George Packer's Blog, page 141

Who Believed in Trump, and Who Is to Blame

The Times unveiled a new feature on its Web site last night, for the Presidential election. Each time a new segment of the vote was reported, anywhere in the United States, algorithms reweighted the chances that each candidate would win each state, and the election. The animation that depicted these chances was a jittery little needle on a dial indicator, and early in the evening the joke was that its constant, frantic quiver was going to drive everyone nuts. By the end of the evening, the needle was only pointing in one direction, toward Donald Trump. It was a magnificent little creation, and a way to understand how votes in one place changed the significance of votes in another. So much care must have gone into its creation; the endeavor seemed so painstaking and earnest. And it measured the ascent to the Presidency of a brute with authoritarian tendencies.

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Related:
Trump’s Stunning Win
Trump’s America, Hiding in Plain Sight
An American Tragedy

Trump’s America, Hiding in Plain Sight

Donald Trump’s America was always there, just beneath the surface. You glimpsed it in the crowds, furious but patient, waiting to see him, no matter how long they had to stand in the sun. You heard it in the words of his admirers, who saw him not only as an improvement on our current leaders but as an antidote, a bend in history, an agent of revolution. In the final weeks, there were the accelerants to his fire—the intervention of F.B.I. director James Comey in the Presidential race, a surge in health-plan prices under Obamacare—but none of them alone created his path. Only the people themselves could do that.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Stunning Win
Who Believed in Trump, and Who Is to Blame
An American Tragedy

An American Tragedy

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Stunning Win
Who Believed in Trump, and Who Is to Blame
Trump’s America, Hiding in Plain Sight

A Few Thoughts on the Unthinkable

As the nation’s voters cast their ballots, Ryan Lizza, Benjamin Wallace-Wells, and Adam Davidson offer closing thoughts on the Presidential race and other issues to be decided in today’s election. This post will be updated throughout the day.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Stunning Win
Who Believed in Trump, and Who Is to Blame
Trump’s America, Hiding in Plain Sight

The Trump Campaign in North Carolina

An election is typically thought of as a reflection of public will, but it is more accurately the product of the public will plus an array of variables, some random, some the result of human design, and a good many that remain impossible to decipher. At 8:47 A.M. on Election Day, the North Carolina State Board of Elections tweeted that, because of a computer glitch, they were advising polling places in Durham County, a Democratic stronghold, to revert to paper lists of registered voters. “Voting not interrupted,” they wrote. But the implications were not in question: slower voting and longer lines, in a county that is thirty-eight per cent black and was crucial to Hillary Clinton’s hopes of winning the state, and perhaps the Presidency.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Stunning Win
Who Believed in Trump, and Who Is to Blame
Trump’s America, Hiding in Plain Sight

Suppression of the Black Vote Is No Relic

At several points during this campaign, Barack Obama has urged voters to support Hillary Clinton not because of her long experience, or because of his estimation that Donald Trump is “uniquely unqualified” for the Presidency, but in order to preserve his own legacy. He said this most explicitly at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual dinner, in September, where he implored African-Americans to back the Democratic candidate.

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

Donald Trump’s Closing Message

On Monday evening, while Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi were getting ready to entertain the huge crowd of Hillary Clinton supporters on Independence Mall, in Philadelphia, Donald Trump made one of his final campaign stops about a hundred and twenty-five miles farther north, at Lackawanna College, in the city of Scranton. When I got there, in the late afternoon, the auditorium, which has a capacity of forty-five hundred people, was already full, and hundreds more were lined up outside. One man who had made it in, a retiree who had driven over the Poconos from New Jersey, said he had taken his place in line at eleven in the morning.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Stunning Win
Who Believed in Trump, and Who Is to Blame
Trump’s America, Hiding in Plain Sight

Hillary Clinton, on the Eve of the Presidency

The American Presidency comes with unmatched, impersonal power, and yet the position is sought in intimate encounters: the rope line, the policy briefing, the call to donors, and the Sunday-morning talk shows. The strangeness of the experience can be seen in the transitions in scale. In the late summer, Hillary Clinton was still speaking in half-filled high-school gyms, where supporters shuffled around self-consciously so the spaces between them didn’t seem too big. Last night, her final big rally before the election—with Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, Jon Bon Jovi, and Bruce Springsteen—drew thirty-three thousand people to Independence Mall, in Philadelphia. To look out at the crowd, outside, in the middle of a big city at night, was a cause for amazement. In such an atmosphere, the essential impossibility of the modern Presidency surfaces, the disjunction between the limits of any individual and the expansive powers suddenly at her command.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Stunning Win
Who Believed in Trump, and Who Is to Blame
Trump’s America, Hiding in Plain Sight

Looking for the National Purpose on Election Day

That something has gone wrong in America most of us know. I’ve borrowed that timely sentence from the opening lines of an article the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote, in 1960, for Life magazine. In a curiously dated exercise, Life had asked MacLeish and seven other prominent men (no women participated) to consider the “national purpose”—to debate, and discuss, the nation’s hopes and goals—in several issues over that summer. The Presidential election that year represented generational change: John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, both men in their forties, were trying to succeed President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who celebrated his seventieth birthday three months before leaving office, and it must have struck some editor as a moment for reflection. Among the participants Life enlisted were the historian Clinton Rossiter, the evangelist Billy Graham, the nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, and the former Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson; their theses were published by Life, the Times, and other newspapers; then as a book, and a set of LPs. Today it’s a time capsule, buried on the Web.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Latino Voters Show Trump What It Means to Be American
Clinton, Obama, Garland, and the G.O.P.
In Final Appeal to Voters, Clinton Changes Slogan to “Won’t Blow Up Planet”

Latino Voters Show Trump What It Means to Be American

On Sunday, two days before the Presidential election, Donald Trump made five campaign stops, in five states: Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. In Michigan, Ted Nugent served as the warmup act; in Virginia, it was Oliver North. At the end of Trump’s campaign, he has returned to the theme with which he began: the threat that immigrants pose to American society. In Minnesota, he told his supporters that “you’ve seen firsthand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with very large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state without your knowledge.” In Michigan, he blamed refugees for putting “your security at risk.” In Pennsylvania, he said, “You have people being brought into your community. Nobody knows who they are.” In Iowa, he described gruesome murders of Americans that were committed by immigrant killers. “The crime that’s been committed by these people is unbelievable.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Looking for the National Purpose on Election Day
Trump TV Late-Night Packet
Bonus Cartoon: The James Comey Edition