George Packer's Blog, page 69

Theresa May’s Donald Trump Problem

Two days before the British general election, Donald Trump has turned into a campaign issue. Following Trump’s online outbursts against Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, opposition politicians and media commentators are pressuring Theresa May, the Prime Minister, to distance herself from the American President and to rescind an invitation for him to make an official visit later this year.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Do White House Ethics Rules Mean If They Can Be Circumvented?
How to Influence Trump
“What to Expect When You’re Expecting Fascism”

Bill Cosby’s Trial Begins, With the World Barging In

Proceedings for Commonwealth v. William Henry Cosby, Jr., began at 9:30 A.M. on Monday, in Norristown, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia. The trial concerns Cosby’s alleged sexual assault of a woman named Andrea Constand, in 2004. The weather was gray and drizzly; the outside world threatened constantly to intrude. Cosby, who is now seventy-nine years old, walked into the courthouse with his “TV daughter” Keshia Knight Pulliam, the actress who played Rudy Huxtable on “The Cosby Show.” A court monitor wearing a coral-colored jacket circled the press benches, making sure that journalists were only taking notes, and not sending e-mails. In an impassioned hour-long speech to the jury, Judge Steven T. O’Neill reminded the group repeatedly not to communicate about the case by e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or other social media. They were told to avoid search engines and TV news, and not to speak about Cosby to their family members, their friends, or their fellow-jurors. They could get to know each other by talking about sports, O’Neill advised, or the weather, but probably not politics; at the tacit invocation of Donald Trump, who has his own extensive inventory of sexual-assault accusations, a low and sickly laugh rumbled through the wood-panelled courtroom. “You’re a sequestered jury, and this is 2017, not 1970,” O’Neill said. “If this was then—then sequestration, blocking everything from you, that’s easily done. But that ship has sailed.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Phony Sexual Transgressions of Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle”
The Sexual-Assault Election
Trump and the Truth: The Sexual-Assault Allegations

Can Bipartisan Criminal-Justice Reform Survive in the Trump Era?

In the nineteen-nineties, when John Malcolm was a federal prosecutor in Atlanta, the nation’s prisons were being filled up with small­-time drug dealers. The war on drugs was at its height, and the number of Americans in prison was rising dramatically. Now a legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation, the influential conservative think tank, Malcolm has watched with approval, in recent years, as lawmakers and law-enforcement officials have begun to support criminal-justice policies aimed less at punishing anyone caught with drugs and more at targeting violent offenders and drug kingpins.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Amid the Chaos, Trump’s Appointees Push His Agenda
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, May 23rd
Barry Blitt’s “Ejected”

While Trump Tweets, Assad and Putin Advance in Syria

In normal political times, when a President attacks another country and makes bold claims about what his warfare will achieve, the press will stay on the case in the following weeks, reporting on how things have turned out. In Donald Trump times, this is only one of many rules of accountability to have vanished behind his Presidency’s fog machine of manufactured distraction, legal crises, and eroding governance.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, June 6th
Daily Cartoon: Monday, June 5th
Daily Cartoon: Friday, June 2nd

Why More Troops Won’t Help Afghanistan

Last Wednesday, a tanker truck, one of many that carry empty septic tanks in Kabul, a city with no sewage system, navigated through bumper-to-bumper traffic past the Afghan intelligence agency’s compound, the residence of former President Hamid Karzai, and the Iranian and Turkish embassies, to Zanbaq Square. Video from a surveillance camera shows that police halted the driver at a checkpoint as he tried to turn into the city’s diplomatic quarter.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s “Travel Ban” Tweets Show His Disdain for the Law
In the Withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, the Koch Brothers’ Campaign Becomes Overt
The New Season of “Veep” Was Not Supposed to Be About Donald Trump

After the Portland Train Stabbing, Scenes of Grief and Grievance

The Hollywood Transit Center, in Portland, Oregon, was quiet on Sunday morning, but its concrete walkways were filled with words of love and grief. By twos and by threes, by bike and by foot, people arrived to leave flowers or messages of remembrance for Taliesin Namkai-Meche and Ricky Best, the two Portland men who, on May 26th, were fatally stabbed on the light-rail train, after they tried to stop a man from shouting anti-Muslim insults at two teen-age girls, one of whom was wearing a hijab. (Another man, Micah Fletcher, who also intervened, was badly wounded but survived.) At the Transit Center, a small, dark-haired girl drew a heart on the sidewalk with thick orange chalk, carefully underlining it three times, as if for emphasis. On one of the walkway walls, in bold pink letters, someone had recorded Namkai-Meche’s reported parting words, uttered as medics carried him away on a stretcher: “Tell everyone on this train I love them.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Delicate Task of Memorializing the Boston Marathon Attacks
When Painting a Ukrainian Flag Is A Hate Crime In Moscow
How to Stay Safe When the Big One Comes

Trump’s “Travel Ban” Tweets Show His Disdain for His Lawyers

As President Trump was about to sign an executive order on January 27th, he held it up and read its title aloud. “This is the ‘Protection of the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States,’ ” he said. “We all know what that means.” What that means—to Trump, to the judges who have heard challenges to the order and to a revised version, and to the future of civil rights—is an issue that the Supreme Court is now being asked to decide. The question is whether the current order, which would temporarily keep people from six predominantly Muslim countries and all refugees out of the country, is a realization of the unconstitutional “Muslim ban” that Trump called for during the campaign, or whether it is something entirely independent: a prudent, religiously neutral immigration measure taken in response to national-security concerns. After the weekend’s terrorist attacks on London Bridge, Trump provided some ugly answers to that question in a series of tweets.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Do White House Ethics Rules Mean If They Can Be Circumvented?
How to Influence Trump
Theresa May’s Donald Trump Problem

Trump’s “Travel Ban” Tweets Show His Disdain for the Law

As President Trump was about to sign an executive order on January 27th, he held it up and read its title aloud. “This is the ‘Protection of the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States,’ ” he said. “We all know what that means.” What that means—to Trump, to the judges who have heard challenges to the order and to a revised version, and to the future of civil rights—is an issue that the Supreme Court is now being asked to decide. The question is whether the current order, which would temporarily keep people from six predominantly Muslim countries and all refugees out of the country, is a realization of the unconstitutional “Muslim ban” that Trump called for during the campaign, or whether it is something entirely independent: a prudent, religiously neutral immigration measure taken in response to national-security concerns. After the weekend’s terrorist attacks on London Bridge, Trump provided some ugly answers to that question in a series of tweets.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why More Troops Won’t Help Afghanistan
In the Withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, the Koch Brothers’ Campaign Becomes Overt
The New Season of “Veep” Was Not Supposed to Be About Donald Trump

In the Withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, the Koch Brothers’ Campaign Becomes Overt

If there was any lingering doubt that a tiny clique of fossil-fuel barons has captured America’s energy and environmental policies, it was dispelled last week, when the Trump Administration withdrew from the Paris climate accord. Surveys showed that a majority of Americans in literally every state wanted to remain within the agreement, and news reports established that the heads of many of the country’s most successful and iconic Fortune 100 companies, from Disney to General Electric, did, too. Voters and big business were arrayed against leaving the climate agreement. Yet despite the majority’s sentiment, a tiny—and until recently, almost faceless—minority somehow prevailed.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why More Troops Won’t Help Afghanistan
Trump’s “Travel Ban” Tweets Show His Disdain for the Law
The New Season of “Veep” Was Not Supposed to Be About Donald Trump

How Different—and Dangerous—Is Terrorism Today?

On Sunday, just hours after three men launched an assault on London Bridge, British Prime Minister Theresa May stepped in front of 10 Downing Street and told the world, “We believe we are experiencing a new trend in the threat we face.” In many ways, the attack in the British capital, as well as others over the past two years in Nice, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, and Manchester, actually weren’t all that unique in terms of tactics, targets, or even motive. A century ago, a battered horse-drawn wagon loaded with a hundred pounds of dynamite—attached to five hundred pounds of cast-iron weights—rolled onto Wall Street during lunch hour. The wagon stopped at the busiest corner in front of J. P. Morgan’s bank. At 12:01 P.M., it exploded, spraying lethal shrapnel and bits of horse as high as the thirty-fourth floor of the Equitable Building, on Broadway. A streetcar was derailed a block away. Thirty-eight people were killed; many were messengers, stenographers, clerks, and brokers who were simply on the street at the wrong time—what are today known as “soft targets.” Another hundred and forty-three people were injured.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why More Troops Won’t Help Afghanistan
Trump’s London Tweets: How Low Can He Stoop?
What Donald Trump Can Do to Help Stop Terrorism: Talk Less