If there was any chance that President Trump and James B. Comey could avoid all-out war, it will end Sunday night.
That is when ABC News will broadcast an hourlong interview with Mr. Comey, the president’s fired F.B.I. director, as he seeks to publicize his searing tell-all memoir, “A Higher Loyalty.”
.. He calls Mr. Trump unethical and says he is a serial liar who could be vulnerable to blackmail by the Russian government. He compares the president to a mafia boss and says his tenure has been like a forest fire that is incinerating the country’s important norms and traditions.
“Donald Trump’s presidency threatens much of what is good in this nation,” Mr. Comey writes in the book.
The interview with Mr. Comey and the weekslong media blitz he plans for his book amount to a remarkable public assault on a sitting president by someone who served at the highest levels of power in the government.
.. Mr. Trump’s legal fate, as well as his political fortunes in Washington, may depend on whether he succeeds in undermining the credibility of Mr. Comey and the law enforcement institutions he views as arrayed against him.
.. Mr. Comey’s liberation is all the more combustible because it is aimed directly at a president who has said with pride on Twitter that “when someone attacks me, I always attack back…except 100x more.”
.. Mr. Trump called Mr. Comey a “slimeball” for the second time in three days, saying in a pair of early-morning tweets that he belongs in jail for what the president said were lies to Congress and leaks of classified information.
.. It is unclear where the epic battle of wills will lead, other than to a sustained escalation of insults between two men who have each admitted to having outsize egos.
.. It is unclear where the epic battle of wills will lead, other than to a sustained escalation of insults between two men who have each admitted to having outsize egos.
.. Mr. Comey says in the interview that Mr. Trump and his aides seemed interested only in what the former F.B.I. director called the “P.R. and spin” about the issue.
“The conversation, to my surprise, moved into a P.R. conversation about how the Trump team would position this and what they could say about this,” Mr. Comey said in a preview of the interview that aired on Sunday morning. “No one, to my recollection, asked: ‘So what’s coming next from the Russians? How might we stop it? What’s the future look like?’”
.. Mr. Comey said the president also raised the idea that the F.B.I. should investigate the claim as a way of proving that it never happened. Mr. Comey said he warned Mr. Trump that doing so would add to “the narrative” that the president was under investigation.
.. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press secretary, unloaded on Mr. Comey, calling him a “self-admitted leaker” and a liar.
Trump Mocks Mika Brzezinski; Says She Was ‘Bleeding Badly From a Face-Lift’
The president described Ms. Brzezinski as “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and claimed in a series of Twitter posts that she had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” during a social gathering at Mr. Trump’s resort in Florida around New Year’s Eve. The White House did not explain what had prompted the outburst, but a spokeswoman said Ms. Brzezinski deserved a rebuke because of her show’s harsh stance on Mr. Trump.
.. “My first reaction was that this just has to stop, and I was disheartened because I had hoped the personal, ad hominem attacks had been left behind, that we were past that,” Senator Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine who is a crucial holdout on the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, said in an interview.
“I don’t think it directly affects the negotiation on the health care bill, but it is undignified — it’s beneath a president of the United States and just so contrary to the way we expect a president to act,” she said. “People may say things during a campaign, but it’s different when you become a public servant. I don’t see it as undermining his ability to negotiate legislation, necessarily, but I see it as embarrassing to our country.”
.. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, urged the news media to move on, arguing during the daily White House briefing that Mr. Trump was “fighting fire with fire” by attacking a longtime critic.
Ms. Brzezinski had called the president “a liar” and suggested he was “mentally ill,” added Ms. Sanders, who defended Mr. Trump’s tweets as appropriate for a president.
.. “As the first lady has stated publicly in the past, when her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder,” Mrs. Trump’s spokeswoman wrote in a statement, referring to the first lady’s remarks during the campaign.
.. Mr. Trump’s oldest friends say it is difficult for him to distinguish between large and small slights — or to recognize that his office comes with the expectation that he moderate his behavior.
And his fiercest, most savage responses have almost always been to what he has seen on television.
.. After lashing out at Mr. Scarborough and Ms. Brzezinski at one point last summer, Mr. Trump told an adviser, “It felt good.”
.. reporters interrupted Ms. Sanders’s defense of the president to ask how she felt about them as a woman and a mother.
She responded that she had only “one perfect role model”: God.
“None of us are perfect,” she said.
Modi Picks Hindu Nationalist to Lead India’s Most Populous State
Promotion of Yogi Adityanath is seen representing the rise of Hindu power
.. Prime Minister Narendra Modi appointed a hard-line Hindu nationalist politician to lead India’s most-populous state over the weekend, a surprise move that marks a swing toward contentious religious politics by a leader who had stuck largely to a development-focused agenda.Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu priest and parliamentarian for nearly 20 years, is known for his divisive and incendiary speeches targeting Muslims... Mr. Adityanath will serve a five-year term as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a state where nearly 20% of the residents, or 40 million people, are Muslims and where religious tensions easily and frequently flare.
.. Mr. Adityanath’s promotion.. represents the rise of a muscular, Hindu India and a chance to correct what they see as years of official policy going too far to accommodate India’s Muslim minority.
.. “It signifies a new reading on the BJP’s part that public opinion will now accept what was considered politically imprudent not so long ago.”
.. Mr. Adityanath is among the strongest voices in the BJP pushing for the construction of a temple in a place in Uttar Pradesh where, in the 1990s, a Hindu mob destroyed a 16th century mosque
.. He campaigns against so-called love jihad, which he describes as an “international conspiracy” by Muslims to kidnap or lure Hindu women to marry and convert them.
He has exhorted Hindus to respond to attacks on members of their community with tenfold violence.
.. his choice for chief minister harks back to the Hindu nationalist roots of his party, which arose out of a nine-decades-old movement to establish India as a Hindu nation.
.. Mr. Adityanath built a support base in Uttar Pradesh by projecting India’s 80% Hindu majority as victimized and shortchanged by his political rivals, who he accuses of a pro-Muslim bias