George Packer's Blog, page 70

Trump’s London Tweets: How Low Can He Stoop?

The American Embassy in London is currently leaderless. In January, Donald Trump said that he would pick his friend and supporter Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets, as Ambassador to the Court of St. James. But as with many other appointments in the Trump Administration, this one has yet to be made official. On Sunday night, when the Embassy put out a series of tweets in response to this weekend’s terrorist attack in London, they were issued in the name of Lewis Lukens, the charge d’affaires and acting Ambassador, a career diplomat who has served in Australia, China, Ireland, Iraq, and the Ivory Coast. (From 2008 to 2011, Lukens ran the executive secretariat at the State Department.)

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Related:
Why More Troops Won’t Help Afghanistan
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

How the Six-Day War Changed Israel’s Mind

Fifty years ago today, on June 5, 1967, we awoke to the news that the war we had dreaded was begun—and decided. I was eighteen, had just finished my freshman year at McGill, and was living with my father, who had been a Zionist leader in Montreal during the nineteen-fifties and had recently married an Israeli woman. During the previous month, grim reports had come to us in rushed calls from Tel Aviv: Israel’s mobilized reserves were baking in the Negev Desert; seaside hotels were being converted to makeshift hospitals. In April, there had been conflict with Syria over the headwaters of the Jordan River; in May, President Nasser, of Egypt, brandishing new Soviet arms and claiming to support Syria, expelled United Nations peacekeepers from the Sinai and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. By early June, Jordan’s King Hussein had thrown in with Egypt. We knew that the Israeli military would strike. I heard that students were contacting the Israeli consulate and volunteering—not to fight but to help with the summer harvest. On June 3rd, I surprised myself by doing the same. On the morning of the 5th, the Israeli Air Force destroyed the Egyptian Air Force on the ground. The rest, as my father put it, with uncharacteristic swagger, would be “a mopping-up operation.” Unopposed in the skies, Israel conquered Jerusalem on the 7th and rolled into the West Bank. By the 11th, it had taken the Golan Heights, from where Syrians had fired on the Hula Valley. I got to Tel Aviv on June 14th, to work, but mainly to celebrate.

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The Dovekeeper and the Children’s Intifada
The Lights Are Going Out in the Middle East
What Donald Trump Can Expect on His Tour of the Middle East

What Donald Trump Can Do to Help Stop Terrorism: Talk Less

In the hours after the London terrorist attack, President Trump took to his favored platform, Twitter, to deliver a stream-of-consciousness response. He repeated his call for a “travel ban” on visitors from six predominantly Muslim countries. And he warned against political correctness. “If we don’t get smart it will only get worse,” he said. “Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now?” he added, in a puzzling non sequitur. “That’s because they used knives and a truck.”

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Eight Minutes of Terror at London Bridge
How Trump Has Stoked the Campus Debate on Speech and Violence
The Renewed Importance of Pope Francis’s Encyclical on Climate Change

Eight Minutes of Terror at London Bridge

On Saturday, on a warm evening in London, there was a terrorist attack. Seven members of the public were killed, and forty-eight were injured. Two weeks ago, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a concert in Manchester, killing twenty-two other people, among them many young women and girls. Yesterday’s plan was cruder, employing a vehicle and knives, and closer in method to the attack that took place on Westminster Bridge, in March. In that instance, however, one individual acted alone, whereas, last night, three men were involved. All three are now dead.

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Related:
What Donald Trump Can Do to Help Stop Terrorism: Talk Less
After Manchester, the U.K. Weighs Security and Freedoms
Trump Abandons the Human-Rights Agenda

How Trump Has Stoked the Campus Debate on Speech and Violence

Nearly a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., famously suggested, in defense of free speech, that “every idea is an incitement.” But are words themselves violence? The striking acceptance of the notion that some speech can constitute violence—and therefore has no place on a university campus—has coincided, this year, with the eruption of actual physical violence over speech.

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Related:
What Donald Trump Can Do to Help Stop Terrorism: Talk Less
The Renewed Importance of Pope Francis’s Encyclical on Climate Change
How Climate Change Saved Steve Bannon’s Job

The Renewed Importance of Pope Francis’s Encyclical on Climate Change

When the President met the Pope at the Vatican, last week, it was as if they were members of different species, so far apart in values and style that the actual content of what separated them proved elusive. Francis slyly presented Trump with a gift, though, that—as of yesterday—defines their opposition as absolute. The gift was a copy of his encyclical on climate change, “Laudato Si’.” Trump politely promised to read it. Sure.

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How Climate Change Saved Steve Bannon’s Job
Donald Trump’s “Screw You” to the World
Angela Merkel and the Insult of Trump’s Paris Climate-Accord Withdrawal

Jeremy Corbyn Is Surging by Using Bernie Sanders’s Playbook

Jeremy Corbyn, the sixty-eight-year-old leftist who heads the opposition Labour Party in the U.K., wasn’t scheduled to appear at the BBC’s televised general-election debate this week. With Theresa May, the Conservative Prime Minister, and the hot favorite to gain reëlection, skipping the event out of a super-abundance of caution, Corbyn’s aides didn’t think that it would do him any good to debate the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, who was standing in for May, and the leaders of five smaller parties: the Liberal Democrats, the U.K. Independence Party, the Greens, the Scottish National Party, and the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru.

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Related:
After Manchester, the U.K. Weighs Security and Freedoms
The British Are Stung by Leaks in the Manchester Bombing Case
The Return of Tony Blair

How Climate Change Saved Steve Bannon’s Job

Reports of Steve Bannon’s death were greatly exaggerated. Just a few weeks ago, President Trump’s chief political adviser and the most controversial figure in the West Wing was considered a spent force. Some reports said he was going to resign. Others predicted Trump was about to fire him. “Bannon is on his way out,” a person close to Bannon, who worked on the Trump campaign, predicted to me last month. “He’ll probably go back to Breitbart or do something with the Mercers”—the billionaire political donors who have funded Breitbart and several of Bannon’s other political projects—“but I think it’s sort of a fait accompli at this point, because of the infighting.”

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Related:
The Renewed Importance of Pope Francis’s Encyclical on Climate Change
Daily Cartoon: Friday, June 2nd
Can Al Franken Be a Funny Senator?

Why Police Chiefs Oppose Texas’s New Anti-Immigrant Law

Last month, Greg Abbott, the Republican Governor of Texas, signed into law an anti-immigrant measure allowing local police officers to ask for the citizenship status of anyone they detain. This sort of provision—often called a “show me your papers” law—has been attempted at the state level before, most notoriously in Arizona, which passed a measure in 2010 that was subsequently blocked in federal court. In response to the new law, civil-rights groups and several Texas city governments have filed lawsuits against the measure. Earlier this week, thousands of demonstrators descended on the state capitol, in Austin, to protest on the last day of the legislative session, prompting one overwhelmed Republican representative to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), presumably so that agents could arrest and deport members of the opposition while they stood in a gallery of the statehouse.

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Trump’s Budget Contains a Warning Shot for Sanctuary Cities
The Seven-Year Saga of One Undocumented Student in Georgia
A Harrowing Turning Point for Haitian Immigrants

Can Al Franken Be a Funny Senator?

Senator Al Franken, of Minnesota, hates headlines that say “no joke.” He was subjected to a perhaps unprecedented run of them back when he was running for office for the first time, in 2008. “No Joke: Franken Announces Senate Bid,” “No Joke: Franken Wins DFL Nomination,” “No Joke: Franken Wins Recount.” There were fewer “no joke” headlines in 2014, when he ran for, and easily won, reëlection. Now he’s a second-term senator, still a progressive with unapologetically partisan views, but one eager to explain the new friendships he’s struck up with some of the most conservative members of the Senate, such as Pat Roberts, of Kansas, and Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, who is now the Attorney General and whose wife once knit a blanket for Franken’s grandson.

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Related:
How Climate Change Saved Steve Bannon’s Job
Congressional Daydreams
A Gardening Book for Those Who Hate Gardening Books