George Packer's Blog, page 137

The Dark Sides of American Presidents

After the 1968 Presidential election, when former Vice-President Richard Nixon defeated the incumbent Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, in a race so close that vote-counting continued into the morning, the Times’ influential and well-connected columnist James Reston weighed in. “This has been a hard election, and there are many who believe it has wounded and divided the nation,” he wrote. But, Reston continued, Americans “have short memories and instinctively accept the result of the vote, no matter how close. This, at least, is the consolation of our political history.” The next day, the wise Russell Baker, another Times columnist, took a harsher, but perhaps more realistic view, writing that the election proved “that the country does not want Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey for President.” Much the same could be said of what we’ve just gone through.

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Related:
Has Rudy Giuliani Been Done in by His Own Buck-Raking?
The Gathering Storm of Protest Against Trump
What You Can Do

Coming to Terms with Trumponomics

Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, appeared Wednesday morning on CNBC, and he laid into Donald Trump’s economic program. Trump’s proposed tax cuts don’t make sense, Summers said, because they would target very high earners, meaning that a lot of the money they free up could end up being saved, rather than spent. And Trump’s infrastructure plans are questionable, Summers argued, because in at least one version of the plans, they depend largely on private financing. The problem, Summers said, is that pension funds and other big investors won’t invest in essential tasks like repairing the nation’s roads, bridges, and airports, because projects like those don’t produce any revenues. So where would the financing for them come from?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
With Health-Care Reform, Listen Carefully to Trump’s Words
Watching “Arrival” After the Election
Donald Trump’s First, Alarming Week as President-Elect

Donald Trump’s First, Alarming Week as President-Elect

It’s been one week since an unusually subdued Donald Trump gave his victory speech in Manhattan. “For those who have chosen not to support me in the past—of which there were a few people,” Trump said, eliciting laughter from the crowd of ecstatic supporters wearing red Make America Great Again hats, “I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.” After running a campaign defined more by whom and what he opposed, Trump’s remarks were out of character and welcome.

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Related:
Coming to Terms with Trumponomics
With Health-Care Reform, Listen Carefully to Trump’s Words
Trump’s Populism Is Not Just a Western Phenomenon

Trump’s Populism Is Not Just a Western Phenomenon

Last week, a photograph was taken of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, the far-right English politician who helped steer his country toward Brexit, standing in a golden elevator at Trump Tower, their arms around each other. Both men have accented their pale complexions with artificial tans, and both are exuberant: Trump’s expression is slightly sheepish, his features happy and pinched, while Farage’s face is stretched into a wild jack-o’-lantern grin. “Huh?” Trump said in June, when a reporter asked him about the impending Brexit vote. By August, Farage was serving as a warmup act for Trump in Jackson, Mississippi. This seemed strange and disturbing—since when had Mississippi conservatives required a foreign exhorter?—but you could detect a broader utility in the alliance. Farage’s presence in Jackson suggested that Trump’s voters were engaged in a rebellion that was big enough to encompass the West; it assured them that their grievance had heft, and a context.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Coming to Terms with Trumponomics
With Health-Care Reform, Listen Carefully to Trump’s Words
Watching “Arrival” After the Election

Glimpsing the Future of Men’s Tennis

The year in men’s tennis wraps up this week, with the top eight players still healthy enough after the long, long season, to compete in the round-robin A.T.P. World Tour Finals, which takes place every November. Since 2009, the tournament has been held at the cavernous O2 arena, in London, the kind of place you’d go to see aging rock veterans like the Stones or Springsteen. There’s something apt about this: men’s tennis has lately become no country for young men. In 1992, the average age of a top-ten men’s player was twenty-three; at the end of last year, it was roughly twenty-nine. It is true, though, that, for the first time since 2001, neither the thirty-five-year-old Roger Federer nor the thirty-year-old Rafael Nadal will be competing: knee troubles (Fed) and wrist troubles (Rafa) kept them off the court for long stretches this season, sending them down the rankings and out of the season finale. And so the story of this year’s tournament is shaping up to be whether Novak Djokovic, who has won the past four Tour Finals, can somehow summon his early-season form and regain the No. 1 ranking that, earlier this month, was seized, barely, by Andy Murray, who has been playing the best tennis of his career. (Djokovic had held the top spot since July of 2014, the fourth-longest streak in the history of the men’s game.) Both Murray and Djokovic will turn thirty in May. Twenty years ago, there was exactly one player who was thirty or older (Stefan Edberg) in the top twenty.

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Related:
Wawrinka, Kerber, and Two Highly Rivalrous U.S. Open Finals
Sania Mirza’s Unlikely Stardom
Kei Nishikori’s Pressure-Filled U.S. Open

A Letter to a Friend in a Time of Trump

A friend, the great sleight-of-hand man and skeptic Jamy Ian Swiss, wrote in some despair about the United States Presidential election—not about the result alone but about the possibility of “advocating the construction and expansion of a liberal society” in its aftermath. Rather inadequately, I wrote this in response:

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The Timbisha Shoshone of Death Valley and the Shadow of Trump
On Margaret Fuller and Woman in the Twenty-First Century
Ways I Am Preparing for a Trump Presidency

Postscript: Gwen Ifill

Long before Monday, when Gwen Ifill, the renowned PBS journalist, died, at sixty-one, of cancer, this year had begun to look like a bouquet of hardships. It is a particular cruelty that Ifill, who was a standard-bearer for journalism, a mentor of young reporters, and a profoundly decent colleague, should depart now, when the country has never been more in need of those qualities.

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Related:
Wayne Barrett, Who Wrote the Book on Trump, Is Still Reporting
Gawker’s Essential Unevenness
Gawker Was a Great Place to Become a Journalist

The Moral Weakness of Pope Benedict’s “Last Testament”

It seems impolite to say so, given Pope Benedict XVI’s chastened retreat to the shadows of the Vatican, back in 2013, but his papacy was a failed one. For nearly eight years, he led the Catholic Church in the broad collapse of its moral authority, from the crisis of criminal priests to the further alienation of women to the blatant dysfunction of the Church’s own bureaucracy. Still, there is one sense in which Benedict succeeded. After a career spent railing against relativism, he relativized the world’s last divine-right office, becoming the first Pope since 1415 to resign and giving his successor, Francis, the sway that he so astonishingly exploits today. At the end, the self-styled Pope Emeritus, still dressed in his white robes, lifted off from the Vatican in a white helicopter, which took him to Castel Gandolfo, the papal vacation palace on a lake outside Rome. He assumed the quiet, cloistered existence of a retired prelate. Today, he has broken his silence with “Last Testament,” a late-in-life attempt at personal reckoning that amounts, instead, to a reiteration of the ethical detachment that undercut him from the start.

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Related:
At the Vatican, a Search for Cancer’s Miracle Cure
Postscript: Daniel Berrigan, 1921-2016
Daniel Berrigan, My Dangerous Friend

Donald Trump Brings a New Age of Political Combat

On Saturday night, about a hundred hours after Donald Trump’s election as President, Wanda Sykes took the stage at the TD Garden, in Boston, to deliver a short set, part of a comedy evening for charity. Sykes, a gay black comic and often a political one, told the crowd that, in the days since the election, she had found herself consoling her friends, telling them that everything was going to be O.K. “I am certain this is not the first time we’ve elected a racist, sexist, homophobic President,” she said at the Garden. “He’s just the first confirmed one.” At this, loud, heavy boos came from the crowd. “Fuck you, motherfuckers,” Sykes said. “Fuck all y’all.” She raised her middle finger, and started indicating particular places in the crowd. “Fuck you, you, you you you you you.” The image of Sykes’s extended middle finger was the cover of yesterday’s Boston Herald.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Conflict-of-Interest Problem
How to Save the Democratic Party
The Anti-Élite, Post-Fact Worlds of Trump and Rousseau

Trump’s Conflict-of-Interest Problem

“Are you planning on putting your assets in a blind trust should you become President?” the Fox Business Network anchor Maria Bartiromo asked Donald Trump during a Presidential-primary debate in South Carolina, in January. “How difficult will it be for you to disentangle yourself from your business and your money and prioritize America’s interests first?”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump Brings a New Age of Political Combat
How to Save the Democratic Party
The Anti-Élite, Post-Fact Worlds of Trump and Rousseau