George Packer's Blog, page 72

Trump’s Budget Contains a Warning Shot for Sanctuary Cities

The Trump Administration’s proposed budget, which was released earlier this week, was more of a wish list than a policy blueprint. The proposal was distinguished by its call for deep cuts to the social safety net. But the document wasn’t all cuts: it included a significant boost in spending on immigration enforcement. A hundred million dollars is earmarked for Border Patrol; a hundred and eighty-five million dollars for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to hire hundreds of new agents; $1.2 billion for ICE to expand its detention facilities; and another hundred and thirty-one million dollars to institute a mandatory program for employers to run immigration background checks on potential hires.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump Says He Does Not Know Jared Kushner Very Well
Donald and Melania Trump’s Last Judgment
How Worried Should Jared Kushner Be?

How Worried Should Jared Kushner Be?

One of the overlooked aspects of yesterday’s news that the F.B.I. is interested in Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, is that Kushner played a role in the firing of James Comey, the former F.B.I. director. Kushner is not formally a target of the F.B.I.’s sprawling investigation, but I was reminded of his role in Comey’s removal while discussing Kushner with a person close to Comey. The former F.B.I. director is known to have drafted a series of memos about his interactions with Trump, and—importantly—with other White House and Administration officials. Whether Kushner is mentioned in the Comey memos is not known. The source close to Comey offered a terse “no comment” when I asked about additional details, but the point is that Comey was aware of and carefully documenting how the White House reacted to him and his Russia investigation. “That’s a memo-driven place,” the source said.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump Abandons the Human-Rights Agenda
Trump’s Travel Ban “Drips with Intolerance” on Its Way to the Supreme Court
“13 Reasons Why,” Season 2: Trump

Trump Abandons the Human-Rights Agenda

In his first four months in office, President Donald Trump has shaken America’s democratic foundations at home and abandoned a powerful bipartisan commitment to human rights. Seemingly forgotten is the legacy of Ronald Reagan, who, in his first Inaugural Address, pledged that America would “be the exemplar of freedom and a beacon of hope” for oppressed populations around the world.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How Worried Should Jared Kushner Be?
Trump’s Travel Ban “Drips with Intolerance” on Its Way to the Supreme Court
“13 Reasons Why,” Season 2: Trump

Trump’s Travel Ban “Drips with Intolerance” on Its Way to the Supreme Court

In a ruling, on Thursday, that left in place a lower court’s stay on President Donald Trump’s travel ban, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals went well beyond saying that the White House’s case was mistaken, misguided, or just inadequate. Instead, Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote that behind the arguments in defense of the ban lay “a dangerous idea”—namely, that “this Court lacks the authority to review high-level government policy of the sort here.” The Trump Administration had said that the courts simply could not second-guess the President on matters of national security and immigration. This is not true, and never has been, Gregory wrote, despite the government lawyers’ “casual assertion” to the contrary. The Supreme Court has, instead, found that the courts have a duty to intervene, even in times of war, “where constitutional rights, values, and principles are at stake.” And they were very much at stake in the travel-ban case, which is playing out in various circuits and is now undoubtedly headed for the Supreme Court.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How Worried Should Jared Kushner Be?
Trump Abandons the Human-Rights Agenda
“13 Reasons Why,” Season 2: Trump

What the Latest Crisis Means for Brazil

Brazilians know their political crises better than most. On social media, some like to joke that the chaos of Donald Trump’s Presidency is simply gringos imitando—foreigners copying us. Others suggest that Brazil should offer the U.S. assistance in setting up impeachment proceeding—a frequent Brazilian trauma. Such dark humor is a necessary refuge in a country where stability rarely lasts for long. The latest crisis erupted last week, when the Supreme Court placed President Michel Temer under investigation for corruption and obstructing justice. On Wednesday of this week, protesters overran government buildings in Brasília, setting fire to the agriculture ministry, and police reportedly responded by shooting live ammunition. Less than a year after the former President Dilma Rousseff was removed from office, Temer faces the possibility of a similar fate. And with right-wing populism on the rise in the country as it is elsewhere in the world, the stakes are as high as they have ever been.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Should America Worry About What Happened in Montana?
Will Robert Mueller Explore Trump’s Russian Business Ties?
Did the U.S. Just Pull Out of a Global Anti-Corruption Group?

Should America Worry About What Happened in Montana?

On Wednesday evening, the night before Montana held a special election to fill the state’s lone U.S. House seat, the Republican candidate in the race, Greg Gianforte, body-slammed a reporter, Ben Jacobs, of the Guardian, who was asking him a question about his position on health-care reform. Gianforte was swiftly charged with assault. On Thursday night, he won the election. The uncertainty, after the vote, was whether this sequence of events was unfortunate but explainable (early voting meant that Gianforte might have had an insurmountable lead before the attack) or extraordinary and terrible, in that a political candidate had, unprovoked, attacked a reporter, and his partisans had cheered him and the voters had not blinked. Theories aside, though, the events, and the news coverage of them, pointed to the same phenomenon: early in the Administration of a President with authoritarian tendencies, American public life continues to be consumed by political partisanship that has proved impossible to shake.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What the Latest Crisis Means for Brazil
Greg Gianforte and Populism’s Moments of Alarm
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, May 25th

Jared Kushner’s Russia Problems

When the Washington Post reported, on Thursday, that the F.B.I. is investigating Jared Kushner’s meetings with Russian visitors, the news thrust the Russia probe to a new level of proximity to President Trump, reaching above former campaign aides to encompass the President’s close adviser and son-in-law. The news also reminded me of an odd episode that highlights how Kushner, and the White House, have struggled to clarify the nature of his Russian contacts.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How Worried Should Jared Kushner Be?
Trump Abandons the Human-Rights Agenda
Trump’s Travel Ban “Drips with Intolerance” on Its Way to the Supreme Court

At NATO Headquarters, Trump Fails Another Leadership Test

Even when a moment designed to affirm some of America’s basic principles is dangled before him, President Donald Trump has a way of batting it aside. In Brussels on Thursday, as he stood at a rostrum at a ceremony in front of the new NATO headquarters, Trump had, to his left, a mangled girder from the World Trade Center; to his right, broken slabs of the Berlin Wall, both of which were being dedicated as memorials; and, behind him, the leaders of the twenty-seven other countries in the alliance. One of them, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, had just delivered remarks that served as a reminder that, until she was thirty-five years old, she had lived behind that wall, and had been part of the civic movement that peacefully reunified Germany. Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary-General of NATO, who had introduced Merkel, noted that she had been among the crowds filling the streets of East Berlin on the night the Wall came down. A few minutes later, when Stoltenberg introduced Trump, he summoned a personal connection for him, too, noting that the 9/11 terrorists “struck at the heart of your own home town, New York.” That attack marked the only time that NATO has invoked Article 5 of its charter, the mutual-defense provision, which the new headquarters’ 9/11 memorial was also supposed to commemorate. In what may have been an attempt at Trump-friendly sloganeering, Stoltenberg summed up Article 5 by declaring, gamely, “All for one, and one for all!” But Trump had come to praise other ideals, other lands, and other leaders.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Republicans’ War on Medicaid
Emmanuel Macron’s French Lessons for Donald Trump
Eulogy for America

The Republicans’ War on Medicaid

Many people who don’t use Medicaid think of it as a federal health-care program for the impoverished and destitute, but it’s much more than that. In the past couple of decades, as incomes have stagnated and health-care costs have accelerated, Medicaid has turned into an essential support mechanism for millions of Americans who can’t be classed as poverty-stricken, strictly speaking, but who also can’t afford to bear the costs of private health coverage.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
At NATO Headquarters, Trump Fails Another Leadership Test
Emmanuel Macron’s French Lessons for Donald Trump
Eulogy for America

Greg Gianforte and Populism’s Moments of Alarm

As recently as last week, with less than a month to go before the general election in the U.K., the position of the country’s Conservative Party looked secure. The Prime Minister, Theresa May, had been projecting a protective national steadfastness through the process of Brexit, and with the momentum behind the right-wing U.K. Independence Party dissipating and the Labour Party convulsed by internal grievances and recriminations, the Tories looked likely to win a historic victory.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, May 25th
The House G.O.P.’s Shameful Health-Care Victory
Preëxisting Conditions Under the A.H.C.A.