George Packer's Blog, page 77

If Donald Trump Were a C.E.O., He’d Probably Be Fired Today

Donald Trump has built his political career on his reputation as a successful businessman, so it seems fair to assess his recent performance as President as if he were a C.E.O. running U.S.A., Inc. The report card isn’t pretty. Indeed, if Trump were the chief executive of a public company, the firm’s non-executive directors probably would have been huddled in a crisis meeting on Tuesday morning, deciding whether to issue him a pink slip.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Is the Comey Memo the Beginning of the End for Trump?
H. R. McMaster and Appropriate Presidential Behavior
Obama Willing to Serve as Temp President While Trump Receives Psychiatric Evaluation

Preserving the Russia Investigation: A Preview of Our Interview with Sally Yates

Last Thursday morning, I sat down with Sally Yates, the former acting Attorney General, whom President Trump fired on January 30th, after she refused to defend his original executive order banning travel to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Is the Comey Memo the Beginning of the End for Trump?
H. R. McMaster and Appropriate Presidential Behavior
Obama Willing to Serve as Temp President While Trump Receives Psychiatric Evaluation

Can “Merkron” Draw a New Road Map for Europe?

Emmanuel Macron, the new French President, is off to a fast start. On Monday, just a day after he was sworn in at the Élysée Palace, the thirty-nine-year-old boy wonder reached across the political divide and Daily Cartoon: Monday, May 15th
A Strange and Beautiful Book About a Mother Who Disappeared
The Return of Tony Blair

What Donald Trump Can Expect on His Tour of the Middle East

In 1974, Richard Nixon became the first American President to visit Saudi Arabia and Israel—as well as Syria—on a swing intended to chalk up triumphs abroad and, more pointedly, to divert attention from the escalating Watergate crisis at home. It was a reassuring trip for the beleaguered President. He promoted a new peace process and talked up a regional realignment to stabilize the Middle East after the 1973 war. Leaders fêted him. Flag-waving crowds lined the streets, even in Damascus.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Is the Comey Memo the Beginning of the End for Trump?
H. R. McMaster and Appropriate Presidential Behavior
Obama Willing to Serve as Temp President While Trump Receives Psychiatric Evaluation

Why Trump Will Make the Wrong Decision on Paris

As the Trump Administration lurches from one crisis to the next, the deadline for its decision on how to deal with the Paris climate accord keeps getting pushed back. The latest word is that the White House won’t make the call until after the President returns from the G7 meeting, to be held in Taormina, Italy, next week. Here’s a prediction (admittedly not a bold one, given the record so far): whatever the Administration decides, it will make the wrong choice.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Is the Comey Memo the Beginning of the End for Trump?
H. R. McMaster and Appropriate Presidential Behavior
Obama Willing to Serve as Temp President While Trump Receives Psychiatric Evaluation

Live: The Future Under Trump, with the Reverend William J. Barber II and David Remnick

We hope you will join us on Facebook tonight for the fourth and final event in our “A Well-Ordered Nation” series, which addresses the Trump Administration, and which is co-produced by the Public Theatre and The New Yorker.

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The Big Tweet
The Trump Administration’s Uneasy Relationship with Historically Black Schools
The Senate Starts to Look at Trump’s Businesses

North Korea’s Consistently Apocalyptic Propagandists

On May 2nd, as a U.S. carrier-strike group cruised the waters off the Korean peninsula, anticipating that North Korea might soon conduct a sixth nuclear test, Pyongyang’s propagandists were ready with an apocalyptic prediction. “Our preemptive nuclear attacks will bring the provocateurs nothing but tragic consequences,” an English-language commentary in Rodong Sinmun, the official paper of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, warned. “South Korea will be submerged in a sea of fire, Japan will be reduced to ashes, and the U.S. will collapse.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump, North Korea, and the Case of the Phantom Armada
North Korea Offers Unconditional Surrender After Mike Pence Angrily Squints at It
An Extraordinary Statement from a North Korean Prince

The Trump Administration’s Uneasy Relationship with Historically Black Schools

Seconds after Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, walked up to the lectern at a Daytona Beach convention center on Wednesday to deliver her commencement address to Bethune-Cookman University’s graduating class, she was drowned out by booing from the crowd. Students stood up and turned their backs to the stage. DeVos, dressed in doctoral robes, strained to disguise the humiliation on her face. The jeers were so loud that the school’s president, Edison Jackson, issued a warning. “If this behavior continues, your degrees will be mailed to you,” he said. “Choose which way you want to go.” He was summarily ignored. The audience knew that it was Jackson who had invited DeVos to speak in the first place. The two met earlier this year, during a series of events in Washington centered on the future of historically black colleges and universities, or H.B.C.U.s, including Bethune-Cookman. At the time, DeVos described H.B.C.U.s as “real pioneers when it comes to school choice,” acknowledging only later that they were originally products of segregation. The comment provoked a swift but enduring backlash; Representative Barbara Lee, of California, called it “tone-deaf,” and Senator Claire McCaskill, of Missouri, called it “totally nuts.” The crowd’s reaction in Daytona Beach, then, was expected, even by the guest of honor. Right before Jackson interrupted her, DeVos had been praising “the ability to converse with and learn from those with whom we disagree.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Senate Starts to Look at Trump’s Businesses
A Harrowing Turning Point for Haitian Immigrants
The Fidget Spinner Is the Perfect Toy for the Trump Presidency

A Harrowing Turning Point for Haitian Immigrants

D.—he asked that I not use his name—moved to the United States from Haiti with his parents in 2001, when he was nine years old. They travelled from Port-au-Prince on tourist visas, and then stayed beyond the authorized time period because of political instability in Haiti. D. attended school in Miami.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Trump Administration’s Uneasy Relationship with Historically Black Schools
The Senate Starts to Look at Trump’s Businesses
The Fidget Spinner Is the Perfect Toy for the Trump Presidency

The Threat in President Trump’s Interview with Lester Holt

President Trump is a selfish liar, and a vain one. Those traits, together, can cause chaos, as they did on Thursday, when, in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump undermined his own alibi for firing the F.B.I. director, James Comey. The official story had been that Trump was moved to act on Tuesday only after the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, and the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, came to him with concerns about Comey’s competence—specifically, his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. Trump’s letter firing Comey said that he had “accepted their recommendation.” Vice-President Mike Pence and other dependents repeated this story all day Wednesday, with Pence portraying the President as solemnly resolved to follow the best advice he had, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary, throwing in some smears of Comey, who she said had committed “atrocities” while at the F.B.I. and was disliked by its rank and file. Speaking to Holt, Trump stood by the smears: “Look, he’s a showboat, he’s a grandstander”; “I just want somebody that’s competent.” But, when Holt asked him about heeding Sessions and Rosenstein, Trump seemed to bristle. Could Holt think that he, Trump, needed to hear what anyone had to say—that he had his mind changed by subordinates?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Trump Administration’s Uneasy Relationship with Historically Black Schools
The Senate Starts to Look at Trump’s Businesses
A Harrowing Turning Point for Haitian Immigrants