Glenn Thrush

The stimulus package that President Biden signed into law in March was intended to stabilize state and city finances drained by the coronavirus crisis, providing $350 billion to alleviate the pandemic’s effect, with few restrictions on how the money could be used. Three months after its passage, cash is starting to flow — $194 billion so far, according to the Treasury Department — and officials are devoting funds to a range of efforts, including keeping public service workers on the payroll, helping the fishing industry, improving broadband access and aiding the homeless. In conservative-le

With Twitter as his Excalibur, the president takes on his doubters, powered by long spells of cable news and a dozen Diet Cokes. But if President Donald Trump has yet to bend the presidency to his will, he is at least wrestling it to a draw.

President Donald Trump removed Stephen Bannon, his chief strategist, from the National Security Council’s cabinet-level “principals committee.” The shift was orchestrated by Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, who insisted on purging a political adviser from the Situation Room where decisions about war and peace are made.

Bannon resisted the move, even threatening at one point to quit if it went forward, according to a White House official who, like others, insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Bannon’s camp denied that he had threatened to resign and spent the day spreading the word that the shift was a natural evolution, not a signal of any diminution of his outsize influence. His allies said privately that Bannon had been put on the principals committee to keep an eye on Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. With Flynn gone, these allies said, there was no need for Bannon to remain, but they noted that he had kept his security clearance.

The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, has taken to slapping journalists who write unflattering stories with an epithet he sees as the epitome of low-road, New York Post-style gossip: “Page Six reporter.” Whether the New England-bred spokesman realizes it or not, the expression is perhaps less an insult than a reminder of an era when Donald Trump mastered the New York tabloid terrain — and his own narrative — shaping his image with a combination of on-the-record bluster and off-the-record gossip.

He’s not in Manhattan anymore. This New York-iest of politicians, now an idiosyncratic, write-your-own-rules president, has stumbled into the most conventional of Washington traps: believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has. Instead, President Trump has found himself subsumed and increasingly infuriated by the leaks and criticisms he has long prided himself on vanquishing. Now, goaded by Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, President Trump has turned on the news media with escalating rhetoric, labeling major outlets as “the enemy of the American people.”

President Donald Trump intensified his slashing attack on the news media during an appearance before the Conservative Political Action Conference , reiterating his charge that “fake news” outlets are “the enemy of the people.” The opening portion of the president’s free-range, campaign-style speech centered on a declaration of war on the news media — a new foil to replace vanquished political opponents like Hillary Clinton. “They are very smart, they are very cunning, they are very dishonest,” Trump said to the delight of the crowd. “It doesn’t represent the people; it never will represent the people.” President Trump, who once posed as his own public relations man to plant news stories in New York tabloids — and spoke frequently with reporters off the record during the campaign — called for an end to the use of “sources,” meaning anonymous sources. “A few days ago, I called the fake news the enemy of the people because they have no sources — they just make it up,” he said. He added that his “enemy of the people” label applied only to “dishonest” reporters and editors.

President Trump, who suggested revisiting First Amendment protections for the news media during the campaign, refined that attack on Feb 24, urging his supporters to use their free-speech rights to counter hostile press accounts from outlets like CNN, which he called the “Clinton News Network.” “They always bring up the First Amendment,” Trump said of journalists. “Nobody loves it better than me.” After spending 10 minutes listing the shortcomings of the news media, Trump said criticism “doesn’t bother me.”