George Packer's Blog, page 154

The Problem with Voting Rights in New York

It’s a truism of modern politics that Republicans have placed voting rights under assault in the states they control. Ever since the G.O.P. landslides in the midterm elections of 2010, Republicans have worked to restrict the right to vote in a variety of ways—by cutting back on opportunities for early voting, making absentee voting more difficult, and imposing photo-I.D. requirements at the polls, to name only the best known methods. In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court, with a majority of 5–4, gave Republicans the green light to continue their efforts by gutting the Voting Rights Act. The Shelby decision effectively ended the federal government’s supervision of voting rights in states, mostly in the South, that had histories of discriminating against minority voters.

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Published on October 11, 2016 13:00

What Would a Trump Presidency Look Like?

What would life in America be like under President Donald Trump? On Saturday, I had a chance to be part of a discussion of that question at The New Yorker Festival, at a panel moderated by my colleague Evan Osnos, whose magazine piece on the subject, “President Trump’s First Term,” should be required reading. For three of us panelists—Max Boot, a military historian; Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton; and me—the prospect was a hazardous one. Wilentz called it a “crisis,” Boot spoke about his fears for the nuclear codes, and I worried about the descent of our political culture. (See the video above for more on all of that.) But the fourth panelist, Roger Stone, a member of Trump’s circle, has been doing what he can to make a Trump Presidency happen. (Stone has been involved in Republican politics since the Nixon Administration, a career that Jeffrey Toobin recounted in a 2008 Profile, “The Dirty Trickster.”) Stone was as willing as Trump proved to be at the debate the following night to excuse the candidate’s behavior by claiming that both Clintons had an extravagantly dirty past. The revelation, less than twenty-four hours earlier, of a video tape of Trump bragging about his right, as a star, to assault women, did not strengthen Stone’s case.

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Published on October 11, 2016 03:58

Clinton’s Coming Struggle with Trump Supporters

“My argument is not with his supporters. It’s with him,” Hillary Clinton said last night at the Presidential debate in St. Louis, gesturing toward her opponent, Donald Trump. Clinton had been asked about her comment, at a private fund-raiser last month, that half of Trump’s supporters belonged to a “basket of deplorables,” and that some were “irredeemable”—including racists and white nationalists. (She later retracted the “half,” but stood by the general description.) Trump got a chance to vent a little bit. “She has hate in her heart,” he said. “When she said they’re irredeemable, to me that might have been even worse.” Clinton said she had apologized for the remarks, then denounced Trump’s “hateful and divisive” campaign, the “inciting of violence at his rallies,” and the “very brutal campaign” of words against minority groups, and one majority group, women. But she did not offer a new description of how many of Trump’s supporters fit into that basket of deplorables—if it wasn’t half, how many was it? And she didn’t say that they could be redeemed.

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Published on October 10, 2016 06:24

Trump Shows His Inner Dictator

“I didn’t think I’d say this,” Donald Trump said to Hillary Clinton, as he took a couple of steps across the stage at the second Presidential debate, on Sunday night in St. Louis. “But I’m going to say it—and I hate to say it.” At that point, just nineteen minutes in, it was already hard to imagine what might give Trump any qualms. He had already said that her record was “terrible” and “disgraceful,” and that she “should be ashamed”; called Clinton’s husband, Bill, the worst abuser of women “in the history of politics in this nation,” and claimed that Hillary had “viciously” attacked women who had made allegations against him (three of those women were Trump’s guests at the debate); accused her of “laughing at the girl who was raped” by a man she had represented as a young lawyer (he’d brought her, too); accused her of being behind birtherism, which he himself had pushed; and objected when Clinton referred to Michelle Obama, who has been campaigning for her, as her friend—objected, it seemed, to the idea that Clinton could have any friends but Sidney Blumenthal (“he’s another real winner that you have”).

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Published on October 10, 2016 05:14

The Nastiest Presidential Debate of All Time

Shortly before the second Presidential debate began, on Sunday night, John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a New York Post columnist, remarked on Twitter that this was “the weirdest single moment in modern American political history.” Some people who lived through Watergate, or the farcical impeachment of Bill Clinton, might argue with that statement, but one thing can be said without fear of contradiction: this was the darkest and nastiest Presidential debate in modern history.

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Published on October 10, 2016 01:36

Reince Priebus Is Destroying the G.O.P. by Trying to Save It

There is so little discipline in the Donald Trump campaign (and even less shared long-term interest) that we already know a fair bit about what has transpired in the past forty-eight hours inside the Trump Tower penthouse. According to the Washington Post, Trump was holed up in his home with a group of what are, politely, called “advisers” but seem more like characters in a tossed-off screenplay, each representing a cliché of cravenness. Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani were reportedly there. While technically different people, in this context they were redundant: two reckless gamblers who had lost everything until Trump gave them a long shot at getting their power back. Kellyanne Conway stood in for the amoral professional operative. Stephen Bannon, the Breitbart chief, was the whisperer whose interests are served by chaos. (His business appeals to a narrow target audience of angry white conservatives and flourishes on outrage.) We can ignore Donald, Jr., and Hope Hicks, who have shown themselves to be ineffective loyalists with no perceivable judgment independent of Trump’s. The most telling detail in the reports has been the absence of Ivanka Trump, the one person who seems intent on preserving the value of a non-loathsome version of the family name. (Her husband, Jared Kushner, reportedly violated his Sabbath and was present; Ivanka turned down opportunities to defend her father.)

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Published on October 09, 2016 15:31

Donald Trump: Narcissist, Creep, Loser

A famous scene in the great Marx Brothers’ surrealist farce “Duck Soup” has Groucho, as Rufus T. Firefly, the prime minister of Freedonia, in negotiation with Trentino, the stuffy prime minister of the neighboring country of Sylvania. Trentino calls Groucho a series of insults—“Worm!” “Swine!”—none of them the least penetrating Groucho’s equanimity—until, at last, he lands on “Upstart!” That’s intolerable to Freedonian pride. “This means war!” Groucho declares, and it does.

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Published on October 09, 2016 10:39

A Sexual Predator in the Republican Party’s Midst

What should a national political party do if it discovers, four weeks before an election, that its candidate for President is a man who once described his behavior in terms that fit a sexual predator? That was the unprecedented dilemma that the Republican Party was dealing with on a remarkable Friday night, and as Saturday arrived the outcome of its deliberations wasn’t entirely clear.

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Published on October 08, 2016 07:04

Trump and the Truth: The “Rigged” Election

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

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Published on October 08, 2016 06:00

The New York Tale of Donald Trump’s Accountant

The political drama of the week—the revelation that, in 1995, Donald Trump claimed nine hundred and sixteen million dollars in losses and as a result might not have had to pay any federal income taxes for two decades—was a New York story in every particular. Its theme was the comeuppance of the capital class by the hand of brainier, laboring professionals. It had a midtown office-tower setting and an earnest protagonist, the Times metro reporter Susanne Craig, who found Trump’s tax returns because she is a compulsive checker of her newsroom mailbox. It had a vengeful ghost: whichever shrewd, jilted ex-wife or shrewd, jilted ex-C.P.A. photocopied the returns and sent them to the press in the first place. And, at the center of it all, there was an eighty-year-old real-estate accountant named Jack Mitnick.

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Published on October 07, 2016 21:00