George Packer's Blog, page 241

Mega-Tuesday: Can Anyone Stop Trump? Can Sanders Surprise Again?

Another Tuesday in March; another crucial set of primaries. After the violent clashes in Chicago on Friday night, it’s back to the nitty-gritty of votes and delegate counts. By Tuesday night, Donald Trump could be well on his way to wrapping up the Republican nomination, or he could be facing the prospect of a fight all the way to the Convention. On the Democratic side, we will find out whether Bernie Sanders can build on his surprise victory in Michigan last week and deliver another blow to Hillary Clinton.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 14, 2016 13:50

How the Jump Shot Brought Individualism to Basketball

One of the great Internet finds of last year—for basketball fans, anyway—was Brandon Armstrong’s YouTube channel. In July, 2015, Armstrong, who has played professionally in Spain and in the National Basketball Association Development League, uploaded a twenty-nine-second video in which he imitates the Oklahoma City Thunder’s mercurial point guard, Russell Westbrook. Playing on a hoop with a rim set about eight feet off the ground, he mimics Westbrook’s tilting pull-up jump shots, tomahawk dunks, and lunatic celebrations with hilarious precision. The clip spread on Facebook and got picked up by the Sporting News and ESPN—eventually, it was shared on Twitter by Westbrook himself. Since then, Armstrong has posted dozens more parody videos, featuring impressions of Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Shaquille O’Neal, among others, and has been dubbed the N.B.A. Impersonator.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 14, 2016 11:30

Talking About Donald Trump

Last Tuesday night, David Remnick, Kelefa Sanneh, Nate Silver, and I sat down at NeueHouse Madison Square to talk about the 2016 Presidential election. In effect, this meant talking quite a lot about Donald Trump. One of the questions raised was whether the media has paid him too much attention. One answer is that, though there has been a good deal of talk from the beginning about Trump as a spectacle or a joke, there has not been anywhere near enough discussion about how and why he became a real contender, or about his ideology. For too long, “he’s just going to go away” was an acceptable response to the problem of Trumpism. We tried to address that issue last week—without neglecting the battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Highlights of the discussion can be seen in the video here. The event began about half an hour before the polls closed in Mississippi, and an hour and a half before they closed in Michigan. Trump won in both states, and in Hawaii. Later in the evening, Sanders picked up Michigan, in an upset that demonstrated, yet again, that this is an election year that has taken almost everyone by surprise.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 14, 2016 10:30

Why Donald Trump Is Wrong About Manufacturing Jobs and China

Not long ago, a video mocking Donald Trump’s obsession with China was posted on YouTube, a mashup splicing together some two hundred and fifty instances in which he has said “China” during his speeches. The context of his remarks on the subject, inexorably, is this: “They’re stealing our jobs; they’re beating us in everything; they’re winning, we’re losing.” These sentiments have struck a chord with many struggling Americans, particularly those in the unemployed and underemployed working class.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 14, 2016 05:00

Comment from the March 21, 2016, Issue

In “Conventional Wisdom,” Amy Davidson writes about what the Democratic National Convention of 1924 may teach us about the Republican National Convention of 2016, which could end up being a contested Convention.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 13, 2016 21:00

The Chicago Anti-Trump Protest Was Only the Beginning

For the past eight months, Donald Trump’s divisive, racially tinged Presidential campaign has been tearing apart the Republican Party. Over the next eight months, if Trump wraps up the G.O.P. nomination, it could well have a similar impact on the country at large.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 13, 2016 07:50

Donald Trump, Chicago, and the Lessons of 1968

From the outset, Donald Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” has existed in a gray area of acceptability, carrying a whiff of fascistic appeal but also not so different from the generic “Fix America” sloganeering common to Presidential campaigns. (Jeb Bush went with this—“Jeb Can Fix It,” which sounds more appropriate for a chain of automotive repair shops.) Nothing offered by Republicans in 2016—“Defeat the Washington Machine” (Rand Paul), “Heal, Inspire, Revive” (Ben Carson), “Taking on the Tough Issues,” (Chris Christie), “A New American Century” (Marco Rubio)—has achieved the brand recognition that Trump’s slogan has. But it’s also clear that this is only Trump’s public slogan. The implicit one, increasingly difficult to avoid as the campaign winds closer to the nomination, is a masterstroke of racial populism: White Lives Matter.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 12, 2016 09:56

Hillary Clinton, Nancy Reagan, and AIDS

It will take somebody with more psychiatric sophistication than me to figure out how Hillary Clinton could have come to praise Ronald and Nancy Reagan, as she initially did earlier today, for having started the American conversation about AIDS “when, before, nobody talked about it.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

1 like · Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 11, 2016 16:56

The Death of Berta Cáceres

The Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was at home last week, in a town called La Esperanza, when gunmen stormed in and shot her dead. Cáceres, who was forty-four, had known she was in danger. Late last month, while leading a march in a nearby village, she had an altercation with soldiers, police officers, and employees of a Honduran company, Desarrollos Energéticos S.A., or DESA, that she had been fighting for years. In 2010, the Honduran Congress passed a law that awarded contracts to a group of private companies, including DESA, to build dozens of hydroelectric dams throughout the country. Four of the approved dams, which are known collectively as the Agua Zarca Dam, were along the Gualcarque River, in western Honduras, on territory inhabited by the indigenous Lenca people.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 11, 2016 13:45

Joe Biden in Jerusalem

On Tuesday, Vice-President Joe Biden arrived in Jerusalem, to discuss, among other things, a long-term military-aid package—in effect, funding for the Israel Defense Forces to acquire advanced American weapons. That morning, however, Haaretz reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had decided to cancel a planned trip to Washington, claiming that he could not secure a meeting with the President. The White House, which learned about the cancellation from news reports, said that it had offered a meeting on a day that the Prime Minister’s office had proposed. Pressed on Tuesday as to whether Netanyahu’s government should have informed the Administration before cancelling the trip, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said, “I think it’s just good manners.” He continued, “I think you’d have to ask them why they chose to pursue this in the way they did.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

View more on George Packer's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 11, 2016 11:25