George Packer's Blog, page 78

Jared Kushner and Mohammed bin Salman: Princes of Tech Disruption?

When Donald Trump travels to Saudi Arabia later this month, the first country he will visit as President, the attention will be on geopolitics and the complicated friendship between Saudi Arabia and the United States. But the trip also highlights, just off center stage, an unremarked upon similarity between the current Saudi government and the American White House: in both places, unelected men in their thirties have swiftly amassed power.

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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

The Battle Over Confederate Monuments in New Orleans

The adage holds that history is written by the victors, but, as the masked, bulletproof-vested municipal workers who assembled in New Orleans at three o’clock in the morning on Confederate Memorial Day might attest, the most indelible version of the American past was authored by those who lost the Civil War. The workers were there to remove an obelisk dedicated to the Crescent City White League and the Battle of Liberty Place, in 1874. Clashes over American history are typically fought with duelling sets of footnotes and the subjective shade of historiographic essays. This one, which involved death threats issued to the mayor and the contractors bidding on the project, risked being fought using tools with considerably higher stopping power.

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Daily Cartoon: Friday, May 5th
Fourth-Grade Class Touring White House Answers Trump’s Questions About the Civil War
An Artist’s Meditation on Color Reveals a Secret History of Film

James Comey’s Conspicuous Independence

On Tuesday, when Donald Trump abruptly dismissed the F.B.I. director, James Comey, his Administration insisted that he was merely following the recommendation of his Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, the two most senior officials in the Justice Department.

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Barry Blitt’s “Ejected”
Donald Trump’s Craven Republican Enablers
In Trump, Echoes of Nixon’s Constitutional Crisis

Donald Trump’s Craven Republican Enablers

It is often said that the U.S. Presidency is a relatively weak office—but that is a contingent statement. To prevent the President from gaining too much power, or abusing that power, the Founding Fathers divided authority among the different branches of government, and established some fundamental governing principles. These are the fabled checks and balances, arranged, as James Bryce, the British jurist, noted in his venerable 1888 tome, “The American Commonwealth,” to “restrain any one department from tyranny.”

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Related:
Barry Blitt’s “Ejected”
James Comey’s Conspicuous Independence
In Trump, Echoes of Nixon’s Constitutional Crisis

The Complicated Relationship Between Cruise Ships and the Arctic Inuit

Last summer, the Crystal Serenity, a luxury cruise ship, embarked on a monthlong voyage through the Northwest Passage, the sea route that winds through Canada’s Arctic archipelago. The Serenity, which can accommodate more than a thousand passengers, headed through the same waters as had H.M.S. Resolute, which, in August of 1853, set out to rescue a group of British explorers and ended up trapped in the ice for the better part of a year. The Arctic Ocean is warmer than it was a hundred and sixty-three years ago, and the Crystal Serenity, accompanied by a British icebreaking vessel, made the voyage without dire incident. It is the largest cruise ship to sail through the Northwest Passage, and its voyage signalled the economic changes that are coming to the vast region as a result, in part, of climate change.

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Kim Stanley Robinson’s Latest Novel Imagines Life in an Underwater New York
What Is Science Good For?
Earth Day in the Age of Trump

President Trump Nominates Judges Even He Could Love

On Monday, President Trump announced his first group of lower-court nominations to the federal bench. The list illustrates how differently Democratic and Republican Presidents have approached the task of making judges: it comes down to ideology versus diversity.

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Donald Trump’s Craven Republican Enablers
In Trump, Echoes of Nixon’s Constitutional Crisis
Other People Trump Has Fired

Jeff Sessions’s Role in James Comey’s Firing

In January, during the hearings to consider Donald Trump’s nomination of then Senator Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, Senator Mike Lee, the Republican of Utah, noted that whoever held that office had a good deal of “flexibility” on the matter of special prosecutors. What guidelines would Sessions follow, Lee asked, in responding to calls to appoint one? As it happens, calls of that sort have been heard loudly since Wednesday, in the wake of President Trump’s firing of the F.B.I. director, James Comey. Sessions likely had a different set of circumstance in mind back in January, although even then there were indications—hacking, Russian contacts, financial conflicts, nepotism—of the legal morass to come. Sessions ought to have known that Lee’s question was not entirely hypothetical.

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New F.B.I.-Director Job Application
Comey’s Firing and the Look of Power
How Comey’s Firing Accelerates the Russia Investigations

Comey’s Firing and the Look of Power

Four thousand people work for the executive office of the President. Thirty-five thousand work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Protocols for communication between the two are well established. And yet, on Tuesday, after President Donald Trump decided to fire the F.B.I. director, James Comey, he had a letter printed out, dropped into a manila envelope, and carried to F.B.I. headquarters in the hand of his own longtime personal bodyguard, the fifty-seven-year old ex-N.Y.P.D. cop Keith Schiller. This Administration has a weakness for macho strutting: recall Vice-President Mike Pence, standing at the Korean D.M.Z., hands on hips, staring down the entire country of North Korea, as if what gave America leverage was not its planet-annihilating nuclear arsenal but a thrust, middle-aged Hoosier chest. The Trump White House also has a weakness for Schiller, who has been given the novel title of director of Oval Office operations and a brief so accommodating that it permitted him to represent the country at a meeting with the political leadership of Iraqi Kurdistan while wearing an Adidas workout top. Even for this White House, though, Comey’s ouster was remarkably ritualized and medieval: a Corleone gesture, the loyalist sent across town with a letter in his hand.

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Related:
Jeff Sessions’s Role in James Comey’s Firing
New F.B.I.-Director Job Application
How Comey’s Firing Accelerates the Russia Investigations

How Comey’s Firing Accelerates the Russia Investigations

The official explanation for James Comey’s firing did not survive the night. Aides to President Donald Trump initially claimed that he fired the director of the F.B.I. for mishandling an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server. But that flatly contradicted Trump’s public praise of Comey’s decisions in the Clinton case. Moreover, Trump had repeatedly decried the F.B.I. investigation of his associates for potential collusion with Russia, calling it a “witch hunt,” “FAKE NEWS,” and a waste of money. By nightfall, aides to Trump were conceding to reporters that Trump was infuriated that Comey would not back up his false accusation that President Obama wiretapped him, and that the aides had been trying to “come up with reasons” to justify the firing for more than a week. It emerged that Trump had taken to shouting at the television when he saw reports on the Russia investigation.

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Related:
Jeff Sessions’s Role in James Comey’s Firing
New F.B.I.-Director Job Application
Comey’s Firing and the Look of Power

Comey’s Firing Is—and Isn’t—Like Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre

On October 19, 1973, a Friday, it became clear that the Justice Department’s special Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox, would not obey President Nixon’s order to be content with the summaries of recordings of Nixon and White House aides. Cox wanted the tapes, and it was easy to see that his defiance, or courage, was not going to lead to a happy conclusion. When a reporter asked Cox, on his way out of the office that night, if he intended to resign, Cox replied, “No—hell, no.”

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Related:
Donald Trump’s Firing of James Comey Is an Attack on American Democracy
Michael Flynn’s Questionable Conduct, and Trump’s
The Fourth Circuit Examines Trump’s Travel-Ban Motives