George Packer's Blog, page 81

How Trump Could Ditch the Freedom Caucus and Pass a Bipartisan Health-Care Bill

Every President is surprised, at the beginning of his term, at how difficult it is to move legislation through Congress, but Donald Trump seems not to have known even the most rudimentary facts about the legislative system before assuming office. He claimed in February that “nobody knew” that health-care reform “could be so complicated.” Last month, Trump and his aides seemed surprised that the Freedom Caucus, a group of some forty right-wing House Republicans, defeated the first Republican bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, despite the fact that the Freedom Caucus has played a starring role in every congressional battle for the past several years, regularly torpedoing the plans of Republican leaders. And Trump seems to have been only dimly aware of the Senate filibuster, which can only be broken with sixty votes.

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What Trump Sees in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte
Fourth-Grade Class Touring White House Answers Trump’s Questions About the Civil War

What Trump Sees in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte

Any way you look at it, the White House’s account of a phone call between President Trump and the Philippine President, Rodrigo Duterte, which took place over the weekend, is shocking. The call was “very friendly,” the White House said in a statement. Trump and Duterte discussed “the fact that the Philippine Government is fighting very hard to rid its country of drugs, a scourge that affects many countries throughout the world.” It ended with a kicker: “President Trump also invited President Duterte to the White House to discuss the importance of the Philippine-United States alliance, which is now heading in a very positive direction.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Joe Biden’s Sound Advice for Democrats
How Trump Could Ditch the Freedom Caucus and Pass a Bipartisan Health-Care Bill
Fourth-Grade Class Touring White House Answers Trump’s Questions About the Civil War

The War on Wildlife and Its Protectors

The shooting, by armed raiders, of the wildlife conservationist Kuki Gallmann, on April 23rd, is the latest in a series of attacks against environmental activists in Kenya and neighboring African countries. Gallmann, who is seventy-three years old and the author of the best-selling book “I Dreamed of Africa,” the basis for the Hollywood movie of the same title, was shot twice in the stomach. She survived the attack, and is recovering in a hospital in Nairobi.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Pandas, Pangolins, and China’s Fitful Attempts at Wildlife Conservation
A Win in the Ground War Against Elephant Poachers in Africa
Remembering the Craigheads, Pioneers of Wildlife Biology

Two Scenes from Pope Francis’s Revolution of Tenderness

Five decades ago, in an essay in The New York Review of Books, Hannah Arendt described an exchange she had had with a “Roman chambermaid” about Pope John XXIII. The beloved pontiff had died, of stomach cancer, two years earlier, not long before the Second Vatican Council, which he convened, transformed the liturgy and the spirit of the Catholic Church. “How could it happen that a true Christian would sit on St. Peter’s chair?” the chambermaid asked, apparently referring to the succession of venal company men who had held the office over the centuries. “Didn’t he first have to be appointed Bishop, and Archbishop, and Cardinal, until he finally was elected to be Pope? Had nobody been aware of who he was?”

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After a Hundred Days, Trump Is Trump Is Trump

On the first day of his second hundred days in office, Donald Trump visited familiar terrain: Trump National Golf Club, in Sterling, Virginia. According to Mark Knoller, a White House correspondent for CBS News, it was the twentieth visit that Trump has made to one his golf clubs in Florida or Virginia since his swearing-in. In all likelihood, Trump thought that he deserved a few hours on the links after all his exertions trying to put a positive spin on three months of chaos, bluster, sabre-rattling, and the trashing of historical norms.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Trump’s First Hundred Days: Humor from The New Yorker

Ueli Steck and a Fateful Return to Everest

When the sad news reached me this morning that Ueli Steck, probably the most accomplished mountaineer of his generation, had died near Mt. Everest, I was surprised to hear that he had returned to a place he disdained for its crowds and its bitter base-camp politics. Steck was forty. He reportedly fell on Nuptse, an adjacent peak, which he was climbing in order to acclimatize to the altitude. He was in Nepal for another attempt at a route—one connecting the summits of Everest and Lhotse—that he’d had to abandon in 2013, after being attacked by Sherpas.

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In Memoriam: Jack Ziegler
Postscript: Debbie Reynolds, 1932-2016
Searching for Signs of Hannibal’s Route in DNA from Horse Manure

The Worrisome Reporting on Aaron Hernandez’s Sexuality

Two days before the April 19th suicide of Aaron Hernandez, the former star New England Patriots tight end who had been serving a life sentence for the murder of his friend Odin Lloyd, the investigative journalist Michele McPhee appeared on a Boston sports radio show. It was “Marathon Monday” in Boston. McPhee, an ABC News producer, formerly a New York Daily News bureau chief, and an author of true-crime books, had been invited on WEEI’s “The Kirk & Callahan Show” to talk about her new book, “Maximum Harm,” which investigates the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Hernandez had just been acquitted of murder the previous Friday, in a separate case. But McPhee’s friends Kirk Minihane and Gerry Callahan wanted to discuss something else: Hernandez’s sexuality, which McPhee had been investigating as a possible motive in the Lloyd murder. Lloyd was shot to death, on June 17, 2013, in an industrial park about a mile from Hernandez’s North Attleborough, Massachusetts, home after spending the previous evening with him. A specific motive for the killing was never established, beyond a suspected breach of trust.

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Pandas, Pangolins, and China’s Fitful Attempts at Wildlife Conservation

In late February, a three-and-a-half-year-old cub clambered into a crate marked “Contents one panda” to begin a sixteen-hour, one-way flight to China. Bao Bao was born at the National Zoo, in Washington, D.C., and this was her first trip overseas. Her parents have lived in the American capital since 2000, but they, like all giant pandas, remain the property of the Chinese state, which lends the animals to foreign zoos for around a million dollars per year. Any products of overseas panda unions also belong to the Chinese motherland.

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Bill O’Reilly’s Self-Aggrandizing Sense of Persecution

On Monday, Bill O’Reilly returned with his podcast, “No Spin News,” which will help provide for a soft landing after his forced exit from Fox News. (A payout that has been reported to be as high as twenty-five million dollars should also come in handy.) He had very little to say about the sexual-harassment allegations that ended his twenty-one-year career at the network, and nothing about the portrait that has emerged of Fox News as a geriatric frat party where the rewards for being a top dog included ogling, propositioning, and groping the women who worked there, from clerical temps to news producers to star anchors like Megyn Kelly. Earlier this month, an investigation by the Times uncovered the stories of five women who had accused O’Reilly, now sixty-seven years old, of harassment that included “verbal abuse, lewd comments, unwanted advances and phone calls in which it sounded as if Mr. O’Reilly was masturbating.” The women had received payouts totalling thirteen million dollars in exchange for not pursuing lawsuits or speaking publicly about the allegations. More than one said that O’Reilly had threatened to wreck their careers; the former Fox producer Andrea Mackris told the Times that O’Reilly vowed that if she complained about his behavior, he’d make her “pay so dearly” that she’d “wish she’d never been born.” An internal Fox investigation turned up still more accusations; advertisers cancelled their sponsorship of O’Reilly’s evening program, and as of last week he, like his former boss, the accused sexual harasser Roger Ailes, was out.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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What It Was Like Being a Left-Wing Pundit on “The O’Reilly Factor”
Reading Bill O’Reilly’s Old Novel About a TV Newsman Who Murders Several People After Losing His Job
Fox Lost Bill O’Reilly, But It Still Has Donald Trump

Why Trumpcare Keeps Failing

On Thursday, for the second time in a month, House Republicans announced that they were cancelling a vote on a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare. This time, the measure under consideration was a compromise bill, worked out over several weeks of negotiations between two Republicans: Mark Meadows, a North Carolinian and the head of the right-wing Freedom Caucus; and Tom MacArthur, a New Jerseyan who is co-chair of the Tuesday Group, a coalition of more centrist House Republicans. In late March, opposition from the Freedom Caucus torpedoed the G.O.P.’s initial push to replace Obamacare. The theory now was that if the leaders of these two groups—a right-winger from the South and a businessman from the Northeast—could reach a compromise on an amended version of the bill, then the measure would be able to attract the two hundred and sixteen votes it needs to pass the House.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump Cartoons: Politics and Satire in The New Yorker
Why Donald Trump Is Skipping the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Betsy DeVos Says Media Shouldn’t Emphasize First Hundred Days Because “It’s So Hard to Count to a Hundred”