First Run News

On Tuesday, Indra Nooyi, the chief executive of PepsiCo, joined a call with other prominent corporate chieftains who — like her — had agreed to advise President Trump. A rebellion was brewing. Along with other business leaders, Ms. Nooyi had watched with bafflement over the weekend as Mr. Trump blamed “many sides” for an outburst of white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va. Ms. Nooyi spoke with Mary T. Barra, the head of General Motors, Virginia M.

On Tuesday, Indra Nooyi, the chief executive of PepsiCo, joined a call with other prominent corporate chieftains who — like her — had agreed to advise President Trump. A rebellion was brewing. Along with other business leaders, Ms. Nooyi had watched with bafflement over the weekend as Mr. Trump blamed “many sides” for an outburst of white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va. Ms. Nooyi spoke with Mary T. Barra, the head of General Motors, Virginia M.

WASHINGTON — Jewish members of President Trump’s administration remained largely silent Wednesday after Mr. Trump came to the defense of nationalist and right-wing protesters in Charlottesville, Va., who had chanted anti-Semitic slogans and demeaned the president’s Jewish son-in-law. Gary D. Cohn, the director of the president’s National Economic Council, who is Jewish, was described by several people close to him as “disgusted” and “deeply upset” by the president’s remarks. But Mr.

Fox News, television’s equivalent of a presidential safe space, kept up its steadfast defense of President Trump even as he faced an uproar this week over his response to the violence at a white supremacist rally in Virginia last Saturday. Anchors like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson praised the president and lauded his bare-knuckle criticism of the news media. But notably, some pundits broke ranks. Eboni K. Williams, a host of the 5 p.m. show “The Specialists,” derided Mr.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Heather D. Heyer, the woman run down during violent clashes here, was remembered on Wednesday for a quality that friends and relatives described as her most frustrating, and most admired — a passion for fighting injustice that was so relentless, it often spilled into her work and personal life. Hundreds of mourners packed a theater in downtown Charlottesville for her memorial service, wearing a sea of purple, her favorite color. Ms.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s embrace of the country’s racially charged past has thrown the Republican Party into crisis, dividing his core supporters who have urged him on from the political leaders who fear that he is leading them down a perilous and shortsighted path. The divisions played out in the starkly different responses across the party after Mr.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s personal lawyer on Wednesday forwarded an email to conservative journalists, government officials and friends that echoed secessionist Civil War propaganda and declared that the group Black Lives Matter “has been totally infiltrated by terrorist groups.” The email forwarded by John Dowd, who is leading the president’s legal team, painted the Confederate general Robert E.

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — Eric Brown had already seen the footage of the torches, the fire, the fights. The wreckage of Charlottesville days before was still fresh in his memory when he turned on his television on Tuesday to hear the words of President Trump. He listened intensely as the president appeared to equate white nationalist hate groups with those who protested them. First, he allowed himself to feel the hurt. And then he prayed. “His words were bone-crushing,” Mr. Brown, 51, the minister of Greater Mount Pleasant A.M.E.

BALTIMORE — It happened in the dead of night. Around midnight, as Tuesday turned into Wednesday, a crew of police officers and workers wielding a large crane began making rounds of the city’s parks and public squares, hauling away monuments to Confederate heroes. When they were through, before sunrise, four statues that had stood for decades were gone, one chapter in a searing drama that is roiling cities across the county, particularly in the South. “I thought that there’s enough grandstanding, enough speeches being made,” Mayor Catherine E.

WASHINGTON — President Trump did more on Tuesday than simply draw an equivalence between the torch-wielding marchers and the leftist activists who clashed with them in Charlottesville, Va. He relinquished what presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan have regarded as a cardinal duty of their job: set a moral course to unify the nation. Asked during his news conference in Trump Tower whether he would put white supremacists and neo-Nazis on the same “moral plane” as their liberal and leftist resisters, a frustrated Mr.