George Packer's Blog, page 143

Trump’s Supporters Boo the Media, but Cheer the News

At political rallies across the country, people keep falling down. “O.K., we got someone who fell, which is what I expected,” Barack Obama said on Wednesday in Chapel Hill, reassuringly. “Give them some room. Make sure they get a little water. They’ll be O.K. It happens all the time.” On Friday afternoon, at a Trump rally at a country club in Atkinson, New Hampshire, a medic spoke urgently into the radio on his shoulder: “Someone’s down. Overheating. To the right of the stage.” The collapsed person turned out to be an older man, who said he had been standing for three hours, waiting for Trump. The fire captain grabbed at his own back in sympathy. “I’ve been here since eight,” he said. The two candidates, who are sixty-nine (Clinton) and seventy (Trump) years old, have been flying home many nights, their on-call jets courtesy of the largesse of political donors (Clinton) and casino gamblers (Trump). They arrive at rallies looking hydrated, moisturized, none the worse for wear. Everyone else is wiping out.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Surreal Election Season of a Hillary Clinton Impersonator
Bernie Sanders’s Hard Fight for Hillary Clinton
A Scholar of Fascism Sees a Lot That’s Familiar with Trump

Bernie Sanders’s Hard Fight for Hillary Clinton

One of the many things that makes Donald Trump angry is that Bernie Sanders does not seem to hold grudges. In recent speeches, Trump has pointed to the information that has come out, through WikiLeaks’ disclosures of John Podesta’s e-mails, about the Clinton team’s attitude toward Sanders during the primaries: the slights (“doofus”), the schemes (“where would you stick the knife?”), and the eye-rolling (“socialist math”). Perhaps worst of all—at least from Trump’s point of view—was Donna Brazile’s passing along of debate questions. “Now, Bernie Sanders should be angry right? Shouldn’t he be angry?” Trump asked a crowd in Florida. He sounded a little bit puzzled—he would be so mad.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Surreal Election Season of a Hillary Clinton Impersonator
Trump’s Supporters Boo the Media, but Cheer the News
A Scholar of Fascism Sees a Lot That’s Familiar with Trump

Donald Trump and the Death of American Exceptionalism

In the sixteen months since he declared his candidacy, Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign has elicited comparisons to those of George Wallace and Barry Goldwater, to the hallucinatory paranoia of Joseph McCarthy, to the fascist preoccupations of Charles Lindbergh, and to lesser lights of American demagoguery like Father Coughlin and the Know-Nothings of the nineteenth century.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Surreal Election Season of a Hillary Clinton Impersonator
Trump’s Supporters Boo the Media, but Cheer the News
Bernie Sanders’s Hard Fight for Hillary Clinton

A Critical Week in North Carolina

On Tuesday, two days before Barack Obama arrived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for a rally, an unsettling story appeared on the front page of the local paper. Third graders at Frank Porter Graham, a public elementary school, had been instructed to dress up as historical figures for a “wax museum,” and several students had selected Adolf Hitler. The principal hastily cancelled the event, writing in a letter to parents that “given the current political climate and sociopolitical issues as the election approaches, some of the historical figures selected by students could create controversy.” (At least one other student chose Donald Trump.) Perhaps these choices had little to do with the election, or meant nothing at all: the Holocaust is a hard thing for a third-grade mind to get around. But the episode, and the cancellation, seemed to be a sign that, with the election less than a week away, at least some people in North Carolina are more than normally freaked out.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Surreal Election Season of a Hillary Clinton Impersonator
Trump’s Supporters Boo the Media, but Cheer the News
Bernie Sanders’s Hard Fight for Hillary Clinton

Grover Norquist Wants Vapers to Save the G.O.P.

As a political trend spotter, the lobbyist Grover Norquist has a formidable record. Three decades ago, he founded Americans for Tax Reform, a fanatical anti-tax group that inspired “60 Minutes” to describe him, years later, as “responsible, more than anyone else, for rewriting the dogma of the Republican Party.” In 1994, he co-authored, with Newt Gingrich, the Contract with America, which became the Party’s central manifesto for the decade, and, later, he was an early backer of Texas governor George W. Bush for President.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Surreal Election Season of a Hillary Clinton Impersonator
The Beats Fuelling the Viral Dance Challenges
Trump’s Supporters Boo the Media, but Cheer the News

Trump and the Truth: The Viral Candidate

This essay is part of a series The New Yorker will be running through the election titled “Trump and the Truth.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Surreal Election Season of a Hillary Clinton Impersonator
Trump’s Supporters Boo the Media, but Cheer the News
Bernie Sanders’s Hard Fight for Hillary Clinton

Are Smartphones Ruining Distance Running?

When George Hirsch ran the New York City Marathon in 1976, the first year the course snaked through all five boroughs, the event was a lean affair. He and two thousand others dodged wayward bicycles and pedestrians on the streets, with little help from an anemic police presence. Bill Rodgers trimmed the edges off his race bib in the name of speed, to reduce drag. Holes were cut into T-shirts for ventilation. Socks were abandoned altogether. “They did everything they could to lighten the load,” Hirsch, now the chairman of the board for the New York Road Runners, the group that stages the event, told me this week. “The idea of tugging an iPhone around? No way.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Somewhat Accurate Guide to the Marathon
At Last
The First Five-Borough New York City Marathon

Four Trump Rallies and a Fight for Florida

“I love that sign: ‘Blacks for Trump!’ ” Donald J. Trump said on Wednesday, as he squinted into the Miami sun. He wore a “Make America Great Again” cap, white with blue lettering, and an open-collared shirt, and he had just been introduced to the outdoor crowd by Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi. The controversy over twenty-five thousand dollars that the Trump Foundation illegally gave to a group associated with Bondi, for which it had to pay a fine, does not seem to have left either of them abashed. Trump continued with his sign-spotting, treating what were mostly pre-printed placards, produced by his campaign, as pledges of allegiance: “Hispanics for Trump . . . Hispanics and women for Trump!” And, a little later, “Cubans for Trump—Cubans! Love Cubans.” He had, he said, just come from a visit to Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, and was glad to report that everyone there hated the Clintons because they had “ripped off” Haiti. What had happened to minority communities was, he said, “very unfair.” Trump would change that, if he got the chance—if so many people weren’t trying to cheat him of victory.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Cover Story: Barry Blitt’s “Anything But That”
How Can Americans Trust Donald Trump?
The Case for 2016 Being a Boring Election

How Can Americans Trust Donald Trump?

Of the many strange and disturbing developments in the past few days, perhaps none is more strange or disturbing than this: according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released on Wednesday, Americans, by a significant margin, view Donald Trump as more honest than Hillary Clinton.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Cover Story: Barry Blitt’s “Anything But That”
Four Trump Rallies and a Fight for Florida
The Case for 2016 Being a Boring Election

At Last

Good game, great game, and worth the wait. The Chicago Cubs, who had trailed in this World Series by three games to one and in the record books by a hundred and eight seasons to none, beat the Indians last night, 8–7, in ten innings, and deserve all praise, however outlandish.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Thrilling Competence of Joe Maddon and Terry Francona
Almost There
Ancient History and Short-Term Memories in World Series Game 1