George Packer's Blog, page 79

Donald Trump’s Firing of James Comey Is an Attack on American Democracy

At a time like this, it is important to express things plainly. On Tuesday evening, Donald Trump acted like a despot. Without warning or provocation, he summarily fired the independent-minded director of the F.B.I., James Comey. Comey had been overseeing an investigation into whether there was any collusion between Trump’s Presidential campaign and the government of Russia. With Comey out of the way, Trump can now pick his own man (or woman) to run the Bureau, and this person will have the authority to close down that investigation.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Comey’s Firing Is—and Isn’t—Like Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre
Michael Flynn’s Questionable Conduct, and Trump’s
The Fourth Circuit Examines Trump’s Travel-Ban Motives

Michael Flynn’s Questionable Conduct, and Trump’s

In 1999, Yuri Skuratov, then Russia’s top prosecutor, was investigating corruption inside the Kremlin. Then, a grainy sex tape surfaced that showed a man who resembled Skuratov with two young women in a hotel room. After Russian TV aired the video, there was some debate over whether the man was actually Skuratov. A few weeks later, the head of the F.S.B., a former intelligence officer named Vladimir Putin, held a news conference and settled the issue: the naked man was indeed Skuratov. Skuratov resigned, and by the end of the year Putin was the Russian President.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Comey’s Firing Is—and Isn’t—Like Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre
Donald Trump’s Firing of James Comey Is an Attack on American Democracy
The Fourth Circuit Examines Trump’s Travel-Ban Motives

Judges Doubt Trump’s Travel-Ban Motives

On Monday, in Richmond, Virginia, before a thirteen-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the deputy Solicitor General, Jeffrey Wall, was defending President Donald Trump’s motives with regard to the Administration’s latest executive-order travel ban, when Judge Henry Floyd mentioned statements by Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary. Reading from a brief filed by the lead plaintiff in the case, the International Refugee Assistance Project, Floyd said that, after the executive order was signed, “Sean Spicer said, ‘the principles remain the same!’ ” The judge continued with a litany of citations: “President Trump, statement concurrent with that time, ‘You know my plans’; Spicer: ‘President Trump yesterday continued to deliver on campaign promises.’ ” The quotes were part of IRAP’s presentation of the genealogy of the current order, which temporarily bans all refugees and people from six predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States. The order, issued on March 6th, replaced an even broader one, issued on January 27th, which was blocked by several courts. And that initial order, according to IRAP, had served as a proxy for, or a first installment of, Trump’s December, 2015, campaign pledge to institute “a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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

The Fourth Circuit Examines Trump’s Travel-Ban Motives

On Monday, in Richmond, Virginia, before a thirteen-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the deputy Solicitor General, Jeffrey Wall, was defending President Donald Trump’s motives with regard to the Administration’s latest executive-order travel ban, when Judge Henry Floyd mentioned statements by Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary. Reading from a brief filed by the lead plaintiff in the case, the International Refugee Assistance Project, Floyd said that, after the executive order was signed, “Sean Spicer said, ‘the principles remain the same!’ ” The judge continued with a litany of citations: “President Trump, statement concurrent with that time, ‘You know my plans’; Spicer: ‘President Trump yesterday continued to deliver on campaign promises.’ ” The quotes were part of IRAP’s presentation of the genealogy of the current order, which temporarily bans all refugees and people from six predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States. The order, issued on March 6th, replaced an even broader one, issued on January 27th, which was blocked by several courts. And that initial order, according to IRAP, had served as a proxy for, or a first installment of, Trump’s December, 2015, campaign pledge to institute “a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Comey’s Firing Is—and Isn’t—Like Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre
Donald Trump’s Firing of James Comey Is an Attack on American Democracy
Michael Flynn’s Questionable Conduct, and Trump’s

The Gang MS-13 Is a Real Problem, But Does Trump Have Any Answers?

“You know about MS-13?” President Trump asked a crowd at an N.R.A. rally last month in Atlanta. He was talking about the Salvadoran street gang notorious for its violence and brutality in Central America and the U.S. “Get them the hell out of here, right? Get them out,” he said, as the crowd roared.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Comey’s Firing Is—and Isn’t—Like Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre
Donald Trump’s Firing of James Comey Is an Attack on American Democracy
Walter Benjamin’s Unfinished Magnum Opus, Revisited Through Contemporary Art

Why Did the White House Ignore Sally Yates’s Warning About Michael Flynn?

There was a lot of dissembling and double-talk in Room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building on Monday afternoon, when Sally Yates, the former acting Attorney General, and James Clapper, the former director of National Intelligence, testified at a Senate subcommittee hearing that was supposed to be about Russian interference in the 2016 election.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Comey’s Firing Is—and Isn’t—Like Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre
Donald Trump’s Firing of James Comey Is an Attack on American Democracy
Michael Flynn’s Questionable Conduct, and Trump’s

What’s Wrong with Twitter’s Live-Video Strategy

On May 1st, Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. of Twitter, announced that the social-media platform would be reinventing itself as a video-streaming platform. At the NewFronts, where digital-media organizations present their wares to ad buyers, the company announced new partnerships with BuzzFeed, Vox Media, and others, to live-stream their video content. Twitter has become newly relevant, thanks to its status as President Donald Trump’s favorite social medium, and it added nine million active monthly users in the first quarter of this year. Dorsey, who has struggled to make shareholders happy, seemed determined not to waste the momentum—video is where advertisers want to be, so video they shall have.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Continuing Fallout from Trump and Nunes’s Fake Scandal
The Steve King Style of American Politics
The Politics of Conspicuous Displays of Self-Care

Why Emmanuel Macron’s Win Is Good News for Theresa May

If you had to devise the perfect name for a modern politician, “Emmanuel Macron” would fit the bill. The first half is messianic, hinting at a salvation long prayed for, and the second half sounds like a software company. Also, the name, though French, is not too French, being pronounceable wherever you go; it comes ready-globalized and primed to win. Thus, it was no surprise when the Presidency of France was handed to the Emmanuel Macron, on Sunday night. Someone called Jesus GygaBot might have beaten him, but nobody else.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The French Vote, Celebrate, and Return to Normal in Grand Style
The Huge Challenges Facing Emmanuel Macron
French Annoyingly Retain Right to Claim Intellectual Superiority Over Americans 

The French Vote, Celebrate, and Return to Normal in Grand Style

On Sunday, in the pretty village of Noyers-sur-Serein, in Burgundy, the mayor, wearing her sash of office, presided over the voting in the Presidential election from behind a table set up in the stone town hall. She was flanked by two women, one of whom checked names off a voter roll. As the town’s citizens filed in—three hundred and eighty out of four hundred and sixty-three who were registered to vote—they politely greeted the officials. After being ticked off the roll, each walked over to a table on which there were two stacks of folded paper ballots, one for Emmanuel Macron and the other for Marine Le Pen. The voters dutifully picked up ballots from both stacks before going into one of the two curtained booths, where they marked the ballot they favored and discarded the other in one of two plastic trash bins. The ritual, as the officials explained to me, is aimed at reinforcing the appearance of voter open-mindedness up to the very last, and to avoid influencing potentially undecided voters in the room.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Huge Challenges Facing Emmanuel Macron
French Annoyingly Retain Right to Claim Intellectual Superiority Over Americans 
The Far-Right American Nationalist Who Tweeted #MacronLeaks

The Huge Challenges Facing Emmanuel Macron

As Emmanuel Macron and his supporters celebrated his big victory in the French Presidential election outside the Louvre on Sunday night, you could almost hear the sighs of relief from other parts of Europe, and also from this country. After a long and fractious campaign, which saw the two parties that have run France for decades humiliated, and the far-right National Front enjoying record levels of support, the center ultimately held. Which is good news all around.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
French Annoyingly Retain Right to Claim Intellectual Superiority Over Americans 
The Far-Right American Nationalist Who Tweeted #MacronLeaks
Marine Le Pen’s Memoir: a Dutiful Daughter’s Sanitizing of Far-Right Politics