WASHINGTON — President Trump formally abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership on Monday, pulling away from Asia and scrapping his predecessor’s most significant trade deal on his first full weekday in office, administration officials said. Mr. Trump sharply criticized the partnership agreement during last year’s campaign, calling it a bad deal for American workers. Although the deal had not been approved…
WASHINGTON — The team that wins the World Series typically visits the White House during the subsequent baseball season. But President Obama wanted none of that tradition. With his presidency down to its final week, and the start of the 2017 season still more than two months away, Mr. Obama arranged for the Chicago Cubs to celebrate on Monday….
Marvin Nicholson asked his golfing buddy to be a groomsman in his wedding. That normally would not be a big deal, or even out of the ordinary. But Mr. Nicholson has spent the last eight years as the White House trip director and a personal aide to the president, who happens to be his golfing buddy. Shortly after President…
Not since Lincoln has there been a president as fundamentally shaped — in his life, convictions and outlook on the world — by reading and writing as Barack Obama. Last Friday, seven days before his departure from the White House, Mr. Obama sat down in the Oval Office and talked about the indispensable role that books have played during…
CHICAGO — If the metal barricades, “Do Not Enter” signs and lurking Secret Service agents were a bother the past eight years in the Hyde Park-Kenwood area — the South Side neighborhood where President Obama still owns a house, but rarely has been home — residents are not complaining. “All that’s been fine, really. You get used to it,”…
BALTIMORE — With just days until Donald J. Trump is sworn in as president, the Obama administration is making a last-minute push for police overhauls in two of the nation’s most violent cities, Baltimore and Chicago, where officers have been accused of routinely mistreating African-Americans. In Chicago, where a city task force appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuelconcluded that “the…
President-elect Donald J. Trump pressed Republicans on Tuesday to move forward with the immediate repeal of the Affordable Care Act and to replace it very quickly thereafter, saying, “We have to get to business. Obamacare has been a catastrophic event.” Mr. Trump’s position undercuts Republican leaders who want a quick vote to repeal President Obama’s signature domestic achievement but…
A strategy that went from a “good war” to the shorthand“Afghan good enough” reflects the president’s comingto terms with what was possible in Afghanistan. WASHINGTON — President Obama’s advisers wrestled with an intractable problem in the spring and summer of 2015: How could they stabilize Afghanistan while preserving Mr. Obama’s longtime goal of pulling out the last American troops…
Thirty-five Russian diplomats expelled from the United States by President Barack Obama have left the country, Russian news agencies report. An embassy official said the plane had taken off with all the affected personnel and their families aboard. Mr Obama ordered the expulsion in response to alleged hacking of the US Democratic Party and Clinton campaign during the 2016…
WASHINGTON — President Obama struck back at Russia on Thursday for its efforts to influence the 2016 election, ejecting 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives from the United States and imposing sanctions on Russia’s two leading intelligence services. The administration also penalized four top officers of one of those services, the powerful military intelligence unit known as the G.R.U. Intelligence…
