George Packer's Blog, page 83

Back in Chicago, Obama Looks to the Future

Perhaps that was Obama’s point, or his goal: to move forward past the tangle of what went wrong for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He said that it was time for the next generation to take “their own crack at changing the world.” He talked about the many “pathways” to engagement, including those outside of politics. (There was praise for the Parent Teacher Association, for example.) He talked, more than anything, about speaking directly to people, including those who you might assume would not agree with you. He nodded when Ayanna Watkin, a high-school senior at Kenwood Academy, said that, if politicians would “actually go out to the community, the community would feel more welcome.” He said that the wish expressed by Kelsey McClear, a senior at Loyola College, for politicians to get back to the basics and listen to people—and not just to respond to them but “to understand” them—was a good rule to follow in marriage, too. (“That will save you a lot of heartache and grief.”) He asked the young people about the dangers of fake news, but mostly in the context of urging them to let more voices in, rather than keeping others out, and to emphasize, again and again, the need for establishing trust. (He also told them to be careful about which pictures of themselves they put on social media; if there were images of everything he had done in high school, he said, he probably never would have been elected.) He prompted the lone Republican on stage, Max Freedman, a junior at the University of Chicago, to speak at length about the perception that “colleges are a bastion of political correctness.” When Ramuel Figueroa, a student at Roosevelt University, who is also a veteran, said that he was working on a project that involved interviewing undocumented day laborers, and that many of them seemed much more fearful lately, Obama offered some practiced advice: approach the laborers through someone they already trusted, like a priest; don’t show up the first time with a clipboard. But he added that both sides of the immigration debate needed to hear and to respect each other more. Those who wanted to limit immigration had to remember that they were dealing with human beings, and that not everyone who arrived on Ellis Island had his or her papers in order; but advocates for immigrants’ rights also ought “not to assume those who have trouble with the current immigration system are necessarily racist.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Live: Journalists Discuss Trump’s First Hundred Days
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Vive L’Europe! A Macron Win Would Give the E.U. a Lifeline

For years now, it has been fashionable on the right to argue that Europe is heading for Armageddon, that it could not survive the consequences of mass immigration, stifling bureaucracy, an overweening welfare state, and restrictive labor laws. This dark view isn’t restricted to believers in Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis and Trumpian ethno-nationalists, though it is widely shared in those quarters. Last year, I heard a well-travelled and urbane British banker argue for a “leave” vote in the Brexit referendum on the grounds that the European Union was destined to collapse anyway, and it would be better for the United Kingdom to be on the outside when the inevitable happened.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Live: Journalists Discuss Trump’s First Hundred Days
What a Historic Vote Means for Marine Le Pen and France
The Persistence of Trump Derangement Syndrome

Live: Journalists Discuss Trump’s First Hundred Days

Join us on Facebook tonight for “Public Forum: 100 Days,” the third event in our “Well-Ordered Nation” series on the Trump Presidency, which is co-produced by the Public Theatre and The New Yorker.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Back in Chicago, Obama Looks to the Future
Vive L’Europe! A Macron Win Would Give the E.U. a Lifeline
Obama’s Barrage of Complete Sentences Seen as Brutal Attack on Trump

What a Historic Vote Means for Marine Le Pen and France

On Sunday night, upon learning that Marine Le Pen would advance to the second round of the French Presidential election, a giddy cheer emanated from the crowd gathered at the candidate’s election-night party, in the northern town of Hénin-Beaumont. Supporters sang the “Marseillaise” over and over in a rapturous chant. Le Pen’s victory does not represent the kind of sudden populist wave that swept over the U.S. in November, or the U.K. last summer. Instead, her close second-place finish on Sunday was the culmination of a forty-five-year battle by her National Front (F.N.) party—which was previously led by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen—to bring nativist, nationalist principles into the center of French politics. Many of the party’s militants—activists—celebrating in Hénin-Beaumont would tell you that they have been F.N. supporters since the womb. Le Pen captured 21.4 per cent of the vote, just a few points less than the winner, Emmanuel Macron, another third-party candidate, who captured 23.9 per cent. The results suggest that, for the moment, at least, the F.N. is more mainstream than the country’s two traditional parties, the Socialists and the Republicans. When Le Pen came out for her victory speech, her blond hair shining nearly white in the stage lights, she spoke for only three minutes, conveying an understandable fatigue. “The grand debate is finally going to happen,” she announced, referring to her coming ideological face-off with Macron. Her words trailed off, and she broke into the tight grin that her followers know so well.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Vive L’Europe! A Macron Win Would Give the E.U. a Lifeline
Live: Journalists Discuss Trump’s First Hundred Days
The Persistence of Trump Derangement Syndrome

Rescuing the Last Two Animals at the Mosul Zoo

Mosul’s forlorn little zoo, a collection of rusted cages in a park near the Tigris River, was abandoned by its keepers in October, as the Iraqi Army began to liberate the city from the Islamic State. For three months, the zoo was a staging ground for ISIS fighters. More than forty of the zoo animals died, either as collateral damage—trapped between warring combatants—or from starvation. By January, when the eastern half of Mosul was freed, only two animals had survived: Lula, a caramel-colored female bear, and Simba, a three-year-old lion.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Trying to Describe Giannis Antetokounmpo

Late in the Milwaukee Bucks’ close second-game loss to the Toronto Raptors, on Tuesday night, the team’s sui-generis star Giannis Antetokounmpo backed his way toward the basket, along the baseline. His defender, Raptors forward P. J. Tucker, buttressed himself, but Antetokounmpo, all roughly seven feet of him, nimbly spun and charged the hoop. Tucker, a good and muscular defender, kept pace, forcing Antetokounmpo behind the basket—but Antetokounmpo spun again, and extended one cartoonishly long arm to flick the ball into the basket as his body sailed in the other direction. Tucker was called for a foul on the play. “He is one step away from being able to dunk the ball from almost anywhere on the court,” Tucker had said after the first game in the series, which the Bucks handily and unexpectedly won. (Milwaukee is the No. 6 seed; Toronto, No. 3.) At one point in that first game, Antetokounmpo got a high screen, drove, and then dunked over Tucker’s teammate Serge Ibaka. Hanging from the rim post-dunk, his right shoe simultaneously touched the floor.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Can President Trump Learn on the Job?

“There’s just something about this job as President . . .” George W. Bush observed last week, in an interview with NPR. “You think one thing going in and then the pressures of the job or the realities of the world, you know, are different than you thought.” Bush wasn’t reminiscing about his own Presidency; he was “opining,” he said, about the current one. The reality that Bush had in mind—the one that he hopes President Trump will embrace—is that it is in America’s national interest “to be allies with Mexico and not alienate Mexico.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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A Fleeting Glimpse of Playoff Rondo

The Chicago Bulls point guard Rajon Rondo is the only N.B.A. player I can think of with a nickname that can only be used for two months a year. That sometime moniker, “Playoff Rondo,” points to his propensity for saving his best performances for this biggest and most visible stage. It’s a bit like Reggie Jackson’s “Mr. October,” except that while Jackson’s seasonal sobriquet had purely positive connotations, indicating his ability to accomplish incredible feats when they mattered most, Rondo’s tag is meant, partly, to suggest that maybe he’s dogging it a bit the rest of the time. It’s hard to tell whether he simply plays harder for the national-TV cameras or if, for him, it’s somehow easier to be fully present when the stakes are clear and close at hand.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Real Trump Agenda: Helping Big Business

What with U.S. aircraft carriers sailing in the wrong direction, Attorney General Jeff Sessions describing Hawaii as “an island in the Pacific,” and Sarah Palin, Ted Nugent, and Kid Rock larking around in the Oval Office, it’s been a pretty typical week for the Trump Administration: jaw-dropping, mind-addling, hard to keep up with. With all the chaos and dysfunction at the top, the Administration’s many pro-corporate regulatory initiatives are being somewhat overlooked by both the media and the public at large. This is wrong: these are decisions and actions that will have harmful consequences, and Trump’s own supporters will be among those hurt.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The White House Seems Excited to Shut Down the Government

Next Saturday, April 29th, is President Trump’s hundredth day in office, a historical marker used by the press to assess a new President’s progress since the first term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. F.D.R. was grappling with the Great Depression, and he had a pliant Congress that would have passed almost anything he proposed. Presidents since then have often struggled to meet the expectations of the hundred-day report card but generally can point to a list of major legislative accomplishments. Trump does not have such a list. At the same time, the Trump White House is facing a much more consequential deadline, one that will help define his first months in office and perhaps his first term: absent a spending deal with Democrats and Republicans in Congress, next Saturday the government will shut down.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Real Trump Agenda: Helping Big Business
The Persistence of Trump Derangement Syndrome
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