George Packer's Blog, page 84

The Persistence of Trump Derangement Syndrome

Suddenly, Trump Derangement Syndrome is a thing, or is trying to become one.

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The Real Trump Agenda: Helping Big Business
The White House Seems Excited to Shut Down the Government
What Is Science Good For?

What Is Science Good For?

Tomorrow, April 22nd—Earth Day—scientists, people who love science, and citizens concerned that government policies are increasingly detached from empirical reality will march in Washington, D.C., and nearly five hundred other cities around the world. Like any large group of protesters, the science marchers have struggled to craft their mission statement. “The March for Science champions robustly funded and publicly communicated science as a pillar of human freedom and prosperity,” they write, on their Web site. “We unite as a diverse, nonpartisan group to call for science that upholds the common good and for political leaders and policy makers to enact evidence based policies in the public interest.”

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The Real Trump Agenda: Helping Big Business
The White House Seems Excited to Shut Down the Government
The Persistence of Trump Derangement Syndrome

Fox Lost Bill O’Reilly, But It Still Has Donald Trump

There was a time, in the clouded days of January, 2016, before the Iowa caucuses, when Donald Trump was very angry at Fox News—or, rather, at a woman at Fox News, Megyn Kelly, who, he thought, had forgotten her place. Kelly had asked him, during the first Republican-primary debate, a few months earlier, about his demonstrable record of misogyny, and so he had refused to appear in an upcoming debate that the network was hosting, and of which Kelly would be a moderator. Trump talked about boycotting Fox altogether, but he was willing to go on Bill O’Reilly’s show, to be cajoled and flattered, and to deride Kelly. (“I have zero respect for Megyn Kelly. I don’t think she’s very good at what she does. I think she’s highly overrated.”) At the time, there was more than one sexual-harassment suit pending that involved O’Reilly’s treatment of his female colleagues, and a custody case that O’Reilly lost several weeks later, after, according to press reports, one of his daughters told a court examiner that she had seen him choking her mother and dragging her down a flight of stairs. (O’Reilly denied the abuse, as he has other charges of wrongdoing.) But none of that seems to have given O’Reilly any inkling that he might, in this very public setting, want to be seen as standing up for a colleague. Instead, he tried to persuade Trump that he should do the debate, because it would give him another chance to insult Kelly in person.

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Reading Bill O’Reilly’s Old Novel About a TV Newsman Who Murders Several People After Losing His Job
DystopIKEA
The Emptiness of Trump’s “Buy American” Executive Order

The Spurs, the Grizzlies, and the Pleasures of the Old Man Game

The first round of the N.B.A. playoffs is always a smorgasbord of basketball pleasures. The talent level is so high. Everyone is playing hard, and egos are on the line. The sheer abundance of it—multiple games each day, most of them shown on regular cable—is a shock to the casual fans who have not been wired into N.B.A. League Pass. This year’s playoffs promise several dramatic story lines: the prospect of the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors meeting again in the Finals for the third time in as many years; the James Harden-Russell Westbrook M.V.P. race embodied in the first-round Oklahoma City-Houston series like some kind of prank; Kevin Durant as the nexus of so many fractured subplots that he should win the award for Most Shakespearean Player (M.S.P.). For me, though, there is special pleasure in a more esoteric strain of this year’s playoffs: the players who have mastered the art of the Old Man Game.

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Analytics Reach the Rec League
The Season of Russell Westbrook and a New Era in N.B.A. Fandom
Knicks Game Memory, from the Year 2018

Tucker Carlson and Fox News After Bill O’Reilly

There are few forces on television more powerful than Tucker Carlson’s skepticism. Subjected to it, a pundit or politician will wilt, or stammer, or stand firm, or (very occasionally) respond with a convincing argument. Whichever way things go, the results are often compulsively watchable—at least for those with an appetite for televised discomfort. This skepticism has driven the success of Carlson’s show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” on Fox News, which will now become the cornerstone of the network’s prime-time lineup. On Wednesday, Fox News announced that Bill O’Reilly, who is under the cloud of a sexual-harassment scandal, was leaving the company. His replacement in the network’s 8 P.M. time slot is Carlson, a former antagonist of O’Reilly (he once called him a “thin-skinned blowhard”) who is now called upon to do what O’Reilly did for two decades: provide ratings big enough to insure that, night after night, Fox News remains the most-viewed cable-news network in the country.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
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
Fox News Ousts Bill O’Reilly: First Thoughts

A Trump Economic Slowdown?

During the election campaign, Donald Trump promised to jump-start the American economy and generate annual Gross Domestic Product growth of four per cent, which would represent roughly a doubling in the rate that we’ve seen since the Great Recession ended. At times, Trump made four per cent sound like a conservative estimate. “My great economists don’t want me to say this, but I think we can do better than that,” he said, in September of last year.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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DystopIKEA
Fox Lost Bill O’Reilly, But It Still Has Donald Trump
The Emptiness of Trump’s “Buy American” Executive Order

The Recent History of Bombing the Shit Out of ’Em

At a campaign rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Donald Trump, speaking of the Islamic State, once told supporters, “I would bomb the shit out of ’em. I would just bomb those suckers.” During Trump’s nascent tenure as Commander-in-Chief, air strikes conducted by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq and Syria have increased. So have civilian casualties: coalition strikes killed more civilians in March than in any other month since our mostly aerial war against the Islamic State began, in late 2014. Last Thursday, the U.S. military also acknowledged that a strike had mistakenly killed eighteen of our local allies in Syria. The victims belonged to the Syrian Democratic Forces, or S.D.F., a coalition of Arab and Kurdish fighters that partners closely with U.S. Special Operations Forces and has been preparing for months to attack the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa. The incident was widely presented as evidence that President Trump is following through on the promise he made in Fort Dodge, as well as an illustration of the perils attending such a strategy. An article on the front page of the Times the next day said that the blunder raised “concerns about whether the White House is applying any rigor to the process of approving airstrikes,” and a front-page article in the Washington Post called it “the worst friendly-fire incident of the war against the Islamic State.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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DystopIKEA
Fox Lost Bill O’Reilly, But It Still Has Donald Trump
The Emptiness of Trump’s “Buy American” Executive Order

In China, a Politicized View of the United Airlines Debacle

At around 7 P.M. on April 9th, at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, a police officer who had been summoned to a United Airlines flight heading to Louisville, Kentucky, wrenched an elderly man from his seat and dragged him down the aisle for the crime of refusing to give up the spot he’d paid for. The passenger, who was bleeding, suffered, according to his lawyer, a broken nose, a concussion, and two knocked-out teeth. Other passengers filmed the violent encounter, and their videos quickly went viral around the world.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
DystopIKEA
Fox Lost Bill O’Reilly, But It Still Has Donald Trump
The Emptiness of Trump’s “Buy American” Executive Order

Fox News Ousts Bill O’Reilly: First Thoughts

Bill O’Reilly, the longtime Fox News star, is leaving the channel amid reports of sexual-harassment allegations made against him. Below, New Yorker writers offer some initial reactions to the news.

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What Bill O’Reilly Means to Fox News
How a Veteran of Fox News Boycotts Does It
A Perfect Storm at Uber

Donald Trump, North Korea, and the Case of the Phantom Armada

“I said, ‘Look, we have ships headed there,’ ” President Donald J. Trump told the Wall Street Journal on April 12th, recounting the straight talk that he had handed to President Xi Jinping, of China, on the subject of North Korea. “He says he knows it very well. I said not only are there aircraft carriers, we have the nuclear subs, which you have to let him know.” “Him” was Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, whom Xi, apparently, was expected to intimidate with information that has now turned out to be false. Some degree of delusion always has to be factored in with Trump: when he referred to “the aircraft carriers” and, in another interview, with Fox Business, said that “we are sending an armada, very powerful,” he was widely understood to be referring to a single aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Vinson, and its support ships. In fairness, the Vinson would have been powerful and provocative enough—if it had, in fact, been speeding toward the Korean Peninsula, or the Sea of Japan, or even just the Pacific Ocean, which it was not. It was in the Indian Ocean, headed in the opposite direction, for exercises with what might be described as the Australian Armada. Just when you think you see the contours of Trump’s phantom menace, he comes up with a Phantom Fleet.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Jon Ossoff and the Future of the Democratic Party
The Conservative Agenda for Gorsuch’s First Week
The Continuing Fallout from Trump and Nunes’s Fake Scandal