George Packer's Blog, page 139

Losing the Popular Vote Won’t Rein in President Trump

In the first photographs of Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office, his head was framed between Barack Obama, who has said that Trump is a threat to the Republic, and a bronze bust of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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The Alt-Right Hails Its Victorious God-Emperor
Media Culpa? The Press and the Election Result
What Trump Needs to Learn About Protests

Defiance and Anxiety Among Undocumented Youth in Trump’s America

We don’t talk about the Dream of New York, Illinois, or Florida the way we talk about the California Dream—a potent seventy-two-degree vision of freedom, opportunity, and diversity, with a palm tree swaying in an unclouded sky. On Tuesday night, collective dreamers of that pluralistic dream began to have night sweats. California is home to a quarter of the nation’s undocumented immigrants, including some five hundred thousand of the approximately eight hundred thousand youths and young adults who came to the United States as children and were granted temporary work permits and a stay of deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), enacted by President Obama in 2012. (DACA represents a narrow version of the DREAM Act, which failed to pass Congress.) These provisionally protected immigrants—the “DACA-mented”—can’t vote, but the outcome of this year’s Presidential election is likely to have severe consequences for their prospects in America. Donald Trump has promised his supporters that he’ll reverse DACA by executive order as soon as he takes office, dividing families and draining the economy of motivated and invested new and soon-to-be professionals. Even if he doesn’t send them back to their countries of origin, many will be relegated to the shadow economy, largely denied the chance to use the skills they’ve honed.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Alt-Right Hails Its Victorious God-Emperor
Media Culpa? The Press and the Election Result
What Trump Needs to Learn About Protests

Fighting for Trump: The U.F.C. Comes to New York City

Elections have consequences—mostly unforeseen, and sometimes unintended. For instance, the election of President Obama, in 2008, led to the appointment, in 2009, of Preet Bharara as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which led to the arrest and subsequent downfall, in 2015, of Sheldon Silver, the longtime Speaker of the New York State Assembly. Under Silver’s leadership, the Assembly had blocked the legalization of mixed martial arts, thanks in large part to the vehement opposition of a union group that was seeking to organize at a hotel-and-casino company. This company was largely owned by the Fertita brothers, Frank and Lorenzo, who also owned most of the world’s preëminent mixed-martial-arts organization, the Ultimate Fighting Championship. With Silver gone, the Assembly voted, earlier this year, to legalize the sport, and now the U.F.C. is promoting its first New York City show, scheduled for this Saturday, at Madison Square Garden—a landmark event that was made possible, if indirectly, by the 2008 election.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Alt-Right Hails Its Victorious God-Emperor
Media Culpa? The Press and the Election Result
What Trump Needs to Learn About Protests

Donald Trump Enters Mitch McConnell’s Washington

No one voluntarily watches the press conferences of Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader. Covering them is a form of civic duty. “A man with the natural charisma of an oyster,” Gail Collins once called him. On Wednesday afternoon, the constitutionally taciturn McConnell took questions from the press for almost half an hour. The senator had spent the past six years stringing Washington along, devoting the upper house of Congress to a program of obstruction, delay, and non-compliance on the theory that this would benefit the Republican Party—and now he had been proved right. He opened on a “parochial matter,” praising the success of Republicans in his home state of Kentucky, who won seventeen seats in the state legislature and would control the body for the first time in ninety-five years. The news, McConnell said, “only added a little more happiness to my evening.”

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Related:
The Alt-Right Hails Its Victorious God-Emperor
Media Culpa? The Press and the Election Result
What Trump Needs to Learn About Protests

Making the Hopewell Baptist Church Great Again

In the afternoon or early evening of Tuesday, November 1st, a fire started to engulf the Hopewell Baptist Church, in city of Greenville, Mississippi. Firefighters raced to the scene, but the flames had reached the steeple. The entire inside of the century-old building was charred. “Everything is destroyed. Everything,” the church’s bishop, Clarence Green, said. One thing, however, had been added to the building: the words “Vote Trump” were scrawled in white spray paint on one of the outside walls.

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Related:
The Alt-Right Hails Its Victorious God-Emperor
Media Culpa? The Press and the Election Result
What Trump Needs to Learn About Protests

Erdoğan Strikes Turkey’s Last Opposition

On Thursday morning, at precisely 9:05 A.M., the Turkish Republic stood still. For sixty seconds, sirens wailed across Istanbul, ferry horns resounded along the Bosphorus, and traffic stopped in front of Dolmabahçe Palace, the one-time home of the sultans. This is how Turkey marked the seventy-eighth anniversary of the death of its founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

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Morning Cartoon: Friday, November 11th

Zephyr Teachout’s Loss and the Fight Against Dark Money

Late Tuesday, in a small hotel on the eastern bank of the Hudson River, Zephyr Teachout stood in a dark stairwell. She had just learned that she had lost her bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. A clear majority of voters in New York’s nineteenth congressional district had chosen to send her Republican opponent, John Faso, a sixty-four-year-old lawyer and former state assemblyman, to Washington. Now she had to address her supporters, dozens of whom filled the bar and restaurant of the Rhinecliff Inn, wearing Teachout caps and buttons. But first, a moment of grief. I could see her in silhouette, standing alone with her head down and her hand on the railing. Perhaps she needed to compose herself. Or perhaps she wanted a few more seconds of silence before confirming out loud, to the people who had worked hard over the previous year to get her elected, that she had lost, and that the country had lost. Moments later, she was behind the lectern, facing the crowd. “It’s been a bad night for honest, respectful democracy,” she said slowly. “Across the country, and in this race, we did not have the results we wanted. But I am so proud of our campaign.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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What the Movies Miss About Trump’s America
President Trump’s Policy on Syria
Wayne Barrett, Who Wrote the Book on Trump, Is Still Reporting

President Trump’s Policy on Syria

Last week, at a meeting with reporters in his office in Damascus, Walid Muallem, the Syrian foreign minister, was asked whom he favored in the American Presidential election.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Zephyr Teachout’s Loss and the Fight Against Dark Money
What the Movies Miss About Trump’s America
Wayne Barrett, Who Wrote the Book on Trump, Is Still Reporting

Wayne Barrett, Who Wrote the Book on Trump, Is Still Reporting

At 10:30 on Wednesday morning, the investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who is seventy-one years old, sat propped up in bed, covers pulled up to his chin, a green-eyed cat curled up beside him. An oxygen tank stood at the foot of his bed; his pillbox was nearby. On the television in the corner, Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, was gloating about her candidate’s victory in the Presidential election.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Zephyr Teachout’s Loss and the Fight Against Dark Money
What the Movies Miss About Trump’s America
President Trump’s Policy on Syria

President Trump’s Surprisingly Warm Welcome in the Middle East

Arab autocrats are gleeful. Islamic extremists seem ecstatic. Israel’s right-wing government is exuberant. Only Iran seems nervous about the election of Donald Trump, who has vowed to transform U.S. policy in a region with four wars (in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen), rising extremism, the return of authoritarian rule after the collapse of the Arab Spring, economic instability, and demographic challenges transforming almost two dozen societies.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Zephyr Teachout’s Loss and the Fight Against Dark Money
What the Movies Miss About Trump’s America
President Trump’s Policy on Syria