One Week, Three Questions, and a Gentle Shove.

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(Photo by Kent NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images)

The president did it gently. In Washington, that’s sometimes the hardest way to hear it. On the South Lawn Friday, President Trump told reporters he’d pulled his new press secretary aside just before walking out. His message to her: “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to… I think you should reconsider.” Then, almost to himself: “Maybe it’s not for her.” Katie Zacharia had held the job for one week. Asked whether that meant she was fired, Trump waved it off. “No no. I want her to have a good life.” She’d “been brutalized by the media,”

You Can Dismiss a Tweet. A Sister Is Harder.

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(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Abdul El-Sayed has a sister. She has been talking about their family for years. He says he’s never listened. That was the gist of a tense exchange this week between the Michigan Democrat, now running for the U.S. Senate, and NBC’s Tom Llamas. Llamas asked about posts from El-Sayed’s sister, Eman Abdelhadi, first surfaced by the Washington Free Beacon. In them she says the family has “long been” in the Muslim Brotherhood. She says relatives in Egypt went to jail over it. She says their mother, Fatten Elkomy, was active in the group as a college student in Egypt in

A One Year Difference — and Everything Riding on It.

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(Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images)

Most of us know what year we were born. It’s the first fact we ever own. Ilhan Omar’s office, it turns out, had to fix hers. And it fixed it after she got to Congress. For years the record was plain. Her birthdate was listed as October 4, 1981 in the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, on Wikipedia, and by major outlets including the BBC. That date stayed put through her time in the Minnesota House and her first run for Congress. Then came the spring of 2019. She’d been in Washington four months. A video from a political rival was

A Simple No, and a Sister Who Said Otherwise.

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(Photo by Finn Gomez/Getty Images)

On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, if he could “set the record straight” on claims that his family had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. “No,” he said. Welker gave him room to be sure. “No, you don’t have any ties, and your family doesn’t?” “No,” El-Sayed repeated. Then he went on offense. Before giving that direct answer, he told Welker his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, had raised the issue only because he “really wanted to repeat the word Muslim.” It was a clean, confident denial. The

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