George Packer's Blog, page 98

A New Phase of Chaos on Transgender Rights

With a one-sentence order last week, the Supreme Court dashed hopes of a big transgender-rights decision this term. The Court was supposed to review the case of Gavin Grimm, a transgender teen-age boy who sued the Gloucester County School Board for the right to use the boys’ bathroom and won, in the Fourth Circuit. But the basis of the Fourth Circuit’s decision was the Obama Administration’s view that Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits schools that receive federal funding from discriminating “on the basis of sex,” requires schools to treat transgender students in a way consistent with their gender identity. Last month, the Trump Administration retracted that position. Both Grimm and the school board urged the Supreme Court to review the case as planned, arguing that the government’s shift made it no less urgent for the Court to declare Title IX’s meaning. But the Supreme Court decided to vacate the lower court’s decision and send the case back for reconsideration. Grimm’s victory in the lower court was tethered to the Obama guidance, and disappeared along with it.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Preet Bharara’s Complicated Legacy on White-Collar Crime
How Educational Children’s Books Are Explaining President Trump
Twansient Thought

Preet Bharara’s Complicated Legacy on White-Collar Crime

On October 16, 2009, just two months after being sworn in as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara held a press conference in lower Manhattan to make an announcement: his office had just arrested Raj Rajaratnam, the manager of a seven-billion-dollar hedge fund, on securities-fraud charges. “This case should serve as a wake-up call for Wall Street,” Bharara said. In significant ways, it was, although Bharara’s tenure—which ended abruptly over the weekend, after he was fired by the Trump Administration—could well be remembered for the Wall Street cases he didn’t bring as much as for those he did.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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A New Phase of Chaos on Transgender Rights
Daily Cartoon: Monday, March 13th
How Educational Children’s Books Are Explaining President Trump

The N.B.A.’s Great Impersonator

Watch closely next time LeBron James steps on the court for the Cleveland Cavaliers. You’ll see not only the usual flurry of quantifiable activity—points, rebounds, assists, improbable trailing blocks in finely timed bunches—but also those motions and habits that make James memorable as a personality as well as a player. After he dribbles across the half-court line, his eyes move in rapid darts, from teammate to cutting teammate, attempting to memorize—or, more likely, to determine—the patterns of their movement. Sometimes he points to a spot on the floor or shoos someone away from another. “Go left; not there; almost; so close,” he seems to be thinking. When he doesn’t have the ball, he chews his nails and fidgets with the edges of his jersey. He jogs as if to a martial snare.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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A New Orleans N.B.A All-Star Game Diary
Football and Politics
Spectacular Relief from the World at the Australian Open

The Preet Bharara Firing: A Reading List

Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced Saturday that he’d been fired by the Trump Administration. Bharara was among the forty-six U.S. Attorneys, all holdovers from the Obama Administration, who were abruptly asked to resign on Friday.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Exposed: Donald Trump’s Sham Populism
The Words We Use About Donald Trump
Health-Care Reform and Trumpism

A New Moment For South Korea

On Friday morning in South Korea, the eight judges of the country’s Constitutional Court appeared live on national television, sitting solemn-faced in their high-back, red-velvet chairs. Three months earlier, the country’s conservative President, Park Geun-hye, had been impeached by the National Assembly. The court had been tasked with either upholding or overturning the legislators’ decision, and it was now ready to issue its ruling. Lee Jung-mi, the only woman justice, read the entire opinion aloud. The court condemned Park’s “betrayal of the public trust” and emphasized the need to “protect the constitution.” Lee spoke for more than twenty minutes, and then a digital scorecard eclipsed her on the screen: eight votes to uphold the impeachment, zero to overturn.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Democrats and the Seesaw of Identity Politics
A Letter to a Friend in a Time of Trump
On Choosing Trump and Being Bad

Exposed: Donald Trump’s Sham Populism

Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House Majority Leader, went on Sean Hannity’s show on Thursday night and tried to talk up the awful health-care bill that his party had just rushed through two committees. His message was aimed at the ultra-conservative groups, such as the Freedom Caucus and Heritage Action for America, that have come out strongly against the proposed legislation. McCarthy didn’t try to claim that the bill would make health care more affordable or widely available. Instead, he defended its conservative bona fides, twice pointing out that it would repeal all the taxes that were introduced under the Affordable Care Act—taxes that mainly hit the one per cent.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Words We Use About Donald Trump
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Health-Care Reform and Trumpism

The Words We Use About Donald Trump

That’s crazy! That is the instant, intuitive, and, one might think, only possible response of a sane person to a week’s worth of tweets from President Donald Trump. Only crazy people make reckless charges, without any plausible foundation, and then simply shrug and sit on them. Take one recent example: “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” This charge is mindboggling, not least for being self-exploding. For Obama to have wiretapped Trump (put aside that that’s not, technically speaking, what is done any longer; the President may have been moved by vague memories of how the feds brought down John Gotti), Obama would have needed his own private team of plumbers to break into, or hack the systems of, Trump Tower. And no one in his right mind suggests that Obama ever had such a team. The most obvious alternative would be that it was done by the F.B.I., in response to a court order spurred by genuine suspicion of grave wrongdoing. In that scenario, Trump would be asserting that someone in the Department of Justice had grounds for such suspicion, sufficient to convince a judge. But he couldn’t possibly have intended to say that. All this suggests that he may not be capable of the normal logic of normal people, of any kind of political bent. And that, folks, would be crazy.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Exposed: Donald Trump’s Sham Populism
How Geert Wilders, the Dutch Trump, Wins Even If He Loses
Health-Care Reform and Trumpism

How Geert Wilders, the Dutch Trump, Wins Even If He Loses

On the day of Donald Trump’s election, I happened to be in Amsterdam. That night, while people in the U.S. were still going to the polls, I found myself sitting in front of a room full of nervous-looking Europeans at Paradiso, which is normally a music venue, taking part in a public panel discussion about what was happening across the ocean. One of the other panelists was Ruth Oldenziel, a Dutch professor at Eindhoven University and a highly regarded America watcher. Although I am American, I have no doubt that Oldenziel knows more about the inner workings of the U.S. political system than I do, so it was with some relief that I heard her declaim, regarding Hillary Clinton and the building fear of a Trump upset, “Don’t worry—she’s got this.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Exposed: Donald Trump’s Sham Populism
The Words We Use About Donald Trump
Scott Pruitt Rejects Climate-Change Reality

Health-Care Reform and Trumpism

Before Donald Trump came along, there was a lively debate in the Republican Party over the best way to appeal to working-class voters. Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 energized a faction of conservatives who modestly proposed that a plutocrat running on a message of upper-income tax cuts and deregulation had little to offer voters who were struggling economically. The leading thinkers of the Reformicons, as these conservatives called themselves, included the conservative pundits Yuval Levin, James Pethokoukis, and Ramesh Ponnuru. They argued that “neo-libertarians,” who were too close to the G.O.P.’s wealthy donor class and were obsessed with a Reagan-era agenda, had taken over policymaking in the Republican Party. While the neo-libertarians favored comprehensive immigration reform, further reductions in taxes on the wealthy, and attacks on the welfare state, the Reformicons pointed out that restrictionist immigration policies might help American workers more, that cuts in tax rates were no longer crucial, and that many government programs should be reformed, not ended.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Exposed: Donald Trump’s Sham Populism
The Words We Use About Donald Trump
Scott Pruitt Rejects Climate-Change Reality

Scott Pruitt Rejects Climate-Change Reality

Scott Pruitt, President Donald Trump’s choice to run the Environmental Protection Agency, was explaining to CNBC’s Joe Kernen that the Paris climate accord was “a bad deal,” with provisions that were “not an America First type of approach,” when Kernen asked him if they could cut to the “nitty-gritty.” Did Pruitt believe that “it’s been proven that CO2 is the primary control knob for climate?”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Exposed: Donald Trump’s Sham Populism
The Words We Use About Donald Trump
How Geert Wilders, the Dutch Trump, Wins Even If He Loses