George Packer's Blog, page 158

How Donald Trump Could Disappear from the Political Scene

Certain detectable changes have been made to the Donald Trump stump speech. In Bedford, New Hampshire, on Thursday, he delivered his remarks as they had been prepared and kept himself to half an hour—normal for a political speech, but unusual for him. Meanwhile, his promises had grown even less restrained. “You have forty days to make every dream you ever had for your country come true,” Trump said.

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Published on September 30, 2016 14:42

The Hoboken Crash and the Rail-Safety Problem

Sarah Blustain arrived at the Hoboken Terminal at eight-forty-seven this morning, just two minutes after New Jersey Transit train 1614 on the Pascack Valley Line jumped a rail bumper and crashed through the terminal wall. The ceiling of the terminal had already collapsed. “I saw one woman who was seriously injured,” Blustain said, along with many people with more minor injuries. Within the hour, officials would report that one person was killed and more than a hundred were injured. The incident came just eleven days after pipe bombs were found at a transit station in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and people at Hoboken Terminal were openly wondering whether the train crash was the result of terrorism. One man “said he heard an explosion and started running,” Blustain said. But soon Governor Chris Christie assured a worried public that there was no evidence this was anything other than a rail accident.

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Published on September 29, 2016 16:29

Postscript: Shimon Peres, 1923-2016

Shimon Peres, the former Israeli President, died at ninety-three, a revered elder statesman, but his glory days were as part of a suspect young guard. In the early fifties, he was part of a cadre of defense officials whom David Ben-Gurion promoted in order to wrest control of the economy from veteran leaders of the Zionist Labor Federation and hand it to the fledgling state. Peres was at first hawkish, in favor of nuclear deterrence against Arab invasion and retaliation against Palestinian border attacks. He ended his career as a symbol of the peace process, after secretly initiating and championing the 1993 Oslo Accords, for which he and his co-signers, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat, won the Nobel Peace Prize. “If I’ve changed my policies, it’s because the situation has changed. I was a hawk, but when we could make peace I was a dove,” he told David Remnick, in 2002.

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Published on September 29, 2016 16:14

What Clinton and Trump Should Do After the Election

The most important question in Monday night’s debate was one that Lester Holt, the moderator, had to ask Donald Trump twice. Trump needed the extra prodding even though the question—“One of you will not win this election. . . . Are you willing to accept the outcome as the will of the voters?”—was one of basic civics and civility. It was also one that he’d just heard Hillary Clinton nail.

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Published on September 29, 2016 15:39

How a Conservative Paper Ended Up Endorsing Hillary Clinton

Two months ago, after the Houston Chronicle announced its endorsement of Hillary Clinton for President of the United States, the director of the editorial page of the Arizona Republic, Phil Boas, contacted a prominent state historian. He wanted help determining whether his paper had ever endorsed a Democratic Presidential candidate in its hundred-and-twenty-six-year history. The Phoenix-based, conservative-leaning newspaper, which has the largest circulation in the state, was once called the Arizona Republican, and it had backed every Republican candidate for President going back as far as anyone at the paper could remember. But what about, say, the contest between Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, in 1892, two years after the paper’s founding?

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Published on September 29, 2016 15:27

Donald Trump and the Climate-Change Countdown

In August, 2015, when President Obama announced the final version of the Clean Power Plan—the centerpiece of his effort to combat climate change—he quoted a speech that Martin Luther King, Jr., gave at Riverside Church, in April, 1967, opposing the Vietnam War. “I believe ‘there is such a thing as being too late,’ ” the President said, in a ceremony in the East Room. He liked the line so much that he repeated it, a few months later, at the opening of the international climate negotiations, in Paris: “For I believe, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that there is such a thing as being too late. And when it comes to climate change, that hour is almost upon us.” Speaking about climate change this past summer, in Yosemite National Park, he invoked it a third time.

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Published on September 28, 2016 21:01

How Much Damage Did the Debate Do to Donald Trump?

The reviews are in, and they are virtually unanimous: Donald Trump had a horrible debate on Monday night against Hillary Clinton. He was unprepared, unconvincing, and off-putting. On Wednesday, the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, hardly a redoubt of liberal sophistry, published a piece by Jason L. Riley, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who wrote, “If Mr. Trump had a strategy for winning Monday night’s face-off with Mrs. Clinton, it remains as secret as his plan to defeat [the] Islamic State.”

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Published on September 28, 2016 16:14

Trump and the Truth: The “Lying” Media

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 September 28, 2016 04:00

The Problem with Trump Isn’t His Debating Skills

In a year of absurd, nerve-testing disconnects, Monday night’s disconnect was the biggest of all. In a moment when, in an all too real sense, the future of liberal democracy itself was on the line—when the possibility of seeing one of the hyper-nationalist demagogues and autocrats who have emerged throughout Europe and Americas in the last decade take power in the United States seemed all too near—the debate was being billed and sold as entertainment. Clinton vs. Trump, toe to toe! Come watch Hamilton and Madison’s dream end, live at 9 P.M.

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Published on September 27, 2016 19:00

Mourning José Fernández

Monday night’s game between the Miami Marlins and the New York Mets was the first the Marlins had played since their twenty-four-year-old star pitcher José Fernández died in a boating accident on Sunday. A few minutes before game time, the entire Marlins roster, every member wearing a Fernández jersey, assembled around the pitching mound. Every man took a knee, and each rubbed handfuls of dirt onto his white pants—one of Fernández’s pre-game rituals. They had the initials “JF” written on their caps, and other special messages. The Mets had hung a jersey honoring Fernández in the visitors’ dugout, and their players came out onto the field to greet the Marlins with hugs. The saddest moment came when a lone bugler performed the familiar notes of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” It’s a song that even casual baseball fans know by heart, one that little kids learn and love, the soundtrack of seventh-inning stretches. On Monday night, it sounded like “Taps.”

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Published on September 27, 2016 15:17