George Packer's Blog, page 233

How Donald Trump Wasted His Spring Break

Late March and early April represent a kind of cooling-off period in the Presidential-nominating calendar. From February 1st through March 15th, thirty-five states and territories participated in Republican primaries and caucuses. That six-week blast of voting reduced the field of Republican candidates from twelve to three, and produced a front-runner, Donald Trump, whose sixty-three-per-cent unfavorabilty rating makes him one of the most unpopular politicians in America.

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Related:
Donald Trump Performs Shakespeare’s Soliloquies
After Wisconsin, Cruz Looks to Churchill and Trump Turns to Troy
Trump Says He Will Sue Everyone in Wisconsin

The 2016 Masters: Can Phil Mickelson Beat the Young Guns?

Golf is only a game, of course. A silly, frustrating game, with some deeply retrogressive aspects attending its role in broader society. But every April, when we’re viewing the blooming magnolias and baize-like greens at Augusta National Golf Club, some of us like to pretend that the Masters tournament is an annual ritual that captures various profundities of the human condition—something akin to a Greek tragedy, full of triumph, tragedy, and pathos.

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Related:
Enjoying March Without the Madness
How the Jump Shot Brought Individualism to Basketball
The Twilight of Nadal

The Pigeon Boy and Other Forgotten Fugitives from ISIS

Mohammed Hussein, a six-year-old Iraqi boy, was born with a condition known as glanular hypospadias, in which the opening for the urethra is not in its usual place at the tip of the penis. When his father, Saad Hussein, pulled the child’s trousers down to show me, his mother and five sisters seemed unsurprised. Need had long ago superseded modesty. We were clustered together on the floor of a small tent in Baharka, a camp outside Erbil, in northern Iraq, for people who have fled ISIS but who haven’t left the country. The family has been quartered there for almost two years.

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Related:
The Return of Moqtada al-Sadr, an Iraqi Operator
On the American Front Line Against ISIS
Marcel Broodthaers’s Brussels, and Mine

The Man Restaging an Evel Knievel Jump to Vindicate His Father

Scott Truax wants to “cure history.” His prescription: a Hollywood stuntman riding a steam-powered rocket built from surplus parts across the canyon that yawns above the Snake River, in Twin Falls, Idaho. The malady in question is a haunting image of a similar rocket, the daredevil Evel Knievel’s Skycycle X-2, drifting nose-first into that canyon forty-two years ago.

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After Wisconsin, Cruz Looks to Churchill and Trump Turns to Troy

Senator Ted Cruz had just won the Wisconsin primary decisively last night, with forty-eight per cent of the vote to Donald Trump’s thirty-five per cent and John Kasich’s fourteen per cent, and he was searching, in his victory speech, in Milwaukee, for the words that would convey the significance of the moment. He had already talked about how wrong the media had been (although his win had been widely predicted); thanked Governor Scott Walker for his “principled” work on his behalf (Walker’s experience in fighting off a recall vote helped); promised to abolish the I.R.S. (“a flat tax!”); and tallied the six delegates that he’d picked up in Colorado earlier in the week, and the two million dollars that his campaign had raised, he said, on Tuesday alone. Now it was time for a little history, and so, after a mention of J.F.K., Cruz drew his eyebrows together and raised one hand slightly, in the manner of Bugs Bunny at the Roman Forum. “As Winston Churchill said on taking office, ‘If we open a quarrel between the present and the past, we shall be in danger of losing the future.’ The same is true today.”

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Related:
How Donald Trump Wasted His Spring Break
Donald Trump Performs Shakespeare’s Soliloquies
Trump Says He Will Sue Everyone in Wisconsin

The Lessons of Wisconsin: Can Sanders and Cruz Follow Up Their Big Victories?

As the results came in from Wisconsin last night, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the front-runners in the Republican and Democratic primaries, were nowhere to be seen. According to reports from the television networks’ campaign correspondents, they were both in New York. Trump was holed up in Trump Tower, and Clinton, after attending a fund-raiser in Riverdale, had returned to her family’s home in Chappaqua, in Westchester County.

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Related:
How Donald Trump Wasted His Spring Break
Donald Trump Performs Shakespeare’s Soliloquies
After Wisconsin, Cruz Looks to Churchill and Trump Turns to Troy

The Secret Life of Panama City

Panama, which offers up its national flag to international shippers, local addresses to ghost corporations, and an anything-goes banking system to anyone with money, has long been renowned as an accommodating place for business. On a visit to the country in the late nineties, I was shown around by a Panamanian businessman, a friend, who took me to a newly built hotel and office tower in downtown Panama City. The gleaming green-glass tower rose incongruously above an otherwise pleasant district of one- and two-story residential homes and embassies, overlooking the blue waters of the bay and the Pacific Ocean beyond. Very few of the tower’s offices appeared to be occupied, I noted. “It’s a money laundry,” my friend said matter-of-factly.

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Related:

Panama Papers: Why Aren’t There More American Names?

Who is the odd person out from this list: Ayad Allawi, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, Bashar al-Assad, David Cameron, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, Mauricio Macri, Lionel Messi, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, Marianna Olszewski, Petro Poroshenko, Vladimir Putin?

The Secret Life of Panama City
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, September 23rd
A New Twist in the Penn State Case

Donald Trump, Abortion, and the Collapse of the Conservative Coalition

At the last Republican Presidential debate, in Miami, on March 10th, no one used the word “abortion.” The topic wasn’t raised at the previous one, in Detroit, either. When abortion has come up at the Republican debates in recent months, it has usually been mentioned briefly, often in the context of the Supreme Court vacancy. A generation of conservative politicians—the George W. Bush generation, more or less—had developed a whole gruesome lexicon for describing various types of abortion. Ted Cruz gestured at that heritage when he described Donald Trump as a supporter of “partial-birth abortion” in ads and during a debate in Greenville, South Carolina. But the specific challenge went unanswered—Trump responded by calling Cruz a “nasty guy”—and the general matter of abortion, too, seemed to fade from the Republican contest. Trump then displayed several contradictory positions last week—he said that women who choose abortion should endure “some form of punishment,” before backtracking and declaring that he would not change laws that are “set,” and then refused to disclose whether he believed, as pro-lifers do, that abortion is murder. But beneath the ineptitude and moral chaos of Trump’s statements was the question of how a Republican candidate for President could have made it so far without a clear position on what was long the signal social issue of the right. “I’m very pro-choice,” Trump said in 1999. In this Presidential campaign, he has echoed the language but reversed the position. “I’m pro-life. I’ve said it. I’m very strong there.” Mostly, the crowds have applauded and left it at that.

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Related:
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, April 5th
Donald Trump and the Stunts That Expose the G.O.P.
The Pill that Still Hasn’t Changed the Politics of Abortion

Donald Trump and the Stunts That Expose the G.O.P.

Those of us who accept the common-sense idea that everyone having guns is a good way to insure that a lot of people die from gunshots were first in despair at, and then darkly amused by, the success of a recent petition demanding “open carry” at this summer’s Republican National Convention, in Cleveland. The petition, which gained more than fifty thousand signatures, turned out to be something of a Dada joke: an attempt, on the part of a gun-control enthusiast, to force gun fetishists to confront the logic, or illogic, of their own position. If guns bring order, why not bring them to a Cleveland delegate floor fight?

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Related:
Comment from the April 11, 2016, Issue
Trump: Decision to Consider Women Humans Should Be Left to States
Sanders, Trump, and the Rise of the Non-Voters