George Packer's Blog, page 188

Trump Is Nominated, and More Trumps Take the Stage

Tuesday night was the last chance for the Republican Party to lodge a broad, self-respect-preserving objection to Donald Trump, and a second chance for the Trump family to appear polished, after Melania Trump was humiliated by being sent onstage on Monday night to recite words that, it turned out, had been borrowed from Michelle Obama. The first of those projects failed outright. The results on the second are not fully in.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Republican Party’s Unrequited Love of Rock Music
Donald Trump Threatens the Ghostwriter of “The Art of the Deal”
Three Problems with the Melania Trump Plagiarism Admission

Trump, Inspired by Nixon?

The world waits, though perhaps not eagerly, to hear what Donald J. Trump will say on Thursday night, when he accepts the Republican Party’s Presidential nomination. His campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, may have lessened the anticipatory moment by telling reporters at a Bloomberg News breakfast on Monday to take a look at Richard Nixon’s 1968 acceptance speech, suggesting that Trump found inspiration there. “We started on the speech a couple of weeks ago,” Manafort said. “We looked at previous Conventions’ speeches; the one he focussed on, though, was Nixon in 1968.” To a Times reporter, Trump said, “I think what Nixon understood is that when the world is falling apart, people want a strong leader whose highest priority is protecting America first. The sixties were bad, really bad. And it’s really bad now. Americans feel like it’s chaos again.” That speech, Manafort said, “is pretty much on line with a lot of the issues that are going on today,” by which he meant—well, what, exactly?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Republicans Accused of Plagiarizing Entire Convention Scenario from Book of Revelation
On the Floor at the Quicken Loans Arena
Watching the Republican Convention

The Outrageous “Honor Killing” of a Pakistani Social-Media Star

Last August, a twenty-two-second video posted on Facebook went viral in Pakistan. A young woman, her face obscured by large sunglasses, had recorded herself standing in front of a middle-aged man. “How I’m looking? Tell me how I’m looking,” she says to the man, her gaze never wavering from the camera’s lens. “Marvellous,” he says. “Just marvellous?” she responds, incredulously. “Extraordinary,” he says. The woman’s name was Qandeel Baloch, and her video received nearly a quarter of a million views. For Baloch, it was a breakthrough. In the months that followed, she would post hundreds of videos, racking up millions of views. Just like that, she was famous.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Pakistan’s Troll Problem
An Assassination That Could Bring War Or Peace
A Crisis for Minorities in Pakistan

On the Floor at the Quicken Loans Arena

This week, the photographer Philip Montgomery is covering the Republican National Convention in Cleveland for The New Yorker. On Monday, Montgomery captured scenes from the floor of the Quicken Loans Arena.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump, Inspired by Nixon?
Republicans Accused of Plagiarizing Entire Convention Scenario from Book of Revelation
Watching the Republican Convention

Tom Cotton Probably Hopes You Already Forgot His Convention Speech

Last night, at the opening of the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland, Tom Cotton gave the most intelligent and the most forgettable speech of the evening. Sandwiched somewhere between the “Duck Dynasty” guy and Rudy Giuliani’s near aneurysm, Cotton, the thirty-nine-year-old first-term senator from Arkansas who was touted, before the rise of Trump, as the future of the Party, never deviated from the teleprompter and spoke for less than eight minutes. He wore a striped tie and spoke in a nasally monotone that made him seem more like the guy who has spent years at Harvard and in Washington, D.C., than the one who grew up on an Arkansas farm and served in the U.S. Army in Iraq and Afghanistan.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump, Inspired by Nixon?
Republicans Accused of Plagiarizing Entire Convention Scenario from Book of Revelation
On the Floor at the Quicken Loans Arena

Step Right Up and Make America Safe Again

The theme for the opening night of the Republican National Convention was “Make America Safe Again.” It seemed like the setup for a program on national security but turned out to be something darker and more encompassing: a pageant of fear, as my colleague John Cassidy has noted, directed at a vast range of opponents, from the Islamic State to Black Lives Matter to the Libyan mobs that sacked the consulate in Benghazi. Rarely, in the thirteen months since Donald Trump entered the race for President, has it been clearer that he has refashioned the Republican Party in his own image and enlarged the definition of America’s enemies.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump, Inspired by Nixon?
Republicans Accused of Plagiarizing Entire Convention Scenario from Book of Revelation
On the Floor at the Quicken Loans Arena

On the Streets of Cleveland

On Monday, as the Republican National Convention opened in Cleveland, Roger Stone, the onetime Nixon aide and current Trump consigliere, staged a rally at a small park on the west bank of the Cuyahoga River to celebrate the outsiders who had powered the candidate to the nomination. In the mid-afternoon, Stone himself appeared, offering some hype and clarity about what was happening around him. Cleveland, Stone told a rally of a few hundred Trump diehards, was the scene of “an insurrection.” Stone spoke mostly of a revolt by the conservative grassroots against the Party establishment (“the first real grassroots political movement since Barry Goldwater’s,” he said), but he also courted wilder forms of alienation. The conspiracist radio host Alex Jones, whom Stone had invited to speak, denounced the “globalists” and their program of control, and he was cheered much more lustily than Stone. There was an abiding strangeness. Stone—deeply tanned, his white hair slicked back, wearing a beige suit—told an audience in veterans’ paraphernalia and “Hillary for Prison” T-shirts that they represented a movement that was coming to power. Then he started talking about what Hillary Clinton had done to Vince Foster. A single shirtless kayaker paddled up, curious, stopped to listen, and then departed. Maybe he sensed the general confusion—over whether this crowd mattered very much to the events in Cleveland or whether it was about to be set aside.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump, Inspired by Nixon?
Republicans Accused of Plagiarizing Entire Convention Scenario from Book of Revelation
On the Floor at the Quicken Loans Arena

Melania Trump’s Michelle Obama Moment

“You’ve all been very kind to Donald and me,” Melania Trump told the attendees at the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland, on Monday night, in a keynote speech that was briefly seen as a triumph before it was derided as a cheap knockoff—the QVC jewelry of would-be-First Lady speeches. One paragraph was so similar to Michelle Obama’s speech from the 2008 Democratic National Convention that it was hard to imagine that the resemblance was accidental. It was all the more striking because the subject matter was so generic. Both women spoke of being raised with certain values: “that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say,” Melania and Michelle both said. A few sentences later, Melania said that the only limits to “your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.” Eight years before, Michelle apparently had the same thought; the only difference is that the word “reach” is substituted for “strength.” If Melania’s speech had to copy someone, Republicans might wonder, why Michelle? Couldn’t she have let herself be inspired by Nancy Reagan?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump, Inspired by Nixon?
Republicans Accused of Plagiarizing Entire Convention Scenario from Book of Revelation
On the Floor at the Quicken Loans Arena

A Dystopian Night at the G.O.P. Convention

In the lobby of the hotel where the New Yorker contingent is staying in Cleveland, there is a framed photograph of a smiling Ronald Reagan, which is part of a charity auction. On returning late on Monday night after witnessing the first night of the Republican National Convention, I couldn’t help wondering about what Reagan would have thought of it all.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump, Inspired by Nixon?
Republicans Accused of Plagiarizing Entire Convention Scenario from Book of Revelation
On the Floor at the Quicken Loans Arena

A Delegate’s Dissent at a Boring Convention

The Republican Convention of 1956, unlike the one going on this week, in Cleveland, was so predictable, and so tiresome, that when the Vice-Presidential nomination was nigh and a roll call of the states began, the Convention’s chairman asked the delegates to cut it short—in other words, Arizona should stop saying things like “the beautiful Grand Canyon state,” which only dragged out the proceedings. That Convention, held in late August at the Cow Palace, in San Francisco, was as “rigged” as it gets. The popular incumbent, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been re-nominated without opposition, and the same was supposed to happen with Vice-President Richard M. Nixon, even though Eisenhower had tried, ineffectually, to drop him from the ticket.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Trump Needs to Achieve in Cleveland
Republican Delegates’ First Night in Cleveland
Daily Cartoon: Monday, July 18th