George Packer's Blog, page 189

July 18, 2016

What Trump Needs to Achieve in Cleveland

The Republican Party’s 2016 Convention has just begun here in Cleveland, and the historical allusions are coming thick and fast. With the Party split and an insurgent candidate about to be nominated against a backdrop of violent incidents and rising public concern, some analysts see parallels to the tumultuous 1968 Democratic Convention, in Chicago. Others mention the 1964 Republican Convention, in Daly City, near San Francisco, where Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a conservative ideologue, was nominated to the consternation of the party élite.* Or, perhaps, as David Frum suggested, in the Wall Street Journal, the correct analogy is to 1896, when William Jennings Bryan, the great prairie populist, electrified the crowd at the Democratic Convention, in Chicago, with his famous “Cross of Gold” speech.

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Published on July 18, 2016 15:40

Mike Pence’s Free-Market Ideology: An Awkward Fit for Trump

In 2010, when Mike Pence was still an Indiana congressman, he made a gutsy statement at the Detroit Economic Club: “Though I am proud of the American automotive tradition and Indiana’s ongoing role it, I even opposed bailing out G.M. and Chrysler,” he said, referring to the nearly eighty billion dollars that the government furnished, in 2008 and 2009, to save auto companies from going under. Pence then noted that although the Obama Administration, to justify the investment, was touting G.M.’s rapid recovery, “most Americans know that it still would have been better if G.M. had gone through an orderly reorganization bankruptcy without taxpayer support.”

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Published on July 18, 2016 15:13

Republican Delegates’ First Night in Cleveland

This week, the photographer Philip Montgomery is covering the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland, for The New Yorker. On Sunday evening, Montgomery attended the Rock the Night in CLE welcome party, at North Coast Harbor, which the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee held for arriving delegates.

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Published on July 18, 2016 14:32

Trump’s Remorseful Ghostwriter

When Donald Trump announced his candidacy last year, one of the qualifications he listed was his best-selling book, “The Art of the Deal.” Part memoir, part business-advice book, it presents Trump as the savviest of negotiators. But there’s a problem: Trump didn’t actually write the book—at least not according to Tony Schwartz, the co-author and ghostwriter of “The Art of the Deal.” Schwartz spent more than a year with Trump back in 1986. He hasn’t ever talked publicly about the experience of working with him—until now.

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Published on July 18, 2016 06:49

Baton Rouge and a Reservoir of Wrongs

There is a scene in Toni Morrison’s novel “Song of Solomon” in which a character named Guitar explains to the protagonist Milkman that violence inflicted without repercussion is not a matter of morality, but mathematics. The tide of black death at the hands of white people, he reasons, sets the world at an imperfect ratio. He then explains the corrective.

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Published on July 18, 2016 05:10

July 17, 2016

The H-Bombs in Turkey

Among the many questions still unanswered following Friday’s coup attempt in Turkey is one that has national-security implications for the United States and for the rest of the world: How secure are the American hydrogen bombs stored at a Turkish airbase?

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Published on July 17, 2016 14:00

The Party of Trump Arrives in Cleveland

Party platforms are born humbly. They are conceived in hotel conference rooms by often little-known party enthusiasts when no one is paying attention. Platforms are written in prose, but they are conceived in bullet points and approved by majority votes, and the writing often bears the strain of those transitions—of trying to elevate a transaction between the party’s factions so that it might say something about the future of the country. This week, as delegates to the Republican National Convention voted on this year’s platform, I looked back at the previous two, and developed a clear preference for 2008—filled with gratitude to the troops and the Bush Administration—over 2012, which was animated by a stern constitutionalism and by no little dread. In 2008, the platform had aimed for the emotional tenor of John McCain’s campaign, a long salute to the past, and in 2012 for the tense foreboding of Mitt Romney’s.

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Published on July 17, 2016 12:26

The History of Crowd Control, and the Cleveland Convention

It would be hard to imagine a more nerve-wracking set of crowd-management circumstances than the ones coming together next week in Cleveland, where tens of thousands of people are expected to protest outside the Republican Convention. The groups signed up are an All-American trail mix, ranging from Black Lives Matter to Code Pink, to Bikers for Trump. The Republican nominee is a man who thrives on fomenting anger in the crowds who follow him. And lately some anti-Trump activists have responded in kind, roughing up Trump supporters at rallies in San Jose and Albuquerque. The Convention starts on the heels of the shooting of multiple police officers in Baton Rouge; four days after the horrific terrorist attack on a gathering of people watching Bastille Day fireworks in Nice; less than two weeks after the ambush killings of five police officers in Dallas, by a lone sniper taking advantage of a protest march; and more than two years into a civil-rights movement that has made the police shootings of unarmed black people impossible, at last, to ignore.

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Published on July 17, 2016 09:26

July 16, 2016

Atatürk Versus Erdogan: Turkey’s Long Struggle

Turkey has weathered five successful military coups since the founding of the Republic, in 1923, and what happened on Friday, with soldiers surging against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., marks an attempt at the sixth. Turkey is a constitutionally secular state, though one that is more than ninety-five per cent Muslim and which was once the seat of an Islamic empire. The Turkish military has often served as the nation’s firewall against encroachments on secularism and the Constitution, guarding the aspirations of its founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The tension between secularism and religious fundamentalism is as essential to understanding today’s Turkish political life as is the tension between federalism and states’ rights in America.

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Published on July 16, 2016 12:47