George Packer's Blog, page 99

Your Questions About “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal,” Answered

This week, The New Yorker published “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal,” an investigation into a hotel-development deal that the Trump Organization made with notorious Azerbaijani oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. On Facebook and Twitter, we asked readers to submit questions they had after reading the article. (Questions were edited for clarity.)

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

President Trump’s Guantánamo Delusion

President Donald Trump has never been particularly lucid on the subject of the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He is for it, of course. Early last year, at a campaign rally, he said, “I watched President Obama talking about Gitmo, right, Guantánamo Bay, which, by the way, which, by the way, we are keeping open. Which we are keeping open . . . and we’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.” This cartoonish threat raised the question of where or in which putative wars the United States would find these new inmates. Trump seemed to think, in a later interview, that he could send Americans accused of terrorism to Guantánamo to be tried by military commissions. But American citizens cannot, by law, be held at Guantánamo. Details, for Trump.

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Ben Carson, Donald Trump, and the Misuse of American History

How Long Will the Trump Bull Market Last?

Thursday marks eight years since the low point of the last bear market on Wall Street. On March 9, 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 6,547.05. Since then, it has more than tripled. If you’d invested twenty thousand dollars in the Dow index eight years ago, it would now be worth about sixty-four thousand dollars.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Ben Carson, Donald Trump, and the Misuse of American History
Trump’s Presidency Is Ruining My Personal Brand
Latinos Feel the Sting of Trump’s Presidency

Ben Carson, Donald Trump, and the Misuse of American History

Earlier this week, Ben Carson, the somnolent surgeon dispatched to oversee the Department of Housing and Urban Development on behalf of the Trump Administration, created a stir when he referred to enslaved black people—stolen, trafficked, and sold into that status—as “immigrants” and spoke of their dreams for their children and grandchildren. In the ensuing hail of criticism, Carson doubled down, saying that it was possible for someone to be an involuntary immigrant. Carson’s defenses centered upon strict adherence to the definition of the word “immigrant” as a person who leaves one country to take up residence in another. This is roughly akin to arguing that it is technically possible to refer to a kidnapping victim as a “house guest,” presuming the latter term refers to a temporary visitor to one’s home. Carson had already displayed a propensity for gaffes during his maladroit Presidential candidacy, and it might be easy to dismiss his latest one as the least concerning element of having a neurosurgeon with no relevant experience in charge of housing policy were it not a stand-in for a broader set of concerns about the Trump Administration.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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How Long Will the Trump Bull Market Last?
Trump’s Presidency Is Ruining My Personal Brand
Three Genre-Expanding Documentaries About Racist Crimes of the Past

Latinos Feel the Sting of Trump’s Presidency

Five years ago, before Latino people worried much about Donald Trump, Oscar Saldivar stood in my living room in Los Angeles and told me a story. He began to weep.

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How Long Will the Trump Bull Market Last?
Ben Carson, Donald Trump, and the Misuse of American History
Trump’s Presidency Is Ruining My Personal Brand

The House G.O.P. Health-Care Plan Is Harmful, Regressive, and Wrong

There are at least two ways to look at the American Health Care Act, the Obamacare-replacement proposal that House Republicans released on Monday. Looked at up close, it perhaps isn’t quite as extreme, in some respects, as previous G.O.P. proposals. But if you step back and consider what enacting this bill would mean for the health-care system as a whole, and for American society as a whole, it is far from moderate and reasonable.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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When Trump’s New Travel Ban Goes Into Effect, Watch the Border Agents

The Trump Administration’s first attempt at a travel ban ended in chaos, mass demonstrations, and lawsuits. On Monday, the President signed a second travel ban, which was billed as a corrective. The scope of the new order was narrower, and, according to a source at the Department of Homeland Security, it “took significant pains to insure clarity in terms of who it applies to and who it doesn’t.” Among other things, travellers who receive valid visas and green cards before the order goes into effect, on March 16th, should be unaffected, so the spectacle of people losing their travel status mid-flight and landing at U.S. airports in legal limbo shouldn’t happen again.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Five Questions About the Latest WikiLeaks Release

On Tuesday morning, WikiLeaks released eight thousand seven hundred and sixty-one files that it said were “from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence,” in Langley, Virginia. The group called the collection “Year Zero,” the first installment of a larger project, Vault 7, which reveals the “hacking capacity” of the C.I.A.—and which is, in turn, part of a larger archive that, it claimed, had “been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.” In other words, WikiLeaks has the files because the C.I.A. had “lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized ‘zero day’ exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation.” (WikiLeaks seems to have redacted some of the sensitive code.) The C.I.A. has had no comment, but multiple news organizations have reported that, at first glance, according to their intelligence sources, the material looks as if it did come from the agency. (After the release, Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a cache of documents in 2013, tweeted, “Still working through the publication, but what ‪@Wikileaks has here is genuinely a big deal. Looks authentic.”) The dates on some of the files are as recent as 2016. The size and the currency of the apparent breach raises a number of questions. Here are five to start with.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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When Trump’s New Travel Ban Goes Into Effect, Watch the Border Agents
Donald Trump Meets the Surveillance State
Paul Ryan’s Health-Care Vise

Donald Trump Meets the Surveillance State

On November 26, 2010, in Portland, Oregon, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a nineteen-year-old Somali-born American citizen, stood near the city’s Pioneer Courthouse and punched numbers into a cell phone. He thought the phone would set off a bomb planted nearby, at a crowded Christmas-tree lighting ceremony. In fact, Mohamud had been duped by a months-long F.B.I. counterterrorism sting operation. Agents arrested him.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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When Trump’s New Travel Ban Goes Into Effect, Watch the Border Agents
Five Questions About the Latest WikiLeaks Release
Paul Ryan’s Health-Care Vise

The Murder of an Honorable Lawyer in Myanmar

Whenever I met with Ko Ni, whether seated in his office, with its flickering electricity and precarious piles of law books, or sipping tea in the moldering headquarters of Myanmar’s then-opposition political party, the image that came to mind was that of Atticus Finch—though an Atticus wearing a Burmese sarong. With his salt-and-pepper hair and upright bearing, Ko Ni was the consummate honorable lawyer. He persevered for decades as one of Myanmar’s top constitutional experts despite living under the rule of a military junta with little respect for judicial process. Every day, he woke up and prepared to throw himself, pro bono, into hopeless cases. One day in his office, I saw a stack of papers at the foot of his desk. On top was a copy of the Bulgarian Constitution. You never know, he said, when knowledge of such a document might prove useful.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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China’s North Korea Problem
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The Bizarre Trial of a Poet in Myanmar