George Packer's Blog, page 140

Learning Trump Won, in West Virginia

Major Richard Ojeda went to sleep on Tuesday without waiting for the election results, and when he woke up and started reading posts on his phone, at first he didn’t believe them. “It was surreal,” he said. “I was scrolling down to make sure they weren’t fake.” It had been clear for months that West Virginia would go for Trump, and, indeed, in Logan County, where Ojeda lives with his family now that he’s retired from the military, Trump won just less than eighty per cent of the vote. But Ojeda and most people he knew had assumed that Clinton would win the country.

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

Watching the Trump Spectacle Overseas

On January 20, 2017, Barack Obama will take his leave of the White House. We now know who, though not necessarily what, will replace him. By way of a warmup act, tens of millions of Obama’s fellow-Americans appear to have taken leave of their senses: such, at least, is the broad global view of the election result that was declared on Wednesday morning. If you visited Bild, the German news site, you were met by the blare of twin headlines: “Trump Now President” and, below, the words “How Could That Happen?” Bild distinguished itself, not long ago, during the revelations of Trump’s abusive behavior toward women, by asking a no less blatant question, in letters of incendiary red: “Ist Donald Trump ein Sexmonster?” So palpable is the insult that he presents, to European sensibilities, that the language in which his character is parsed tends to cross national boundaries and become a universal lexicon of scorn. Die Zeit: “Amerikas blonder Mussolini.” Hamburger Morgenpost: “Bitte nicht den Horror-Clown!”

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

Barack Obama in Defeat

Twelve years ago, Barack Obama introduced himself to the American public by way of a speech given at the Democratic National Convention, in Boston, in which he declared, “There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America, an Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” Few of us believed this to be true, but most, if not all of us, longed for it to be. We vested this brash optimist with our hope, a resource that was in scarce supply three years after the September 11th terrorist attacks in a country mired in disastrous military conflicts in two nations. The vision he offered—of national reconciliation beyond partisan bounds, of government rooted in respect for the governed and the Constitution itself, of idealism that could actually be realized—became the basis for his Presidential campaign. Twice the United States elected to the Presidency a biracial black man whose ancestry and upbringing stretched to three continents.

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

With Trump, Coal Wins, Planet Loses

Peabody Energy is, by its own description, the “largest private sector coal company in the world.” It’s also bankrupt. The company, based in St. Louis, filed for Chapter 11 this past April. Today, on the news of Donald Trump’s victory, Peabody’s stock surged almost fifty per cent. That one figure speaks volumes—and forests and coral reefs and coastal cities. For the planet, the stakes in yesterday’s election were enormous—“almost unthinkably large,” as David Roberts put it, at Vox—and now the results are in. The ramification of Americans’ choice will be felt, literally, for millennia.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Election Day in the East Village: Singing Helps
What the Markets Can, and Can’t, Tell Us About a Trump Presidency
A Dark Night at the Javits Center

Hillary Clinton’s Powerful Concession

Hillary Clinton formally campaigned for the Presidency for eighteen months, and informally campaigned for years before that, and when the end neared she seemed to want to gather her movement around her. On Monday, Barack and Michelle Obama joined her for a final rally in Philadelphia, her family surrounded her, famous musicians warmed up the crowd, and volunteers who believed in her introduced her. She arrived at the Westchester Airport at three-thirty on Tuesday morning, and moved slowly through a large crowd of her campaign staff who had come to greet her at home. Her staff had made plans to show the press a proprietary computer algorithm called Ada, and to explain that the algorithm had showed how to win the election. Credit was to be broadly shared; that was the plan and the ethic. Clinton began Election Day by FaceTiming with her grandchild, and ended it by losing the Presidency. From a distance, the crowd around her could look like courtiers. Up close, they seemed to be a movement.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
“I’m with Hillary 2016”: A Clinton Campaign Sign’s Final Resting Place
Election Day in the East Village: Singing Helps
What the Markets Can, and Can’t, Tell Us About a Trump Presidency

Talking to Kids About Trump’s Victory

Someone asked me this morning to say something about talking to kids in this time of crisis. Indeed, Van Jones, speaking last night on CNN, as our own Brexitish disaster was unfolding, spoke passionately about the perils of this Wednesday morning’s breakfast: What do you say to kids when a man whom they have been (rightly) brought up to regard as a monstrous figure is suddenly the figure, the President we have? I have been unstinting in my own view of the perils of Trumpism, and will remain so. But I also believe that the comings and goings of politics and political actions in our lives must not be allowed to dominate our daily existence—and that if we struggle to emphasize to our children the necessities of community, ongoing life, daily pleasures, and shared enterprises, although we may not defeat the ogres of history, we can hope to remain who we are in their face.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
“I’m with Hillary 2016”: A Clinton Campaign Sign’s Final Resting Place
With Trump, Coal Wins, Planet Loses
Election Day in the East Village: Singing Helps

America and South Africa, Watching Each Other

When I first went to South Africa, in 1985, during some of the darkest days of the country’s violently repressive apartheid regime, one of the bright lights I found was the inspiration that protesters drew from the American civil-rights revolution and its victory over apartheid-like discrimination. Even in the midst of torture and trials—black anti-apartheid opponents tossed from planes into the sea; the activist Stephen Biko murdered; Nelson Mandela and his comrades sentenced to life in prison—there was the example of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the thousands who had demanded that America live up to its promise of freedom and justice for all. Once Mandela was released, in 1990, he told me that, in prison, he had thought often of King and his allies, and of the anti-apartheid movement in the United States.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
“I’m with Hillary 2016”: A Clinton Campaign Sign’s Final Resting Place
Election Day in the East Village: Singing Helps
What the Markets Can, and Can’t, Tell Us About a Trump Presidency

How Donald Trump Became President-Elect

Historians will be debating what happened on Tuesday for decades—centuries, perhaps. But there are some assertions that we can already make. The polls were wrong, for one thing: on average, going into Election Day, they had predicted that Hillary Clinton would win the popular vote by about four per cent. The early voting analyses were wrong, too: most of them said that Trump was too far behind in Florida to win that pivotal state. And journalists (myself included) were wrong: we mistakenly trusted the polls instead of what we saw before our eyes—huge crowds turning out for Donald Trump at rallies all over the country. The Clinton campaign, which as late as Monday evening was expressing a high degree of confidence, was also wrong.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
“I’m with Hillary 2016”: A Clinton Campaign Sign’s Final Resting Place
With Trump, Coal Wins, Planet Loses
Election Day in the East Village: Singing Helps

Donald Trump’s Stunning Win

On Tuesday, Donald J. Trump, a Manhattan real-estate developer who promoted his candidacy with the instrument of bigotry, was elected President of the United States. The state that put him over the top, according to the A.P., was Wisconsin, which the news agency put in his column at 2:30 A.M.—but the direction of the evening was set when Trump won Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina. By some measures, it was close: both Trump and Hillary Clinton won more than fifty-five million popular votes. But, given that even a close loss by Trump would have meant that a troubling number of Americans had opted for demagoguery, the result was stunning. Hours before the vote was called, stock-market futures had fallen sharply. There have been many times when people around the world distrusted America, or feared it. The election of 2016 marks the first time in the modern era that the greatest well of those who are fearful and skeptical of American institutions has been found within the American electorate.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
“I’m with Hillary 2016”: A Clinton Campaign Sign’s Final Resting Place
With Trump, Coal Wins, Planet Loses
Election Day in the East Village: Singing Helps

Trump’s Stunning Win

On Tuesday, Donald J. Trump, a Manhattan real-estate developer who promoted his candidacy with the instrument of bigotry, was elected President of the United States. The state that put him over the top, according to the A.P., was Wisconsin, which the news agency put in his column at 2:30 A.M.—but the direction of the evening was set when Trump won Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina. By some measures, it was close: both Trump and Hillary Clinton won more than fifty-five million popular votes. But, given that even a close loss by Trump would have meant that a troubling number of Americans had opted for demagoguery, the result was stunning. Hours before the vote was called, stock-market futures had fallen sharply. There have been many times when people around the world distrusted America, or feared it. The election of 2016 marks the first time in the modern era that the greatest well of those who are fearful and skeptical of American institutions has been found within the American electorate.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Who Believed in Trump, and Who Is to Blame
Trump’s America, Hiding in Plain Sight
An American Tragedy