George Packer's Blog, page 71

Manuel Noriega, a Thug of a Different Era

In an era that surges with new monsters and tyrants, the former Panamanian strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega, who died in a hospital on Monday, at the age of eighty-three, seemed an almost quaint throwback to another time. Noriega had been all but forgotten by the world since his precipitous fall from grace, in 1989, when U.S. military forces invaded Panama to remove him from power. While the world moved on and changed, Noriega spent the past twenty-seven years in prison, most of it in a U.S. federal penitentiary, after being convicted on drug-trafficking and money-laundering charges, then briefly in France, for money laundering, and finally, since 2011, back home in Panama, for murder.

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Published on June 02, 2017 02:00

Donald Trump’s “Screw You” to the World

On Thursday, a fine spring day in Washington, D.C., Donald Trump took to the podium in the White House’s Rose Garden and announced that he was pulling the United States out of the Paris climate-change agreement. In doing so, he was ignoring the advice of his senior economic advisers, many of his fellow-businessmen, and, reportedly, his own daughter and son-in-law. Ivanka Trump was nowhere to be seen at the announcement event, but Steve Bannon, the President’s chief strategist, was strutting around. That was the tip-off for the sort of address that Trump was about to deliver.

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Published on June 01, 2017 16:39

Angela Merkel and the Insult of Trump’s Paris Climate-Accord Withdrawal

On Wednesday, at around the time that news outlets were reporting that President Donald Trump had decided to pull America out of the Paris climate accord, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, was at the Berlin airport, greeting Premier Li Keqiang, of China. As their national anthems played, Li and Merkel stood on a red carpet that had been cut to look like a giant arrow. It seemed to point definitively away from Trump. There was a connection between the two moments that was more than symbolic. China has made it clear that, with America’s abdication, it sees Paris as a vehicle for its efforts to assert itself as a leader of the international community. (Whether this means that it would also make sure that carbon emissions fell is another matter.) And Merkel, during the past few days, seemed to have had it with Trump, in some significant measure because of his flashy contempt for the climate deal and for his fellow world leaders.

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Published on June 01, 2017 15:56

Au Revoir: Trump Exits the Paris Climate Agreement

After milking the fate of the planet for maximum drama, Donald Trump announced today that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate accord. To reach this decision, the President had to dismiss decades’ worth of research by the country’s most prestigious scientific organizations. He needed to resist pleas from the U.S.’s staunchest allies; ignore appeals from many of its largest corporations, including ExxonMobil; and disregard the counsel of his Secretary of State. All this for, well, what? To shore up his base on the coal-hugging right?

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Published on June 01, 2017 12:49

Donald Trump Can’t Turn Back History

The United States is no stranger to isolationism or the willful rejection of international agreements. After the First World War, the Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles because many senators didn’t want the country to join the fledgling League of Nations, which was part of the treaty, and which President Woodrow Wilson had played a big part in conceiving.

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Published on May 31, 2017 16:22

Trump’s “Good Job” Call to Roger Stone

On May 11th Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again political adviser for several decades, had just wrapped up a pair of morning television appearances when, according to two sources with direct knowledge, he received a call from the President.

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Published on May 31, 2017 12:36

Republicans and the Road to Redemption

The unpopular New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (now at seventy-six-per-cent disapproval), who last year bowed and scraped his way into candidate Donald J. Trump’s inner circle, has begun to emit hesitant signals that he wishes he’d bet on another horse. Christie, who had briefly been considered for the Vice-Presidency and other Administration jobs, agreed in March to head a White House task force on opioid addiction. But, after the Times reported that Trump had urged James Comey, the F.B.I. director, to end the investigation of his national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, who may have been compromised by Russian agents, Christie was asked whether he thought that such an action would be appropriate. “Next question,” the governor replied. “I don’t answer hypotheticals.” A few days later, though, after the Times reported that Trump had told Russian officials that Comey was “crazy, a real nut job,” Christie, a former U.S. Attorney, sounded as if he’d had enough: “I would disagree with the characterization of Jim as a ‘nut job,’ ” he said. “I’ve known Jim for a long time.” As for Flynn, he added, “If I was President of the United States, I wouldn’t let General Flynn in the White House, let alone give him a job.” Furthermore, Christie had said as much to Trump. “I didn’t think that he was someone who would bring benefit to the President or to the Administration,” Christie told reporters. “And I made that very clear to candidate Trump, and I made it very clear to President-elect Trump.” As for those to whom Trump has given staff jobs, Christie said, “I think the President could be better served than he’s been served. I think that leads to a lot of the confusion and a lot of the tumult.”

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Published on May 31, 2017 02:00

Six Reasons Why the Trump Reset Won’t Work

The latest Trump Administration reset has begun, or so we are being asked to believe. On Tuesday, Mike Dubke, the White House communications director, confirmed that he was leaving his job after just three months. There is also talk of the Administration setting up a “war room” to deal with the Russia scandal, and assembling an all-star legal team to defend President Trump. Names like Ted Olson and Paul Clement, two former Solicitors General, are being bandied about. And rumors continue to circulate about who else will be coming or going. The potential exit of Sean Spicer, the White House spokesperson, has been the subject of whispers for weeks. And, according to Politico, on Monday Trump met with his former campaign aides Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie.

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Published on May 30, 2017 17:11

Postscript: Frank Deford

The distinguished sportswriter Frank Deford was tall, lean, and sideburned, with a Clark Gable pencil mustache, well-tailored clothes, and often a frisson of purple silk at the neck or breast. He looked the way he wrote and spoke, combining the folksy, conversational idioms of classic Dempsey-age sportswriting with a sophisticated searching curiosity about what impels people—makes them the way they are. He began writing for Sports Illustrated in 1962, at age twenty-three, and his accounts of athletes such as the basketball player Bill Russell, with his wary, intelligent distance; the tennis star Jimmy Connors, who was unusually attached to his mother and grandmother; and the coach Bob Knight and the complexities of his rage changed Deford’s profession—made games into culture.

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Published on May 30, 2017 14:26

After Manchester, the U.K. Weighs Security and Freedoms

What are the risks for a nation seeking to protect its citizens from violence? Is there a point at which a society can become so bunkered, walled off, and restrictive that it begins to forfeit its essence? Something like this, to various degrees and in different ways, is happening in Erdoğan’s Turkey, Netanyahu’s Israel, Modi’s India, and Trump’s America. For much of the past forty-five years, the United Kingdom, too, has intermittently had to answer questions of national security and civil liberties—and even human rights—in dealing with the threat of terrorism. Last week, it had to ask them all over again.

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Published on May 30, 2017 09:08