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      in Elections

      Why Trump’s Tesla Showcase Mattered to Elon Musk

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      A lot has changed since former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. snubbed Elon Musk at an event in 2021.It wasn’t so long ago that Elon Musk couldn’t even get an invitation to the White House.The year was 2021, and President Joe Biden was announcing tighter pollution rules and promoting his electric vehicle policies.Behind him on the lawn were gleaming examples — a Ford F-150 Lightning, a Chevrolet Bolt EV, a Jeep Wrangler — as well as the chief executives of the companies that made them. But the nation’s biggest electric vehicle producer was nowhere to be seen.“Seems odd that Tesla wasn’t invited,” Musk tweeted before the event.The Biden White House explained the snub by noting that the automakers that had been invited were the nation’s three largest employers of the United Automobile Workers, a powerful union, and it suggested that the administration would find other ways to partner with Tesla. (Union animus toward electric vehicles later became a problem for Biden.) But today, the moment is seen as a turning point in a feud between Musk and Biden that some Democrats say they have come to regret deeply.“They left Elon out,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist who is working to get his party to embrace electric vehicles, “and now he hates ’em.”It was hard not to think about that episode yesterday when Musk and Trump lined up Teslas, including Cybertrucks, on the White House driveway and proceeded to rattle off their benefits like denizens of a suburban showroom.“I love the product,” Trump said.“Try it,” Musk said. “You’ll like it!”Musk now has the White House attention and promotion that he wanted several years ago — and with it, a pile of potential benefits for some of his companies — but it’s come at a price. He donated some $300 million largely through his own super PAC to help Trump get elected. My colleagues Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman reported yesterday that he’s signaled a willingness to put another $100 million into groups controlled by Trump’s political operation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Secret Service Shoots Armed Man Near the White House

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      President Trump was in Florida at the time of the episode, during which a man held a gun and a confrontation ensued, the agency said.The Secret Service shot a man near the White House early Sunday after an “armed confrontation” with law enforcement officers, the agency said in a statement.President Trump was not at the White House at the time. He is spending the weekend in Florida at his Mar-a-Lago Club.Earlier on Saturday, the local police shared information with the Secret Service about a suicidal person who may have been traveling to Washington from Indiana. Around midnight, members of the Secret Service encountered the person’s parked vehicle near 17th and F Streets, about a block from the White House. A man was outside of the vehicle, the agency said.As officers approached, they saw that the man had a gun and then a confrontation ensued, during which the Secret Service shot the man, the agency said.He was transported to a hospital, and his condition was unknown, the Secret Service said. There were no reported injuries to anyone with the Secret Service.The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington is investigating the shooting. More

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      D.C.’s Planned Removal of Black Lives Matter Mural Reflects Mayor’s Delicate Position

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      Mayor Muriel Bowser’s decision comes amid calls by the president and other Republicans for more federal control of the city.On Wednesday morning in downtown Washington, D.C., Keyonna Jones stood on her artwork and remembered the time when she and six other artists were summoned by the mayor’s office to paint a mural in the middle of the night.“BLACK LIVES MATTER,” the mural read in bright yellow letters on a street running two city blocks, blaring the message at the White House sitting just across Lafayette Square. In June 2020, when Ms. Jones helped paint the mural, demonstrations were breaking out in cities nationwide in protest of George Floyd’s murder. The creation of Black Lives Matter Plaza was a statement of defiance from D.C.’s mayor, Muriel E. Bowser, who had clashed with President Trump, then in his first term, over the presence of federal troops in the streets of her city.But on Tuesday evening, the mayor announced the mural was going away.Ms. Jones said the news upset her. But, she added of the mayor in an interview, “I get where she is coming from.”The city of Washington is in an extraordinarily vulnerable place these days. Republicans in Congress have introduced legislation that would end D.C.’s already limited power to govern itself, stripping residents of the ability to elect a mayor and city council. Mr. Trump himself has said that he supports a federal takeover of Washington, insisting to reporters that the federal government would “run it strong, run it with law and order, make it absolutely, flawlessly beautiful.” In recent days, the administration has been considering executive orders in pursuit of his vision for the city.Potential laws and orders aside, the administration has already fired thousands of federal workers, leaving residents throughout the city without livelihoods and, according to the city’s official estimate, potentially costing Washington around $1 billion in lost revenue over the next three years.Given all this, Ms. Bowser, a Democrat, described her decision about Black Lives Matter Plaza as a pragmatic calculation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mike Johnson’s Chief of Staff Arrested for DUI After Trump Speech, Police Say

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      The U.S. Capitol Police said the chief of staff to Speaker Mike Johnson was arrested for drunken driving on Tuesday night after the top aide backed his car into a parked Capitol Police vehicle.The arrest came soon after President Trump, with Mr. Johnson presiding behind him, finished delivering his first address to a joint session of Congress since returning to office.“A driver backed into a parked vehicle last night around 11:40 p.m.,” a Capitol Police spokesman said in a statement. “We responded and arrested them for D.U.I.”Mr. Johnson’s office confirmed on Wednesday that Hayden Haynes, the speaker’s chief of staff, was involved in an “encounter” with Capitol Police on Tuesday night, releasing a statement that indicated that he would continue to hold his powerful post.“The speaker has known and worked closely with Hayden for nearly a decade and trusted him to serve as his chief of staff for his entire tenure in Congress,” Taylor Haulsee, Mr. Johnson’s spokesman, said in a statement about the arrest, which was reported earlier by NBC News. “Because of this and Hayden’s esteemed reputation among members and staff alike, the speaker has full faith and confidence in Hayden’s ability to lead the speaker’s office.”Mr. Haynes was released with a citation, rather than taken to jail, and would have a court date “within the coming weeks,” according to the Capitol Police. Since drunken driving cases in Washington, D.C., are prosecuted by the district’s attorney general rather than the U.S. district attorney’s office under the Justice Department, the Trump administration would have no apparent role in the case. More

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      Trump Officials Take Down List of Federal Properties for Possible Sale

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      On Tuesday, the Trump administration identified more than 440 federal properties that could be sold off, a list that included high-profile buildings like the headquarters of the F.B.I., Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services.By Wednesday morning, the entire inventory had been taken down, replaced by an agency web page that said the list of properties was “coming soon.”The General Services Administration, an agency that manages the federal real estate portfolio, had already revised the list at least once. In the hours after it was published, about 100 properties, including many in the Washington, D.C., area, were removed.The changes stirred up confusion over the Trump administration’s plan to offload a vast amount of federal property. Officials at the General Services Administration said the “disposal” of the buildings could help save hundreds of millions of dollars and ensure that taxpayers do not have to pay for “underutilized federal office space.” But the list swiftly came under criticism by some Democratic lawmakers and others who worried about the potential impact on government services across the country.The agency did not immediately respond to inquiries as to why the list had been removed. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Dummies for Putin’: Democrats defend Zelenskyy after ‘shameful’ Trump meeting

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      Democratic lawmakers rushed to defend Volodymyr Zelenskyy after the Ukrainian leader was publicly berated by Donald Trump in a disastrous Oval Office meeting.The US president accused Zelenskyy of “gambling with world war three” while his vice-president, JD Vance, called the Ukrainian leader “disrespectful”, before cutting short talks aimed at kicking off the process of ending Kyiv’s three-year war with Russia.Zelenskyy abruptly left the White House soon after without signing a rare critical minerals deal with the US that Trump has said is the first step toward a ceasefire agreement that he is seeking to broker between Russia and Ukraine.Democratic senators came to Zelenskyy’s defense in statements condemning Trump and Vance’s “shameful” and “disgraceful” treatment of the Ukrainian leader.“Every time I’ve met with President Zelenskyy, he’s thanked the American people for our strong support,” Chris Coons, a Democratic senator from Delaware, wrote on X. “We owe him our thanks for leading a nation fighting on the front lines of democracy – not the public berating he received at the White House.”Adam Schiff, the California senator, said: ““A hero and a coward are meeting in the Oval Office today. And when the meeting is over, the hero will return home to Ukraine.”Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, said: “What an utter embarrassment for America. This whole sad scene.” The Arizona senator Ruben Gallego added: “This is a disgrace.”Senator Chris Van Hollen from Maryland also described the scenes in the Oval Office as “beyond disgraceful”. The Illinois senator Dick Durbin added: “The people of Ukraine and President Zelenskyy deserve an apology.”“Trump and Vance berating Zelenskyy – putting on a show of lies and misinformation that would make Putin blush – is an embarrassment for America and a betrayal of our allies,” Durbin said. “They’re popping champagne in the Kremlin.”Trump and Vance “are doing Putin’s dirty work”, the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, said after the calamitous meeting, adding that his party will “never stop fighting for freedom and democracy”.Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island, also accused Trump and Vance of “acting like ventriloquist dummies for Putin”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhitehouse was part of a bipartisan group of senators who met with Zelenskyy earlier in the morning before his meeting with the president. The Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar said the hour-long discussion showed “strong bipartisan support in the Senate for Ukraine’s freedom and democracy”.Klobuchar later addressed Vance directly in a social media post saying that Zelenskyy had thanked the US “over and over again” both privately and publicly.“Our country thanks HIM and the Ukrainian patriots who have stood up to a dictator, buried their own & stopped Putin from marching right into the rest of Europe,” she wrote. “Shame on you,” she said, referring to Vance.Tina Smith, another Democratic senator from Minnesota, called on her Republican colleagues to “speak out” in the name of “patriotism”. “Once, we fought tyrants. Today Trump and Vance are bending America’s knee,” she said.But Republican senators rushed to defend Trump, describing the president’s exchange with Zelenskyy as evidence that he was “putting America first”.Mike Lee, a Utah Republican senator, thanked Trump and Vance “for standing up to our country and putting America first”. The Indiana Republican senator Jim Banks also thanked Trump for “standing up for America”.“[Zelenskyy] ungratefully expects us to bankroll and escalate another forever war–all while disrespecting the President,” Banks wrote on X. “The entitlement is insulting to working Americans.” More