George Packer's Blog, page 91

How Trump Could Make NAFTA Better but Probably Won’t

Among the awkward moments at a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Donald Trump, on March 17th, was Trump’s assertion that “Germany has done very well in its trade deals with the United States, and I give them credit for it, but . . . it’s not exactly what you call good for our workers.” It was up to Merkel to explain to Trump that he didn’t have the facts straight. “When we speak about trade agreements . . . the European Union is negotiating those agreements for all of the member states of the European Union,” she said. And, perhaps more to the point, Germany has never had a trade deal with the U.S., nor has the E.U.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Keystone Kops in the White House
Ivanka Trump Tries to Quiet the Ethics Critics
Mike Pence’s Marriage and the Beliefs That Keep Women from Power

Could Michael Flynn Turn on Trump?

“I’ve seen the transcript,” a Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee told me recently. “It was explained to us. I don’t know why Flynn did it.” The congressman was talking about a conversation that took place in late December between Michael Flynn, then Trump’s incoming national-security adviser, and the Russian Ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. He noted that he didn’t know why Flynn had discussed sanctions with Kislyak, and wasn’t sure whether he had crossed any legal or ethical lines.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Keystone Kops in the White House
Ivanka Trump Tries to Quiet the Ethics Critics
How Moderates Took Back Kansas

The Facts About Immigration

During a conference at the Brookings Institution last week, the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton presented their latest paper on the rising mortality rates of white working-class Americans, which received, and is still receiving, a huge amount of attention. That’s understandable. Even taking account of the critiques of the paper that have been presented, some of which the economics blogger Noah Smith counter-critiqued on Wednesday, the issues raised by Case and Deaton’s work are profound.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Keystone Kops in the White House
Ivanka Trump Tries to Quiet the Ethics Critics
How Trump Could Make NAFTA Better but Probably Won’t

The Bodies of Mosul

I drove into Mosul in a battered Nissan pickup truck in mid-March. Iraq’s second largest city, once a thriving manufacturing and commercial center, is now a wreckage of destroyed factories, shops, and homes. Huge craters from bombs dropped by the U.S.-led coalition obstructed major intersections. The craters, designed to slow ISIS suicide drivers targeting the Iraqi Army, have since filled with filmy, stagnant water; they were treacherous to circumvent. Roads were lined with rubble from five months of war—chunks of concrete, twisted electricity poles and downed wires, shards of window glass. Almost every block of East Mosul was littered with charred cars. ISIS seized them from residents, setting them alight to emit black smoke and hide their movements from coalition warplanes.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Face to Face with the Ghost of ISIS
A Photographer’s View of a Battle to Destroy ISIS
The Many Dangers of Donald Trump’s Executive Order

The Second Coming of the French Far-Right Tradition

One of the strangest intertwinings in contemporary life is that of extreme right-wing French thought and literature with the new transatlantic white-nationalist mind-set. This is best exemplified by Steve Bannon’s notorious embrace of the themes of Jean Raspail’s bizarre 1973 novel, “The Camp of the Saints,” a nightmare vision of the invasion of France by alien hordes (though, curiously, not from Africa or the Middle East but from India). But even within France there has been, as a good piece in the Wall Street Journal made plain the other day, an intellectual rehabilitation not just of far-right politics but of extreme-right intellect. For years, one of the prophylactics against the rise of the Le Pens, father Jean-Marie and daughter Marine, was their apparent inability to get anyone in the French functionary class—a far more significant opinion-making and directing body in France than here, as illustrated by the great difference between a French “haute fonctionnaire” and a mere American or British civil servant—to embrace them. That has changed, or has seemed to change, recently, with Marine taking on a group of surreptitious haute-fonctionnaire “Horaces”—the name is a reference to the great if obsequious Roman poet who hymned the emperor Augustus.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Facts About Immigration
The Sriracha Argument for Immigration
After an Immigration Raid, a City’s Students Vanish

Franco-American

One of the strangest intertwinings in contemporary life is that of extreme right-wing French thought and literature with the new transatlantic white-nationalist mind-set. This is best exemplified by Steve Bannon’s notorious embrace of the themes of Jean Raspail’s bizarre 1973 novel, “The Camp of the Saints,” a nightmare vision of the invasion of France by alien hordes (though, curiously, not from Africa or the Middle East but from India). But even within France there has been, as a good piece in the Wall Street Journal made plain the other day, an intellectual rehabilitation not just of far-right politics but of extreme-right intellect. For years, one of the prophylactics against the rise of the Le Pens, father Jean-Marie and daughter Marine, was their apparent inability to get anyone in the French functionary class—a far more significant opinion-making and directing body in France than here, as illustrated by the great difference between a French “haute fonctionnaire” and a mere American or British civil servant—to embrace them. That has changed, or has seemed to change, recently, with Marine taking on a group of surreptitious haute-fonctionnaire “Horaces”—the name is a reference to the great if obsequious Roman poet who hymned the emperor Augustus.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Sriracha Argument for Immigration
After an Immigration Raid, a City’s Students Vanish
The Problem with Steve Bannon’s Story About His Father

Senators Ask for an Investigation into Trump Dealings in Azerbaijan

The ranking Democratic members of the Senate’s Foreign Relations, Banking, and Judiciary committees have written a joint letter to several Trump Administration officials asking them to address the possibility that the Trump Organization violated several laws in its dealings in Azerbaijan. The concerns raised in the letter are based on an article I wrote in The New Yorker about the Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku, a project that was nearly completed but never opened.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How Trump Could Still Undermine Obamacare
Nunes Says He Held Russia Hearings Alone in His Apartment and They Went Great
Deutsche Bank, Mirror Trades, and More Russian Threads

The Brooklyn Neighborhood Blogger with the Paul Manafort Scoop

Katia Kelly has lived in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn for three decades. About ten years ago, when she was in her mid-forties, she began writing a blog about the neighborhood, and the changes she saw in it, called Pardon Me for Asking (tagline: “News from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, and Beyond . . .”). Her posts, which feature her own photographs, often concern store openings and closings, local hot topics, neighborhood eyesores, and Brooklyn history. A few weeks ago, a stray tip led to a post titled “Washington Lobbyist and Trump Advisor Paul Manafort Owns Brownstone in Carroll Gardens.” This week, WNYC cited Kelly’s reporting in its article about a “series of puzzling real estate deals” that Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, who is under scrutiny for his ties to Russia, has made in New York City in the past decade. Between April, 2015, and January, 2017, WNYC reported, Manafort borrowed about twelve million dollars against three New York City properties, including the Carroll Gardens home.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Russia Problem Is Far from Marginal
Long Live Shea Stadium
Parquet Courts and the Uncertain Future of Indie

Deutsche Bank, Mirror Trades, and More Russian Threads

On March 10th, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, the ranking Democratic member on the House Committee on Financial Services, wrote a letter with four other Democrats to Congressman Jeb Hensarling, the Republican chairman of that committee, the contents of which would have been considered extraordinary in a less chaotic and febrile political atmosphere. The letter began:

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How Trump Could Still Undermine Obamacare
Nunes Says He Held Russia Hearings Alone in His Apartment and They Went Great
Donald Trump and the Myth of the Coal Revival

Donald Trump and the Myth of the Coal Revival

On Tuesday, less than two weeks after the White House unveiled its “budget blueprint to make America great again,” which proposed to reduce the Environmental Protection Agency’s funding by $2.6 billion and lay off about a fifth of its workforce, President Trump took aim at the E.P.A. once more. On a dais in the Map Room of the agency’s D.C. headquarters, Trump gave a thirteen-minute-long speech celebrating “a new era in American energy,” as thirteen “incredible coal miners” stood silently at his side, like shy and stocky pageant contestants. They were the physical embodiment of this new era—white, middle-aged, clean-shaven, strong—which was about to be signed into existence with a sweeping executive order on energy and environmental policy. Mining is what they “want to do,” Trump said. “They love the job. I fully understand that. I grew up in a real-estate family, and until this recent little excursion into the world of politics I could never understand why anybody would not want to be in the world of real estate.” To put the miners “back to work,” the President announced, he was lifting the moratorium on coal leases on federal lands. He was also ordering a review of his predecessor’s Clean Power Plan, that “crushing attack on American industry.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How Trump Could Still Undermine Obamacare
Nunes Says He Held Russia Hearings Alone in His Apartment and They Went Great
Deutsche Bank, Mirror Trades, and More Russian Threads