 18, 2016 09:55

Postscript: Craig Sager, 1951-2016

At its best, being a diehard fan of the National Basketball Association feels a bit like belonging to a family. For the past two decades, Craig Sager—a longtime sideline reporter for Turner Sports who died on Thursday, at the age of sixty-five, after a two-year struggle with leukemia—was every hoops aficionado’s kindly favorite uncle. Sager was always a pleasure to see onscreen. He mixed a schoolboy’s unembarrassed love for basketball with a reporter’s zeal for the fresh detail or telling phrase.

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Published on December 17, 2016 11:21

Ryan Zinke, Donald Trump’s Pick for Interior Secretary, and the Rising American Land Movements

In 1981, an oilman named George Mitchell developed a fixation on a geologic formation called the Barnett Shale, near Fort Worth, Texas, in which some promising drilling prospects were locked under seemingly unbreachable rock. His company held a long-term contract with a pipeline business that would pay high prices so long as Mitchell could keep supplying natural gas, but his company’s fields were drying up. He focussed his efforts on the Barnett formation, which happened to be near his company’s processing plant and the pipeline. “My engineers kept telling me, ‘You are wasting your money, Mitchell,’ ” the oilman told Forbes, in 2009. “And I said, ‘Well, damn it, let’s figure this thing out, because there’s no question there is a tremendous source bed that’s about 250 feet thick.’ “

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Published on December 16, 2016 14:47

The Crowdsourced Guide to Fighting Trump’s Agenda

On Wednesday, around 7 P.M., a Google document entitled “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda” began making the rounds online. Its origin was the Twitter account of Ezra Levin, a thirty-one-year-old associate director at a national anti-poverty nonprofit, and self-described “Twitter novice,” who lives in D.C. and, until a few days ago, had roughly six hundred and fifty followers. His tweet’s simple message, “Please share w/ your friends to help fight Trump’s racism, authoritarianism, & corruption on their home turf,” belied three weeks of unpaid work by some three dozen mostly young progressives who had been collaborating on the document since the week of Thanksgiving.

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Published on December 16, 2016 09:57

The Crowd-Sourced Guide to Fighting Trump’s Agenda

On Wednesday, around 7 P.M., a Google document entitled “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda” began making the rounds online. Its origin was the Twitter account of Ezra Levin, a thirty-one-year-old associate director at a national anti-poverty nonprofit, and self-described “Twitter novice,” who lives in D.C. and, until a few days ago, had roughly six hundred and fifty followers. His tweet’s simple message, “Please share w/ your friends to help fight Trump’s racism, authoritarianism, & corruption on their home turf,” belied three weeks of unpaid work by some three dozen mostly young progressives who had been collaborating on the document since the week of Thanksgiving.

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Published on December 16, 2016 09:57

Trump’s Daily Bankruptcy and the Ambassador to Israel

Every morning since November 9th, you wake up and read the news and think, This has got to be an issue of The Onion. Because, while so much of the media, in ways subtle and broad, attempts to normalize the Trump ascendancy, while we are told that patriotism demands that we accept Trump and “give him a chance,” the President-elect acts in ways that leave even dystopian satire behind. His behavior has little to do with conservatism or libertarianism or populism; his mode is recklessness, a self-admiring belief that unpredictability is the path to national salvation.

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Published on December 16, 2016 09:11

Nine Ways to Oppose Donald Trump

Over the past few weeks, a number of anguished friends and acquaintances, and even some strangers, have got in touch with me to ask what they might do to oppose Donald Trump. Being a fellow sufferer from OATS—Obsessing About Trump Syndrome—my first instinct has been to tell people to get off social media and take a long walk. It won’t do anybody much good, except possibly Trump, if large numbers of people who voted against him send themselves mad by constantly reading about him, cursing him, and recirculating his latest outrages.

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Published on December 16, 2016 08:22

A Future Visit to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library

When the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Museum opens its doors, historians may get a more rounded view of the reality-show star and businessman who has just been elected President of the United States. After a passage that might include a ride on a replica of the Trump Tower escalator, and possibly a chance to contemplate the six-foot-tall portrait of Trump for which a Trump charity paid twenty thousand dollars, researchers in the archives may be able to study notes from conversations, minutes of meetings, and memorandums to staff, friends, and family. The advent of e-mail has made the project of a Presidential library more of a challenge, and the effect of the Twitter era is unknown, but there will always be a human factor, and telling personal glimpses.

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Published on December 15, 2016 21:00

Rex Tillerson’s State of Denial

Is there such a thing as a non-denial denialist?

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Published on December 15, 2016 05:35

Betsy DeVos and the Plan to Break Public Schools

Among the points that can be made in favor of Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s billionaire nominee for the position of Secretary of Education, are the following: She has no known ties to President Vladimir Putin, unlike Trump’s nominee to head the State Department, Rex Tillerson, who was decorated with Russia’s Order of Friendship medal a few years ago. She hasn’t demonstrated any outward propensity for propagating dark, radical-right-leaning conspiracy theories, unlike Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s designated national-security adviser. She has not actively called for the dismantling of the department she is slated to head, as have Rick Perry, Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary, and Scott Pruitt, the nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

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Published on December 14, 2016 14:52