Peter Baker

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary who fiercely defended President Trump through one of the most tumultuous periods in American politics and presided over the end of the daily White House news briefing, will step down at the end of June 2019. No successor was immediately announced. 

The Office of Special Counsel, an independent government agency, recommended that President Donald Trump fire Kellyanne Conway, his White House counselor, for repeated violations of an ethics law barring partisan politics from the federal workplace. At issue are Conway’s media appearances attacking Democrats running for their party’s nomination for president.

In moments of national crisis, presidents typically reach for unifying themes. But as pipe bombs are delivered to American around the country, President Donald Trump chose confrontation over conciliation.

President Donald Trump has escalated his fiery attacks on the news media, seizing on a recent string of mistaken reports to bolster his case that he is being persecuted by a left-leaning establishment out to bring him down and fueling a national debate over truth, accountability and a free press. While every president has groused about his coverage, President Trump has proved to be the most vocal and visceral news media critic in the Oval Office in at least a generation. In recent days, news outlets have provided him ammunition with reporting errors.

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.