George Packer's Blog, page 149

October 20, 2016

The Art of the Rout: What a Trump Loss Does to the G.O.P.

Donald Trump knows polls. He knows how to locate polls the moment they are posted, how to condense polls to tweetable brevity, and how to unveil polls to a crowd for maximum effect. So there has been a special insult in those moments, in the final weeks of this election, when even the polls seem intent on humiliating him. More than twenty-four national surveys released in October revealed “a split between polls that are good for Hillary Clinton and polls that are fantastic for her,” in the words of Andrew Prokop, of Vox. Barely three weeks to Election Day, short of a radical change that would salvage his fortunes, Trump is careening toward his greatest embarrassment in a life of spectacular pratfalls. (Clintonworld, meanwhile, has been consumed by an embarrassment of options—namely, whether she should spend her money to run up the score or to help other candidates down-ballot.)

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 20, 2016 21:00

Making Peace with Trump’s Revolutionaries

On Tuesday, while driving to a Donald Trump rally in Grand Junction, Colorado, I pulled over when I saw a political sign that used the word “mulatto.” It was located in the town of Delta, on the west side of U.S. Route 550, at a former shopfront whose walls and marquee had been decorated with big-lettered messages:

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 20, 2016 17:00

Trump and the Truth: The Sexual-Assault Allegations

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

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 20, 2016 13:40

The Long Decline of the Republican Establishment

Richard Rovere, this magazine’s mid-twentieth-century Washington correspondent, was the person mainly responsible for introducing into the American vocabulary the term “the establishment.” (He’d picked it up from the British journalist Henry Fairlie.) It has turned out to be a very sticky word, though, as Rovere understood, it’s nearly impossible to define with precision, because the establishment is not a formally constituted entity. That’s why Rovere’s original essay about it, which appeared in The American Scholar, in 1961, was written partly as a joke.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 20, 2016 13:20

Ivanka Trump Fights to Save the Brand

“I hate the word ‘surrogate.’ What does that mean?” Ivanka Trump said on a stage on Wednesday morning at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Laguna Niguel, California. “At one point, major newspapers were writing that I was running to be a Vice-Presidential candidate. I’m, like, ‘No, I’m a daughter. I don’t express my views on policy, with one exception.’ “ That exception, she said, was affordable child care, and she proudly took responsibility for employing her daughterly influence to convince her father, Donald Trump, to incorporate a child-care tax deduction and dependent-care saving accounts into his policy platform, because matters affecting working women were “very core to her professional mission.” Still, she insisted, “I’m not a surrogate. I’m a daughter.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 20, 2016 12:36

Donald Trump, the Anti-Democratic Candidate

“Now we can talk about Putin,” Donald Trump said at the third Presidential debate, last night. “I don’t know Putin. He said nice things about me. If we got along well, that would be good.” He started to talk about Putin’s view of Hillary Clinton, who was standing a few feet away from him, in a college basketball arena in Las Vegas. “Look, Putin, from everything I see, has no respect for this person.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 20, 2016 06:17

For Trump, the Election Is Rigged If a “Nasty Woman” Can Win

“She shouldn’t be allowed to run,” Donald Trump said, of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, who was standing next to him on the debate stage in Las Vegas on Wednesday night. “It’s crooked—she’s—she’s guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run. And just in that respect I say it’s rigged.” Trump’s tone was heated; to make this point, he had talked over the interjections of the moderator, Chris Wallace, and he kept on doing so, making clear how little he cares for decorum or democracy. This person—this woman—shouldn’t be allowed to contend, let alone win. Wallace’s question had been about whether Trump would accept the results of the election; Trump wouldn’t even accept the premise.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 20, 2016 04:42

The Real Message of Trump’s Election Comments: I’m Going to Lose

If there was any suspense left about which way this election was heading—and I don’t think there was much—the last of it disappeared about two-thirds of the way through this year’s final Presidential debate, in Las Vegas on Wednesday, when the moderator, Chris Wallace, of Fox News, asked Donald Trump whether he would accept the result of the election.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 20, 2016 00:31

October 19, 2016

Ivanka Trump and Her Father

On Wednesday night, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump’s preternaturally poised elder daughter, sat in the audience listening to her father as he overthrew the pledge she’d made on his behalf earlier that day. “He’ll either win or he won’t win, and I believe he’ll accept the outcome either way,” she’d said at a women’s summit in Southern California. But Trump would not promise to respect the outcome of the democratic process: “What I’m saying now is, I will tell you at the time. I will keep you in suspense, O.K.?”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 19, 2016 21:57

Bill Clinton, Young and Old, in New Hampshire

Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign has long seemed confident that Bill Clinton could be a great asset, rather than just an allegations magnet, but it has never seemed exactly sure how. After the Conventions, the former President himself had an idea. If the Trump phenomenon centered on white working-class men living in rural places—his people, by birth at least—then he should try to win them back. “The bubba vote,” Politico called it, quoting an adviser saying that Bill Clinton was “singularly obsessed” with the idea. Soon he was in West Virginia, trying to win over the locals (“They were all wearing the other guy’s shirts, you know, everyone screaming and yelling at me”) who were sure that his wife would sell out the coal industry. “I told ’em, ‘The number of jobs in the coal industry east of the Mississippi peaked in 1920,’ ” he relayed earlier this week, at a campaign stop in New Hampshire. Trump was trying to sell them a time machine, he said. Those days were gone.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 19, 2016 15:18

← Previous 1 2 … 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 … 247 248 Next →

George Packer's Blog

George Packer's profile
481 followers

George Packer isn't a Goodreads Author (yet), but they do have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from their feed.