Mr. Rosenstein played a key role in the dismissal, writing a memo that rebuked Mr. Comey over his handling of an investigation into Hillary Clinton.

But in the meeting at the Justice Department, Mr. Rosenstein added a new detail: He said the president had originally asked him to reference Russia in his memo, the people familiar with the conversation said. Mr. Rosenstein did not elaborate on what Mr. Trump had wanted him to say.

The president, referring to himself in the third person, complained on Twitter that Mr. Iger had “never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC.”

The fact that it fell on Thursday before getting out of the starting gate, though, underscored how little the two men understood about each other, or how their words and maximalist demands were resonating in Washington and Pyongyang.

“He will be safe, he will be happy, his country will be rich,” Mr. Trump said of the North Korean leader

Mr. Kim needs money, investment and technology, for sure. But more than that, he needs to convince North Korea’s elites that he has not traded away the only form of security in his sole control — the nuclear patrimony of his father and his grandfather.

The president emphasized that conciliatory tone with a tweet early Friday, saying “the warm and productive statement from North Korea” could lead “hopefully to long and enduring prosperity and peace.”

This month, the Justice Department inspector general is expected to release the findings of its lengthy review of the F.B.I.’s conduct in the Clinton case. The results are certain to renew debate over decisions by the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, to publicly chastise Mrs. Clinton in a news conference, and then announce the reopening of the investigation days before Election Day.

Those decisions stand in contrast to the F.B.I.’s handling of Crossfire Hurricane.

Not only did agents in that case fall back to their typical policy of silence, but interviews with a dozen current and former government officials and a review of documents show that the F.B.I. was even more circumspect in that case than has been previously known.

A veteran critic of pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mr. Brown, with his limited embrace of Mr. Trump, reflected the political culture of the industrial Midwest and the survival strategy he has pioneered for Democrats there.

As Mr. Brown seeks a third term in 2018, it is his brand of indignant populism setting the tone for Democrats in Ohio, where the governorship and several congressional seats are also up for grabs.

Ohio may now be the most vital proving ground for a progressive economic message in Trump country.

The event is the brainchild of EMPOWER, the Woman's March youth branch, and will take place exactly one month after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. It's scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. in every time zone and last for 17 minutes -- one for each victim who lost their life in the massacre.

Students who survived the shooting in Florida are speaking out in hopes that no more schools face a similar tragedy, and they're planning to protest in Washington, D.C. on March 24 at an event organized by March For Our Lives. Another national walkout is slated for April 20, the nineteenth anniversary of the Columbine shooting in Colorado.

Vice President Mike Pence, who was visiting South Korea for the Olympics, has used increasingly hostile language against the North in recent days, calling it the most tyrannical regime on the planet and steadfastly avoiding interactions with North Korean delegates at the Games.

Mr. Kim sent the invitation to the South through a particularly close and trusted envoy: his only sister, Kim Yo-jong. She is one of the reclusive leader’s closest advisers and met with Mr. Moon at the presidential Blue House in the capital, Seoul, on Saturday in the highest-level contact between the two Koreas in years.

The Trump administration is wary of engagement with the North, which has been subjected to increasingly tough international sanctions, unless it shows clear signs of giving up its nuclear weapons program.

The limit on military spending would be increased by $80 billion in the current fiscal year and $85 billion in the next year, which begins Oct. 1.

Mr. Trump is to release his second budget request on Monday, but the deal — championed by the top congressional leaders from his own party — amounts to an unequivocal rebuke of many of the budgetary demands he has put forth.

The budget agreement, coming a day after President Trump threatened to shut down the government, would effectively negate Mr. Trump’s demands to broadly reorder government with deep cuts to nondefense programs like environmental protection, foreign aid and health research that were to offset large increases in military spending.

The limit on nondefense spending would increase by $63 billion this year and $68 billion next year.

The deal would give Mr. Trump military bragging rights. “The bottom line is that, thanks to President Trump, we can now have the strongest military we have ever had,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said on Wednesday.

At least for now, it could put an end to the fiscal crises that Mr. Trump has at times seemed to welcome.

Stocks rise and fall, but the recent sell-off shows the ultimate folly of the president’s fact-free existence. For a year, he took credit for stock market gains that were the continuation of a nine-year bull market

Now, the market is, arguably, beginning to react to Trump’s actual policies — a tax cut that added fuel to an already strong economy, raising fears it will overheat, causing inflation, higher interest rates and recession.

In ways large and small, reality is catching up with Trump.

In the same State of the Union address, Trump boasted that “African American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded.” (Never mind that this continued an eight-year trend.) Barely 60 hours later, Trump’s Labor Department reported that this boast was no longer true: Black unemployment swelled to 7.7 percent in January from 6.8 percent in December.

Republicans had mocked Nancy Pelosi for saying the cut amounted to “crumbs” for ordinary workers. But on Saturday, House Speaker Paul Ryan tweeted out a message pulled from an Associated Press story: “A secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, PA, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week . . . she said [that] will more than cover her Costco membership for the year.” Amid the social media ridicule that followed — Rep. Joe Kennedy noted that the wealthiest Americans get an extra $3,000 per week — Ryan took down the truth-telling tweet.

The race to succeed him, as well as contests for U.S. Senate and statewide offices, probably will feature a November ballot exclusively filled with Democrats.

The top two primary finishers compete in the state’s general election regardless of party, setting up several races between the Democrats’ left and even-more-left wings in the nation’s most-populous state, races that could signal the direction of the party’s future.

In an off-presidential election year, California will serve as a campaign lab for many national issues, including taxes, immigration, health care, climate change, rural-urban income disparities and sexual harassment.

The campaigns will test for national Democrats the most useful positions on issues important to the party’s base and will provide a preview for national Republicans of the popularity of those stands.

“You are going to be talking about Democrat-on-Democrat crime, for the most part,”

“What also is certain is that the next governor is going to be more progressive than Jerry Brown.”

Is serious consideration of impeachment fair? I think the answer is yes. The evidence is now quite strong that Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice. Many legal scholars believe a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime. So the proper remedy for a president credibly accused of obstructing justice is impeachment.

Trump has already tried to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the Trump campaign — it’s time to put together the same sort of list for Trump.

During a dinner at the White House on Jan. 27, 2017, Trump asked for a pledge of “loyalty” from James Comey, then the F.B.I. director, who was overseeing the investigation of the Trump campaign.

On Feb. 14, Trump directed several other officials to leave the Oval Office so he could speak privately with Comey. He then told Comey to “let this go,” referring to the investigation of Michael Flynn, who had resigned the previous day as Trump’s national security adviser.

On March 22, Trump directed several other officials to leave a White House briefing so he could speak privately with Daniel Coats, the director of national intelligence, and Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director. Trump asked them to persuade Comey to back off investigating Flynn.

In March and April, Trump told Comey in phone calls that he wanted Comey to lift the ”cloud” of the investigation.

Only about 1 percent of women seeking abortions do so after 21 weeks, and they often make that decision because a fetal abnormality has been found or because their own health is in danger.

Twenty-week bans particularly curb access for poor women, who often struggle to find the money and time for the procedure.

The Senate bill contains exceptions for rape and incest if the women reported the abuse to law enforcement and sought counseling 48 hours before the abortion. But there is no exception to protect the health of the pregnant woman.

Mr. Cotton said Mr. Durbin “has a history of misrepresenting what happens in White House meetings,” a comment that Mr. Perdue echoed in his interview Sunday morning.

the definition of a racist — the textbook definition, as Paul Ryan might say — is someone who treats some people better than others because of their race. Trump fits that definition many times over:

Trump’s real-estate company was sued twice by the federal government in the 1970s for discouraging the renting of apartments to African-Americans and preferring white tenants, such as “Jews and executives.”

In 1989, Trump took out ads in New York newspapers urging the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Central Park; he continued to argue that they were guilty as late as October 2016, more than 10 years after DNA evidence had exonerated them.

He spent years claiming that the nation’s first black president was born not in the United States but in Africa, an outright lie that Trump still has not acknowledged as such.

He began his 2016 presidential campaign by disparaging Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.”

He has retweeted white nationalists without apology.

He frequently criticizes prominent African-Americans for being unpatriotic, ungrateful and disrespectful.

He called some of those who marched alongside white supremacists in Charlottesville last August “very fine people.”

Given that he started in such a strong position with those blue-collar whites, even after that decline he still holds a formidable level of loyalty among them—particularly men and those over 50 years old.

What’s more, he has established a modest but durable beachhead among African American and Hispanic men, even while confronting overwhelming opposition from women in those demographic groups.

Together, the results crystallize the bet Trump is making for his own reelection in 2020, and for his party’s chances in November’s election: that he can mobilize enough support among older and blue-collar (as well as rural and evangelical) whites to offset the intense resistance he’s provoked from groups that are all growing in the electorate: Millennials, minorities, and college-educated whites—particularly the women among them.

Mark Blumenthal, SurveyMonkey’s head of election polling, calculated Trump’s average approval rating over the last year among groups of voters segmented simultaneously by their race, gender, education level, and age.

That extra level of detail, not available in conventional polls because their samples are too small, offers a more precise picture of Trump’s coalition.

The SurveyMonkey results put Trump’s total approval rating for 2017 at 42 percent, with 56 percent disapproving. That’s slightly higher than, but within range of, other major public surveys.

In the 2016 election, exit polls found that Trump’s best group was whites without a four-year college degree; he carried 66 percent of them. But his approval among them in the 2017 SurveyMonkey average slipped to 56 percent. In 2016, whites with at least a four-year college degree gave Trump 48 percent of their votes. But in the 2017 average, just 40 percent approved of Trump’s performance, while a resounding 60 percent disapproved.

The possibility of a shutdown looms just after Senate Republicans succeeded in passing their sweeping tax overhaul, a moment of triumph for a party that has struggled to produce big achievements despite controlling Congress and the White House.

promises made to secure passage of the tax bill could further complicate negotiations on government funding, and any failure at the fundamental task of keeping the government running would swiftly undercut Republicans’ display of progress.

The threat of a shutdown escalated last week after President Trump fired off a Twitter post attacking the top Democrats in Congress, who in turn pulled out of a planned White House meeting, deepening the rift between the parties at a time when they are already at odds over issues like taxes, health care and immigration.

“Look, there’s not going to be a government shutdown,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.” “It’s just not going to happen.”

She said Mr. Moore warned her that “no one will believe you” if she told anyone about the encounter in his car.

Hours earlier, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said Mr. Moore “should step aside” and that he believes the women who have accused Mr. Moore of sexual misconduct when they were teenagers.

Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado, speaking in his role as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said that if Mr. Moore wins the special election on Dec. 12, he should be expelled from the Senate, “because he does not meet the ethical and moral requirements of the United States Senate.”

Mr. Moore, a judge who was twice removed from the state’s high court, first for refusing to remove the Ten Commandments from the Supreme Court grounds, then for refusing to accept gay marriage, responded defiantly. He showed no sign of leaving the race ahead of Alabama’s Dec. 12 special election date.

in the Senate, those high-tax areas are often represented by Democrats, which puts less pressure on Republican leaders to keep the state and local deduction, in any form, in their version of the bill.

Each of the bills reflects delicate political and fiscal calculations as Republican leaders seek to deliver on President Trump’s campaign promises to cut taxes on the middle class and on businesses — but also find the money to pay for them.

Eliminating the state and local tax deduction would increase tax receipts and therefore lessen the overall cost of the legislation, which by congressional budget rules cannot exceed $1.5 trillion over the next decade if it is to pass without Democratic support.

After the elections, Republicans understand they have to pass a tax bill in order to show a significant accomplishment. Big losses in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday exposed their vulnerabilities going into next year’s midterm elections.

in the Senate, the emerging bill suggests party leaders are less concerned with the potential fallout of eliminating breaks that benefit upper-middle-class taxpayers in high-tax states such as New York and California.

Republican officials say many more changes will be included in the Senate plan, which is planned for release on Thursday, the same day that the House Ways and Means Committee is expected to pass its version of the bill ahead of a full House vote next week.