George Packer: Trump Was a Symptom

George Packer: Trump Was a Symptom

Americans were already losing touch with basic decency before Trump came along—and he exploited that indecency, distrust, and division to win power. In his new novel, George Packer spins a story of an imaginary country that just collapses, and how ordinary people have to learn to live together again. Fiction has a way of making the real world more clear. Plus, Charlie Kirk’s influence on our political climate before his death, JD’s phoniness and lust for power, Trump may be flailing but he’s still amassed immense power, and how AI moving us away from the written word threatens our democracy.

The Atlantic’s George Packer joins Tim Miller for the holiday weekend pod.

show notes

Other books by George:

Episoder(500)

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Toppling the leader of Venezuela looks to be about greed and Trump's vanity. It's not about national security, and is likely to produce bad outcomes—including more repression of ordinary Venezuelans a...

5 Jan 58min

John Heilemann: The Year Is Ending a Lot Better than It Started

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Only six months ago, the wheels felt like they were coming off of America, and our democracy experiment. But since the Epstein case broke wide open, the wheels started to come off Trump instead. And h...

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The DOJ is releasing random Epstein documents to distract the public, while also intentionally covering the faces of men in images. It's also pulling docs that reveal Trump's name. Epstein's victims t...

30 Des 202547min

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