SpaceX and Lockheed CEOs meet with Donald Trump

Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk were among a dozen business leaders who met with the president to discuss manufacturing and related issues.

Trump said he would seek to keep manufacturing jobs in the United States and cut down on regulations.

Anti-Trump protesters clash with riot police in Washington

Protesters and an Associated Press photographer say police fired rubber projectiles at them during demonstrations against U.S. President Donald Trump in downtown Washington.

An AP photographer says he was hit three times by projectiles — once on his left shin and twice on his right — while covering demonstrations Friday.

A photo of a spent canister appears to show the bottom part of a "rubber sponge." The foam-nosed projectile is launched at high-speed by police as a form of less lethal force. 

District of Columbia police spokesman Dustin Sternbeck said police did not use rubber bullets but would not comment on whether they used rubber sponges. He said he will "gladly provide" a comprehensive after-action report once the demonstrations wrap up.

Demonstrations broke out across the U.S. as Trump was sworn in as America's 45th president on Friday.

Black-clad anarchists smashed windows and clashed with police in Washington, D.C., less than a kilometre from where Trump took the oath of office, smashing store and car windows and fighting with officers in riot gear who responded with pepper spray and stun grenades. Police said at least 200 people have been arrested. 

About 500 people, some wearing masks and kerchiefs over their faces, marched through the city's downtown, breaking the windows of a Bank of America branch, a McDonald's outlet and a Starbucks shop, all symbols of the American capitalist system. 

• Donald Trump is sworn in as president

The crowd, which carried banners and at least one sign that read "Make Racists Afraid Again," largely dispersed after police responded in force. 

D.C. police said two uniformed officers sustained "minor injuries" in the altercations and that numerous arrests had been made and suspects charged with rioting. 

Shortly after, workers were on the scene cleaning up the broken windows and debris.  

In San Francisco, around 3,000 people staged a protest on the Golden Gate Bridge. Demonstrators say it was a symbol of love rather than an anti-Trump event and held hands as a show of unity. Eight people were arrested.

Hundreds gathered in Houston where immigrant communities and labour groups came together and marched through downtown after gathering in Sesquicentennial Park. Organizers described the event, attended by a range of groups including interfaith Justice Coalition and Planned Parenthood, as "the start of the resistance movement" to keep communities safe, free and thriving.

Similarly, hundreds gathered in Denver and Phoenix carrying anti-Trump signs. Both were peaceful and didn't result in any arrests.

Protests around the world

On his inauguration day, Trump faced protests not just at home but in cities from Toronto to Sydney, Addis Ababa and Dublin over his politics, which critics say are divisive and dangerous.

​Protesters in Montreal burned an American flag and an effigy of Trump in the first of several planned demonstrations against the new U.S. president.

About 200 people marched through downtown, waving signs and chanting slogans, most commonly "No Trump, No Hate, America was Never Great!"

They stopped outside the offices of the U.S. Consulate, where they set fire to a cardboard replica of Trump as a dozen police officers guarded the door.

Organizer Nicole LeBlanc said despite the focus on Trump, the protest was less about him than the values he stands for.

"We want to start a conversation about the fact that the sexist, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, xenophobic policies that Trump represents are not just limited to Trump," she said. "There are far-right groups with very similar policies operating here in Quebec."

A lone Trump supporter who showed up wearing a shirt reading "Hillary for Prison" was chased and knocked to the ground before police intervened.

'Build bridges not walls'

A banner reading "Build Bridges Not Walls" was draped across London's Tower Bridge Friday. Protesters on the iconic bridge held up pink letters reading  "Act Now!" soon after sunrise, while others unfurled the banner over the railings and a speedboat with a black flag reading "Build Bridges Not Walls" raced down the River Thames. 

The protest in London was organized by the campaign group also called Bridges not Walls, in reference to Trump's pledge to build a wall on the Mexican border. 

Hundreds marched in Madrid, making their way the city's Opera House to the emblematic Sol Square, waving placards calling Trump a racist and homophobic, and hundreds more gathered in protest in central Brussels, lighting candles in defence of women's rights in the bitter cold on Friday evening.

​"It's as important as anything is important, to have respect for everyone. Because women are oppressed and have been oppressed and will continue to be oppressed unless we do something about it," said U.S. citizen David Berstein, who lives in the Belgian capital.

Along with demonstrations in other parts of Europe, protests erupted in Latin American countries including Bolivia, Peru and Mexico.

Massive protest actions against Trump — including a Women's March on Washington — are planned for Saturday and are expected to draw more than a hundred thousand participants.

U.S. embassies and consulates in at least 10 countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America were warning of potentially violent protests through the weekend, as well. 

Security notices posted by U.S. diplomatic missions in Chile, Denmark, France, Greece, Haiti, Italy the Netherlands, Paraguay, Portugal and the Philippines advised American in those countries to steer clear of embassies and consulates on Friday and, in some cases, on Saturday and Sunday, due to the possibility of unrest and clashes with police.

The notices said the planned demonstrations are either focused on "U.S. politics" or are "inauguration-related."

'Great moment in history'

Ahead of the inauguration, Trump supporters flooded into the American capital, many sporting shirts and hats bearing his "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan. 

Carl Beams, 36, from Howell, New Jersey, stood in line with thousands of Trump supporters waiting to enter the National Mall to view the midday inauguration. 

"This is a great moment in history. I wanted to be able to say I was here first-hand," said Beams, who runs a martial-arts school. 

THE INCREASINGLY LONELY HOPE OF BARACK OBAMA

You can tell I’m a lame duck,” Barack Obama joked before his farewell address, on Tuesday night, in Chicago, “because nobody’s following instructions.” This was a teasing reference to the unbridled whoop of cheers that had gone up as he’d appeared at the podium; despite his best efforts, the President couldn’t convince the twenty-thousand-person congregation of true believers and long-standing aides to quiet down and take a seat. The quip also worked as a mordant description of the wider atmosphere of chaos and unpredictability that has taken hold during the two months since Donald Trump’s still-shocking election as Obama’s successor. To the extent that there exist “instructions” for a dignified transfer of power in America, they would seem to include the principle of “one President at a time,” a willingness on the part of the President-elect to communicate at reasonable intervals via press conference rather than Twitter outburst, and a general disinclination to comment on the fortunes of once-storied reality shows or the Golden Globes. Trump, in shredding these unwritten rules to ribbons, has made them seem instantly outdated. In the hours before Obama’s speech, a series of news reports and document dumps concerning the role of Russian interference on Trump’s behalf only served to deepen the impression of disorder.

The farewell address gave Obama one last opportunity to exert control, if only of the rhetorical kind, over national events. Eventually, the crowd quieted, and Obama insisted, as has been his habit recently, on recalling the accomplishments of his Administration. “If I had told you eight years ago that America would reverse a great recession, reboot our auto industry, and unleash the longest stretch of job creation in our history,” he began, “if I had told you that we would win marriage equality, and secure the right to health insurance for another twenty million of our fellow-citizens, you might have said our sights were set a little too high.” That last phrase was an echo of Obama’s victory speech after the 2008 caucus in Iowa. “They said our sights were set too high,” he said that night, inaugurating a tradition of smilingly chiding his doubters—“cynics,” he called them—that has continued, essentially unchanged, for the past nine years.

The coming Trump Administration will be a monumental test of Obama’s enduring optimism, and, perhaps, of his impatience with those who don’t share it. On Tuesday night, Obama carried on his long-running argument in favor of positive thinking, not as a perfect analytical tool—“there will be times when the process disappoints you,” he said—but, instead, as a moral obligation, and an instrument in the work of continual American renewal. Trust me, he seemed to be saying: you’ll need it.

Obama said the name Trump precisely once, and then only to extol the glories of the peaceful Presidential transfer. Still, it was impossible to interpret the speech without reference to the man who will be remembered by history as Obama’s foil. The President cannily framed his successor’s stated policy preferences not only as ill-advised but as directly opposed to the health of American cohesion. The most conspicuous spoke of this argument was a passage about race. For all his restraint, and despite his sometimes maddening insistence upon rhetorical balance, Obama, has, since his “race speech” of 2008, been uncommonly willing to wade into the intricacies of the subject. This time, with Trump as the implied target, he trained his focus on the country’s capacity to welcome the children of immigrants. “If we decline to invest” in them, he said, “we diminish the prospects of our own children—because those brown kids will represent a larger share of America’s workforce.” He reminded those who cheer Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric that “the stereotypes about immigrants today were said, almost word for word, about the Irish, Italians, and Poles.” America, he said, “wasn’t weakened by the presence of these newcomers; they embraced this nation’s creed, and it was strengthened.”

Obama also levelled particularly pointed challenges to both sides of the black-white dialectic that has guided and determined so much of the country’s history. From blacks “and other minorities”—one imagined that he had youthful, campus-grown activists, affiliated with Black Lives Matter and other related movements, in mind—he requested an interesting bit of imaginative enlargement. We should link “our own struggles for justice to the challenges that a lot of people in this country face—the refugee, the immigrant, the rural poor, the transgender American, and also the middle-aged white man who from the outside may seem like he’s got all the advantages, but who’s seen his world upended by economic, cultural, and technological change.” On the other hand, he continued, white Americans should acknowledge that “the effects of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t suddenly vanish in the sixties; that when minority groups voice discontent, they’re not just engaging in reverse racism or practicing political correctness; that when they wage peaceful protest, they’re not demanding special treatment but the equal treatment our Founders promised.”

close dialog

To get more of the latest
stories from The New Yorker,

sign up for our newsletter.

This opposition laid bare an aspect of Obama’s analysis that puts him increasingly out of step with much of the current thinking. For Obama, racism is real, and still pervasive—his background means that he could never have been shielded from this fact—but it is not a necessarily permanent feature of American life. While he is not shy about invoking the horrors of slavery, he never drops the word “racism”—with its civil-rights-era-descended promise of eventual eradicability—in favor of the phrase “white supremacy,” which has lately come to signal an almost mystical belief in racial oppression as our founding national fact. Obama does subscribe to a civic metaphysics, but it is centered instead on the bonds between people and the perennial American ability to change. He spoke last night of “the sacred ties that make us one,” and this was the closest he came to religious language, apart from the perfunctory “God bless” toward the end.

It is not, Obama said, “that our nation has been flawless from the start but that we have shown the capacity to change and make life better for those who follow.” This version of American exceptionalism, he suggested, might prove more lasting than our oldest and bloodiest divisions. The President is an increasingly lonely torchbearer for the “We Shall Overcome” generation. It is striking, in this regard, that the lone literary reference in the speech was not to someone like James Baldwin—who often spoke of an American religion, centered on white skin—but to Atticus Finch, the hero of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” “You never really understand a person,” Obama said, quoting Finch, “until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Obama’s faith in the eventual solubility of things is closely related to his reverence for the Enlightenment, which he name-checked while speaking of another good that Trump threatens to destroy: the truth. Obama posited reason as the link between challenges as diverse as climate change and international terrorism, placing it as a counterpoint to fear, which might tempt our citizenry to shake off, or take “for granted,” the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

But the most moving portion of the speech was more personal: a tribute to Michelle Obama, “girl of the South Side.” While the President spoke to his wife, he briefly lost his cool—that prized possession—and dabbed away a tear or two with a handkerchief. He went on to thank his daughters; Malia was seated next to her mother, also wiping away tears, while Sasha was reportedly back in Washington, because she had a midyear exam on Wednesday morning. The President thanked his Vice-President, Joe Biden, and the rest of the people who had made possible his time in office. And here, too, was a contrast with Trump, who has yet to demonstrate an ability ardently and earnestly to praise a person other than himself. We were reminded, once again, that part of the “soft power” that accompanies the Presidency, for good or ill, is the appearance of wholesomeness, of moral capacity, of love. For eight years, putting policy aside, Obama has displayed those qualities. It remains to be seen—but gets clearer as the transition daily shortens—which attributes of Trump’s will fill the void.

Trump Tower briefly evacuated due to suspicious package, police say

NEW YORK — Trump Tower in Manhattan was briefly evacuated Tuesday afternoon due to a suspicious package, police said.
NYPD Assistant Commissioner for Communication and Public Information J. Peter Donald tweeted that the tower was all clear following the earlier suspicious package in the lobby.

— J. Peter Donald (@JPeterDonald) December 27, 2016
He had said earlier that “out of an abundance of caution” the NYPD Bomb Squad was responding.

Video posted to social media appeared to show people running out of the building as they were being directed by police.

West Virginia official who called Michelle Obama 'ape in heels' fired

The director of a West Virginia nonprofit agency who called first lady Michelle Obama "an ape in heels" in a Facebook post has been fired and the institution put under outside management, state officials said on Tuesday.
Pamela Taylor, director of the Clay County Development Corp (CCDC), which provides services to poor and elderly residents, drew international condemnation after her comment last month about Obama went viral.
She resigned in November but was reinstated last month, prompting West Virginia to review its contracts with the nonprofit.
Democratic Governor Earl Ray Tomblin's office said the state had secured an agreement under which the Appalachian Area Agency on Aging will manage the CCDC for six months.
"Following the state's request for specific assurances that the CCDC is following anti-discrimination policies, we have been assured that Pamela Taylor has been removed from her position as CCDC director," Tomblin's office said in a statement.
Taylor could not be reached for comment.
The nonprofit in Clay, West Virginia, a small town about 20 miles (32 km) northeast of Charleston, the state capital, receives state and federal funding.
After the Nov. 8 election, Taylor went on Facebook to praise the switch from Obama to former model Melania Trump, the wife of President-elect Donald Trump, a Republican.
"It will be refreshing to have a classy, beautiful, dignified first lady back in the White House. I'm tired of seeing an ape in heels," she wrote.
Beverly Whaling, Clay's mayor, resigned after coming under fire for replying to Taylor's comment: "Just made my day Pam."
The Charleston Gazette-Mail has reported that the nonprofit received about $1.5 million in federal funding and $363,000 in state funding in 2014.

Obama: If I ran again, I could have 'mobilized' Americans

President Barack Obama says he would have been able to “mobilize” Americans in 2016 – if only he had been allowed to run again.
“I am confident in this vision because I’m confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could’ve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with David Axelrod, his former senior political advisor, for the AxeFiles podcast, which is produced by CNN and the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. The interview was released on Monday.
“I know that in conversations that I’ve had with people around the country, even some people who disagreed with me, they would say the vision, the direction that you point towards is the right one.”
The president was no stranger to the campaign trail in 2016, frequently headlining rallies around the country for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State. Clinton lost the race to Republican Donald Trump in November, despite winning the popular vote.
Mr. Obama said that Clinton lost in part because Democrats did not focus enough on constituencies that broke for president-elect Trump.
“We’re not there on the ground communicating not only the dry policy aspects of this, but that we care about these communities, that we’re bleeding for these communities,” Mr. Obama said.
“It means caring about local races, state boards or school boards and city councils and state legislative races and not thinking that somehow, just a great set of progressive policies that we present to the New York Times editorial board will win the day.”
However, Mr. Obama said Clinton “performed wonderfully under really tough circumstances.”
Looking forward, Mr. Obama indicated that he might weigh in on political matters in the future, and that Democrats, who have lost control of the White House and Congress, should look to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s example of how to push back on Mr. Trump’s agenda.
“Mitch McConnell’s insight, just from a pure tactical perspective, was pretty smart and well executed, the degree of discipline that he was able to impose on his caucus was impressive. His insight was that we just have to say no to that,” Mr. Obama said.

Trump says UN just a club for people to 'have a good time'

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Days after the United Nations voted to condemn Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, Donald Trump questioned its effectiveness Monday, saying it's just a club for people to "have a good time."
The president-elect wrote on Twitter that the U.N. has "such great potential," but it has become "just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time. So sad!"
On Friday, Trump warned, "As to the U.N., things will be different after Jan. 20th," referring to the day he takes office.
The decision by the Obama administration to abstain from Friday's U.N. vote brushed aside Trump's demands that the U.S. exercise its veto and provided a climax to years of icy relations with Israel's leadership.
Trump told The Associated Press last December that he wanted to be "very neutral" on Israel-Palestinian issues. But his tone became decidedly more pro-Israel as the presidential campaign progressed. He has spoken disparagingly of Palestinians, saying they have been "taken over" by or are condoning militant groups.
Trump's criticism of the U.N. is by no means unique. While the organization does engage in large-scale humanitarian and peacekeeping efforts around the world, its massive bureaucracy has long been a source of controversy. The organization has been accused by some Western governments of being inefficient and frivolous, while developing nations have said it is overly influenced by wealthier nations.
The president-elect is spending the holidays at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. He had no public schedule Monday.

U.S. President Barack Obama suggested on Friday that Russia's Vladimir Putin knew about the email hackings that roiled the U.S. presidential race, and he urged his successor, Republican Donald Trump, to back a bipartisan investigation into the matter.

"Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin," Obama said at his last year-end news conference.

The president said he had warned Putin there would be serious consequences it he did not "cut it out," though Obama did not specify the extent or timing of any U.S. retaliation for the hacking, which many Democrats believe contributed to Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton.

Obama also expressed bewilderment over Republican lawmakers and voters alike who now say they approve of Putin, declaring, "Ronald Reagan would roll over in his grave.

The comments come the same day the FBI confirmed that Russia interfered in the presidential election with the goal of supporting the president-elect.

Trump has dismissed recent talk about hacking and the election as "ridiculous."

Media 'obsession'

Clinton has even more directly cited Russian interference with the U.S. election. She said Thursday night, "Vladimir Putin himself directed the covert cyberattacks against our electoral system, against our democracy, apparently because he has a personal beef against me."

Obama did not publicly support that theory Friday. He did, however, chide the media for what he called an "obsession" with the flood of hacked Democratic emails that were made public during the election's final stretch.ay Media

Obama on Trump: 'He has listened'U.S. intelligence assessments that Russia interfered in the election to benefit Trump have heightened the already tense relationship between Washington and Moscow.

The president is ending his eighth year in office with his own popularity on the rise, though Trump's election is expected to unwind many of Obama's policies. He's leaving his successor a stronger economy than he inherited, but also the intractable conflict in Syria and troubling issue of whether Russia was meddling in the U.S. election to back Trump.

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded with "high confidence" that Russia interfered in the election on Trump's behalf. The president-elect has disputed that conclusion, setting up a potential confrontation with lawmakers in both parties.

The president rejected any notion that the dispute over the origin of the hacking was disrupting efforts to smoothly transfer power to Trump. Despite fiercely criticizing each other during the election, Obama and Trump have spoken multiple times since the campaign ended.

"He has listened," Obama said of Trump. "I can't say he will end up implementing. But the conversations themselves have been cordial."

The president did weigh in on Trump's decision to speak with the leader of Taiwan, a phone call that broke decades of U.S. diplomatic protocol. Obama advised Trump to "think it through" before making changes the "one-China" policy.

Trump has openly questioned why the U.S. upholds that policy, particularly given that Washington has other contacts with Taiwan. Offering his own take, Obama noted that Taiwan is of utmost importance to the Chinese and Beijing could have a significant response to any change in U.S. policy.

Democratic Party woes

Trump's election has upended the Democratic Party, which expected to not only win the White House but also carry the Senate. Instead, the party finds itself out of power on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

In a moment of self-reflection, Obama acknowledged that he had not been able to transfer his own popularity and electoral success to others in his party.lay Media

As he leaves office, the president has said the shaping the future of the Democratic Party now falls to others. He all but endorsed his Labour Secretary Tom Perez to head the Democratic National Committee, lavishing praise on his cabinet aide"It is not something that I've been able to transfer to candidates in midterms or build a sustaining organization around," Obama said. "That's something I would have liked to have done more of, but it's kind of hard to do when you're dealing with a whole bunch of issues here in the White House."

Hilary Sympathizes with Banks Behind Closed Doors

EXCERPTS OF HILLARY CLINTON’S previously secret speeches to big banks and trade groups in 2013 and 2014 show her exalting the work of her hosts, hardly a surprise when these groups paid her up to $225,000 an hour to chat them up.

Far from chiding Goldman Sachs for obstructing Democratic proposals for financial reform, Clinton appeared to sympathize with the giant investment bank. At a Goldman Sachs Alternative Investments Symposium in October 2013, Clinton almost apologized for the Dodd-Frank reform bill, explaining that it had to pass “for political reasons,” because “if you were an elected member of Congress and people in your constituency were losing jobs and shutting businesses and everybody in the press is saying it’s all the fault of Wall Street, you can’t sit idly by and do nothing.”

Clinton added, “And I think the jury is still out on that because it was very difficult to sort of sort through it all.”

Clinton praised Deutsche Bank in a 2014 speech for “the work that the Bank has done in New York City on affordable housing.”

While Deutsche Bank has given to anti-homelessness campaigns in the past, it was also cited in a New York State Senate report in January for refusing to maintain foreclosed properties in New York City neighborhoods and costing those communities millions in unpaid fines. Deutsche is also about to face a multi-billion-dollar penalty from the Justice Department for defrauding investors with low-quality mortgage securities, leading to the housing meltdown.

Those excerpts were among many listed in an 80-page document prepared by the Clinton campaign, listing potentially damaging quotes from the Democratic nominee’s paid but at that point still secret speeches. The report landed in campaign chairman John Podesta’s email, which was hacked, and then posted by WikiLeaks last week.

In a November 2013 speech to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), Clinton pronounced herself proud to work with the trade group as a U.S. senator to “look for ways to help families facing foreclosure with concrete steps.”

NAR represents real estate agents, who had no authority to assist distressed homeowners. An April 2007 document lists NAR’s priorities in foreclosure mitigation, and they were able to get an amendment exempting mortgage debt forgiveness from being treated as earned income. But the rest amount to “urging” and “supporting” efforts to help homeowners that never happened.

Clinton has historically been far less critical of the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington than many other Democrats, and as secretary of state allowed two of her top aides — Tom Nides and Robert Hormats — to receive big payouts from their big-bank employers before entering public service.

“Thank you for lending me Tom Nides for the past two years,” Clinton said to a crowd at Morgan Stanley on April 18, 2013. As The Intercept reported in July 2015, Nides moved from chief operating officer at Morgan Stanley into Clinton’s State Department, and when Clinton left Foggy Bottom, Nides went right back to Morgan Stanley as a vice chairman.

Clinton joked about the “culture shock” for Nides, working a government job. “You should have seen his face when he learned there were no stock options at the State Department. But he soon not only settled in very nicely, he became positively enthusiastic when I told him we did have our own plane.” Clinton also gushed about Hormats, who joined her at State after a career at Goldman Sachs, in a 2014 speech at JPMorgan Chase.

In excerpts that got some attention last week, Clinton told bankers that financial reform “really has to come from the industry itself,” that “the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry,” and that blaming banks for the crisis was “an oversimplification.”

Her former Democratic presidential rival, Bernie Sanders responded in a statement, “Whatever Secretary Clinton may or may not have said behind closed doors on Wall Street, I am determined to implement the agenda of the Democratic Party platform which was agreed upon by her campaign,” and which “calls for breaking up the largest financial institutions in this country, re-establishing Glass-Steagall and prosecuting those many Wall Street CEOs who engaged in illegal behavior.”

The excerpts reveal that Clinton, when speaking to the financial industry, adopted their mindset and privileged their arguments. The question that arises is whether members of a possible Clinton administration will reflect this worldview, or whether the long primary with Sanders has made that untenable. Some aggressive advocates for progressive appointments believe the latter.

“At State and on the speaking circuit, Clinton was in an environment that encouraged her to view Wall Street bankers as fonts of economic wisdom,” said Jeff Hauser, Director of the Revolving Door Project. “But after 15 months running against a progressive populist like Sanders, Clinton knows that government conducted a by rotating stream of bankers is politically unacceptable.”