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There were no sitcom actors. No Olympians or supermodels or Real Housewives, either. Even some of the usual high-profile media names were missing, too. And for the second consecutive year, so was the president.

The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday attracted about 3,000 journalists, random plus-ones and curious hangers on, but the usual buzz around the event was reduced to something more like a snore.

The annual social rite of spring in Washington was less ­the ­government-meets-Hollywood-meets-the-press glitzfest of yore and more like a dressed-up ­Kiwanis Club dinner, albeit one televised live by CNN, MSNBC and C-SPAN.

This may have been President Trump’s intent when he turned down an invitation to the dinner, making him 0 for 2 since his inauguration last year. Trump — who distilled his signature hostility toward the news media by branding them “the enemy of the people” — arranged to be out of town while the journalists and their guests partied.

As he did last year, Trump staged a campaign-style rally, this year in Michigan, timing it to begin just as the salad was being served in the Washington Hilton ballroom. Many of the people at the Hilton read that as more than a coincidence. At one point in the speech, Trump eviscerated the media for being “very, very dishonest people.”

Fifteen presidents have attended the correspondents’ dinner since it began in 1921, which has made the event a hot ticket long before the likes of Bradley Cooper and Scarlett Johansson began showing up. The presidents-in-the-house streak ran to 36 consecutive years until Trump pooped out on the party last year. The last time Trump attended, in 2011, he sat stoically as the evening’s entertainer, Seth Meyers, dropped comic bombs on him. The prospect of it happening again seems to have deterred him from returning.

Trump did make one gesture toward press-administration glasnost, encouraging current and former members of his administration to attend (the White House announced last year that no staff employees would attend in “solidarity” with the president’s snub). And so Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus showed up. Omarosa Manigault-Newman came, too (accompanied by a fellow who tended to the train of her gown). Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders occupied a seat at the head table at the invitation of the White House Correspondents’ Association.

[The 2018 White House correspondents’ dinner: Our live coverage]

The celebrity cadre was small and not quite A-list: comic and Trump controversialist Kathy Griffin, Comedy Central host Jordan Klepper, Baltimore Orioles legend Brooks Robinson, Stormy Daniels attorney and ubiquitous TV presence Michael Avenatti.

The political contingent was modest as well. Among the pols in attendance were former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe (D), former New Jersey governor Chris Christie (R), Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) and Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.).

Tech luminaries? Titans of business? TV network chiefs? Not so many.

It was possible, one guest quipped, that Trump had done something he doesn’t usually do: He made an event more normal.

The sedate and earnest nature of the event was disrupted by comedian Michelle Wolf, the evening’s entertainer, who predictably went after Trump in a routine that swerved from raunchy to downright nasty. She began by saying, “Like a porn star says when she’s about to have sex with a Trump, let’s get this over with.”

Wolf vowed to get under Trump’s skin by questioning his wealth, issuing a call and response with the audience (“How broke is he?”). Her punchline included such quips as, “He’s so broke . . . he has to fly failed business class” and “he looked for foreign oil in Don Jr.’s hair.”

She was particularly harsh on the women associated with Trump. At one point, she compared Ivanka Trump to a diaper pail, and said Kellyanne Conway has “the perfect last name” because “all she does is lie.” Several cracks about Sarah Huckabee Sanders landed poorly, such as her alleged confusion over how to refer to Sanders’s full name: “Is it Sarah Sanders? Is it Sarah Huckabee Sanders? . . . What’s ‘Uncle Tom’ but for white women who disappoint other white women? Oh, I know: ‘Aunt Coulter.’ ”

Groans and cold silence followed.

[The harshest jokes from Michelle Wolf’s correspondents’ dinner speech]

In place of celebrity glitz, the correspondents’ group has tried to rebrand its party as a celebration of the First Amendment, a fundraiser for journalism scholarships and an awards ceremony. Winners of White House reporting awards this year included: the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, whom Trump disparaged in a tweet last week; a CNN team consisting of Jake Tapper, Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto and Carl Bernstein; Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey, recognized for his work at Politico; and a team from Reuters.

And maybe that’s how it should be, Tapper indicated during a pre-dinner cocktail party.

“This might be a precedent that the president is setting that is good,” he said. “We in the media have constantly for years been accused of being too cozy with power — during the Bush years, during the Obama years. Maybe no U.S. president should ever feel comfortable in a room full of White House reporters. I know that’s not why he’s taking a stand, but maybe it’s a good thing.”

The WHCA’s current president, Bloomberg News’ White House reporter Margaret Talev, called the president’s absence “unfortunate.”

But she added, “Our tradition of inviting U.S. presidents, vice presidents and their staffs exists not because of the individual president but because of the office. Those who accept the invitation are signaling that they support the constitutional principles at stake and the role of the press and free speech in our republic.”

News organizations seemed to get that, quickly snapping up all of the available tables within the first week they were on sale.

That meant that more than the usual number of actual journalists got to attend, lending the affair a kind of industry reunion vibe.

“Maybe ultimately this should be more about the First Amendment, and about recognizing good journalism and about recognizing student journalists,” Tapper said. “Maybe this is not as glamorous and fun, but ultimately maybe this is what this event should be more like.”

But the dismissal appears to be an unforced error in a political year when Republicans cannot afford mistakes. The controversy exposed long-simmering tensions between Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians over who should be lawmakers’ religious counselor. And a public clash between Southern evangelical Republicans and Northern Catholics could play to the advantage of Democrats, who are pressing hard to bring working-class Catholic regions in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin back into the Democratic fold.

The controversy was heightened when Representative Mark Walker, Republican of North Carolina and a Baptist minister, said Thursday in an interview with The Hill newspaper that he hoped the next chaplain of the House might come from a nondenominational church tradition who could relate to members with wives and children.

Catholic Democrats quickly called his remarks anti-Catholic, as Catholic priests are celibate, and Mr. Walker’s spokesman later said Mr. Walker was not excluding a particular faith group. One Republican, Representative Peter T. King of New York, took issue with the comments.

“To be excluding one religion up front, that has all sorts of connotations coming from the evangelical community,” Mr. King said in an interview. He said he had received several inquiries from priests about Mr. Ryan’s decision, and he told the speaker, “This issue is not going to go away that quickly.”

A House Democratic aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, said Mr. Ryan gave the Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, an additional reason for Father Conroy’s ouster: Mr. Ryan said he was upset that the chaplain had granted an interview to The National Journal.

In the interview, Father Conroy expounded on matters like sexual harassment and a possible spiritual crisis in Congress. He said he was asked during his job interview whether he had ever molested a child. And while he said he had never been asked to counsel a victim of sexual harassment or assault, he had handled cases of workplace abuse during his tenure in the House.

“Think about it: Who are the people that run for office?” he was quoted as saying. “Are they all highly skilled in every endeavor? No! They’re not. Many of them, I can tell you, don’t know how to say hello in the hallway, let alone work with office people that maybe they don’t think they have to listen to.”

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Ms. Pelosi issued a statement arguing that Mr. Ryan did not have the authority to dismiss the chaplain. “I have expressed my forceful disagreement with this decision to the speaker,” she said. “It is truly sad that he made this decision, and it is especially bewildering that he did so only a matter of months before the end of his term.”

The outrage broke down largely along party lines. Of 148 members of Congress who signed a letter to Mr. Ryan demanding answers on why he ousted Father Conroy, just one, Representative Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, was a Republican.

“This will have ramifications,” Mr. Jones said Friday afternoon. “This is bigger than Father Conroy and the House of Representatives. This is about religion in America.”

The controversy was multifaceted, pitting evangelicals against Catholics but also resurfacing lingering anger over this Congress’s singular accomplishment, the 10-year, $1.5 trillion overhaul of the tax code.

To supporters of that legislation, especially to one of its chief architects, Mr. Ryan, the prayer issued by Father Conroy would have stung: “May all members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle,” the priest said in the midst of the debate. “May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”

Father Conroy, who was named to the post in 2011 by another Catholic Republican speaker, John A. Boehner, said that he did not regard his November prayer as political in nature.

“If you are a hospital chaplain, you are going to pray about health,” he said. “If you are a chaplain of Congress, you are going to pray about what Congress is doing.”

He said Mr. Ryan’s remarks to him afterward marked the only time anyone from the speaker’s office had chastised him for veering into the political realm.

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“I’ve never been talked to about being political in seven years,” he said.

In an election that ultimately will revolve around President Trump, the controversy may well prove ephemeral.

“Whatever Democrats try to do, if they try to politicize this or capitalize on this, I just think it is way too obscure,” said Douglas Heye, a longtime Republican political strategist and a Catholic. “If you are having a larger conversation about ‘Catholic issues,’ Trump is going to dominate that.”

Ten years ago on Capitol Hill, the number of Catholic Democrats in the House was more than double the number of Catholic Republicans. Now it is nearly even.

Some on the left see an emerging issue for Mr. Ryan and his supporters. “Partisans will likely frame this as a Catholic versus evangelical contest,” said Christopher J. Hale, a strategist who did Catholic outreach for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. “They made a political football out of a good Catholic priest.”

The spat is particularly pointed because religious power in Washington has shifted drastically under Mr. Trump to white evangelical leaders. Unlike Mr. Obama, who relied regularly on a religiously diverse group of interfaith advisers, including prominent Catholics, Mr. Trump has elevated a select group of conservative evangelicals who routinely defend his political agenda, and it is rare to see a Catholic bishop in the White House.

Mr. Trump himself famously feuded with Pope Francis during his 2016 presidential campaign over Mr. Trump’s push to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico, which Francis called “not Christian.” Last year, some of Mr. Trump’s evangelical advisers sought to quiet Vatican criticism of the rightward direction of American Catholicism.

Before Francis became pope, the Vatican seemed to favor Republican mainstay issues, such as opposition to abortion and gay marriage. Francis’ rise helped reset the role of Catholicism in American public life, and prioritized political and economic messages on immigration and climate change.

The pope, like Father Conroy, is a Jesuit, an order of priests viewed by some as more liberal. Father Conroy’s resignation is all the more contentious in Catholic circles because Mr. Ryan is a Catholic conservative.

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“We are a long way from Pope Francis at the White House and in the Capitol,” said John Carr, the director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University. “The divisions are greater, they are more stark and they are more angry.”

On Friday, the Catholic Association, a more conservative group, came to Mr. Ryan’s defense. Maureen Ferguson, a senior policy adviser with the organization, called criticism surrounding his decision to ask Father Conroy to step down “downright absurd.”

“Anyone who knows Speaker Ryan knows he is a devoted Catholic,” she said. “Much ado is being made about nothing.”

For others, it far more serious. The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and an editor at large of America magazine, said he has heard from Catholics who are “dismayed” that a chaplain would be fired for apparently defending the poor, and he worries about the anti-Catholic dog-whistling.

“The implication that, as one legislator said, a ‘family man’ would be more suitable smacks of anti-Catholicism,” Father Martin said. “By that yardstick, Jesus wouldn’t qualify either.”

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GEDmatch said in a statement that law enforcement never approached it about the case in California.

“It has always been GEDmatch’s policy to inform users that the database could be used for other uses, as set forth in the site policy,” the website said, adding that participants’ information could help in the “identification of relatives that have committed crimes or were victims of crimes.”

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Paul Holes, a recently retired cold-case detective with the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office, described the process of narrowing down suspects using DNA.

“When you find somebody that has DNA that they might share with our offender … then you find somebody else. And if you see that they share a little more DNA, you’ve stepped a bit closer to who the offender is,” Holes told NBC News. “And so you end up marching down that path until, ultimately, you get within a reasonably small suspect pool.”

The pool in this case included DeAngelo, who was the right age and lived in the area where many of the crimes took place, officials said. Investigators kept tabs on him for six days, collecting actual DNA on items he had thrown out, before arresting him Tuesday night at his home.

And DNA potentially may have played an earlier role in the case: by stopping the crime spree. Genetic testing was just coming into use as a criminal investigative tool in 1986 when the Golden State Killer apparently ended his decadelong wave of attacks.

DeAngelo, who was a police officer for two departments in the 1970s, most likely would have known about the new method, experts said.

After Sacramento County prosecutors confirmed Thursday that they found DeAngelo through genealogical websites, Ancestry.com and 23andMe issued statements denying that they had played any role.

Still, privacy laws aren’t strong enough to stop other police departments from prying, said Steve Mercer, the chief attorney for the forensic division of the Maryland Office of the Public Defender.

“People who submit DNA for ancestors’ testing are unwittingly becoming genetic informants on their innocent family,” said Mercer, adding that they “have fewer privacy protections than convicted offenders whose DNA is contained in regulated data banks.”

Sheldon Krimsky, a Tufts University professor who studies ethics in science and medicine, said almost half of the firms that provide ancestry information will sell customers’ genetic information to some other company. Those might include pharmaceutical or drug developers that want it for research.

Earlier this year, Krimsky said in an interview with Tufts Now, a news site affiliated with Tufts University, that only 10 percent of the ancestry companies will destroy a person’s original sample.

“The vast majority hold onto your sample or sell it. So it’s not just the data, but your actual saliva, that’s being shopped around,” he added.

Friday’s summit between the leaders of North and South Korea was a “historic meeting” paving the way for the start of a new era, North Korea’s media say.

The North’s Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in of South Korea agreed to work to rid the peninsula of nuclear weapons.

The official KCNA news agency hailed this as a “new milestone” in the path to joint prosperity. It also carried the full text of the declaration.

China and the United States both welcomed the news.

However, US President Donald Trump said he would continue to exert maximum pressure on North Korea, as he prepares to meet Mr Kim in the coming weeks.

“We’re not going to be played, OK?” he said.

“We’re going to hopefully make a deal.”

After the talks at the border, Mr Kim and Mr Moon also agreed to push towards turning the armistice, which ended the Korean War in 1953, into a peace treaty this year.

The summit came just months after warlike rhetoric from North Korea.

• Historic summit as it happened
• Five key moments from the meeting
• Read the Korean declaration in full

What is in the agreement?

Details of how denuclearisation would be achieved were not made clear, and many analysts remain sceptical about the North’s apparent enthusiasm for engagement.

An issue for the North is the security guarantee extended by the US, a nuclear power, to South Korea and Japan and its military presence in both countries.

• Will historic Koreas summit lead to peace?

Previous inter-Korean agreements have included similar pledges but were later abandoned after the North resorted to nuclear and missile tests and the South elected more conservative presidents.

Mr Kim said the two leaders had agreed to work to prevent a repeat of the region’s “unfortunate history” in which progress had “fizzled out”.

“There may be backlash, hardship and frustration,” he said, adding: “A victory cannot be achieved without pain.”

Other points the leaders agreed on in a joint statement were:

• An end to “hostile activities” between the two nations
• Changing the demilitarised zone (DMZ) that divides the country into a “peace zone” by ceasing propaganda broadcasts
• An arms reduction in the region pending the easing of military tension
• To push for four-way talks involving the US and China
• Organising a reunion of families left divided by the war
• Connecting and modernising railways and roads across the border
• Further joint participation in sporting events, including this year’s Asian Games

The commitment to denuclearisation does not explicitly refer to North Korea halting its nuclear activities but rather to the aim of “a nuclear-free Korean peninsula”.

• Why has Kim halted nuclear tests now?
• Profile: Kim Jong-un
• North Korea crisis in 300 words

What did China and the US say?

China later praised the political determination and courage of both leaders and said it hoped the momentum could be maintained.

President Trump also welcomed the news, tweeting that “good things are happening”.

Speaking in Washington, Mr Trump said his expected meeting with Mr Kim would take place in one of two countries under consideration and vowed he would not be “played” by the North Korean leader.

“We will come up with a solution and if we don’t we’ll leave the room,” he said.

How did Friday’s summit unfold?

The leaders were met by an honour guard in traditional costume on the South Korean side. The pair walked to the Peace House in Panmunjom, a military compound in the DMZ.

Mr Kim then invited the South Korean president to step briefly across the demarcation line into North Korea, before the pair stepped back into South Korea – all the while holding hands.

It was an apparently unscripted moment during a highly choreographed sequence of events.

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EPA

The two leaders spoke together during a session broadcast live on South Korean TV.

Mr Kim jokingly apologised to Mr Moon for repeatedly forcing him to get up early because of the North’s missile and nuclear tests.

“I heard you [President Moon] had your early morning sleep disturbed many times to attend National Security Council meetings,” he said. “I will make sure that your morning sleep won’t be disturbed.”

“Now I can sleep in peace,” Mr Moon replied.

Mr Kim also acknowledged that the North’s infrastructure lagged behind that of the South.

“I’m worried that our transport situation is bad so it may discomfort you, it may be embarrassing [for me] if you visit North Korea after living in the South’s environment,” he said.

• Korea summit sparks cold noodle craze
• Diplomacy on the menu: How food can shape politics

After separating for lunch, the two leaders took part in a tree-planting ceremony using soil and water from both countries.

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Getty Images

They later attended a banquet.

Mr Kim was accompanied for the symbolic discussions by nine officials, including his powerful sister, Kim Yo-jong.

• Kim’s sister and North Korea’s secret weapon

How did we get here?

Few had predicted a development like this, as North Korea continued its nuclear and missile tests and stepped up its rhetoric through 2016 and 2017.

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Reuters

The rapprochement began in January when Mr Kim suggested he was “open to dialogue” with South Korea.

• Did the Winter Olympics repair relations?
• North and South set up hotline ahead of summit

The following month the two countries marched under one flag at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, held in the South.

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Getty Images

Mr Kim announced last week that he was suspending nuclear tests.

Chinese researchers have indicated that North Korea’s nuclear test site may be unusable after a rock collapse.

As President Trump threatens to reshape the Justice Department’s leadership and demolish its tradition of independence from politics, department alums are fighting back with increasing vigor — signing petitions, holding public events and taking direct aim at a man they fear will do lasting damage.

On Thursday, Trump suggested in a television interview he might increase his involvement with the Justice Department, which is exploring the conduct of his personal lawyer and overseeing the special counsel investigation into whether his election campaign coordinated with Russia.

[Trump says he might get more involved in managing the Justice Department]

Justice Department alums and legal observers already had been critical of the president for allegedly trying to exert influence over the agency in inappropriate ways, including by asking the FBI to let go of an investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The president, though, has ignored their pleas to back off, asserting repeatedly that federal law enforcement leaders are out to get him.

“You look at the corruption at the top of the FBI; it’s a disgrace, and our Justice Department — which I try to stay away from, but at some point, I won’t — our Justice Department should be looking at that kind of stuff, not the nonsense of collusion with Russia,” Trump told Fox Friends.

Justice Department alums fear the president is laying groundwork to fire the attorney general, deputy attorney general or special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in an effort to end investigations that might affect him personally. Trump says he’s the subject of a “witch hunt.”

But his attacks also might have significant consequences, undermining public faith in the Justice Department, the FBI and the force of the law, said John Bellinger, a former Justice Department official who more recently worked as a legal adviser to the State Department and National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration.

“My real concern is that this will do long-term damage to the perception of independence of the Department of Justice and of the FBI, with at least some group of people, and that that might not ever be retained,” Bellinger said.

Trump’s latest complaints were familiar and wide ranging. In the Fox Friends interview, he raged about the number of Democrats on Mueller’s team, and the political donations a Hillary Clinton-ally made to the wife of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. He accused former FBI director James B. Comey of lying and leaking classified information in memos he provided to his lawyers detailing interactions with Trump.

Comey, who as FBI director had the authority to classify information, has said none of the memos were classified when he created them, though the FBI later deemed some of the information was.

Trump’s raging has generated little public pushback from those leading the Justice Department now. On Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said at a congressional hearing that he shared some of the president’s frustrations, and noted that FBI leadership has changed since Trump took office.

[‘This thing needs to conclude’: Sessions says he understands frustrations with Mueller]

Pressed on why he had so far refused to appoint a second special counsel to investigate a host of GOP concerns, many of them having to do with Hillary Clinton, Sessions responded, “I do not think we need to willy nilly appoint special counsels, and as we can see, it can really take on a life of its own” — taking what seemed to be a swipe at Mueller.

Sessions said he sympathized with Trump’s frustration about matters that have distracted from his agenda and suggested Mueller’s probe “needs to conclude.”

“Look, I think the American people are concerned, and the president is concerned,” Sessions said. “He’s dealing with France and North Korea and Syria and taxes and regulations and border and crime, every day, and I wish — this thing needs to conclude.”

It was unclear from the exchange what “thing” he was referring to, though a Justice Department spokeswoman said later, “I’d imagine he was saying that it’s in the public interest to have the special counsel’s investigation concluded as soon as possible.”

Outside the Justice Department, the concern has been more palpable. At Georgetown Law School on Thursday, a group of former Justice officials from both political parties held an event called “Democracy in the Balance,” where they warned of how Trump is violating long-held norms.

Former deputy attorney general Sally Yates, who emceed the event, said it was a way of “planting a flag and making it clear that these institutions are important and that what’s happening now is not normal.” Trump famously fired Yates, an Obama appointee, as acting attorney general after she refused to defend the first version of his travel ban.

“That’s one of the risks, I think, that we face in all of this, is that with a daily onslaught, after a while people stop feeling outraged by it, and it starts becoming more and more normal,” Yates said in an interview.

As of Thursday, more than 900 former Justice employees had signed an open letter calling on Congress to “swiftly and forcefully respond to protect the founding principles of our Republic and the rule of law” if Trump were to move on Mueller or other Justice Department officials. Trump has long raged about Sessions recusing himself from the investigation that Mueller now leads. Those inside the Justice Department have been on edge since the FBI earlier this month raided the home, office and hotel room of Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

[Senate Judiciary Committee backs bill to protect special counsel Robert S. Mueller III from being fired by President Trump]

Former Justice officials often speak out about issues important to them, but the volume and forcefulness with which many are criticizing Trump is notable.

Comey, who is in the midst of a media tour to promote a new book, has repeatedly compared Trump to a crime boss and his presidency to a forest fire. Yates said in an interview this week that the president’s attacks on the Justice Department are “beyond unprecedented,” and that voters should take them into account in deciding whether he should be reelected in 2020.

The Justice Department is part of the executive branch, and it is not inappropriate for the president to work with his attorney general on promoting broad policy goals. Jack Goldsmith, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush administration, said at the Georgetown event that Trump has “extraordinary theoretical powers to control prosecutions,” though since Watergate, presidents have by tradition steered clear of putting their thumb on the scale in such matters.

Trump, Goldsmith said, seemed to be “indifferent to those norms” — though his efforts so far had been largely ineffective.

Of particular concern to some is that Trump has suggested his foes, such as Comey and top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, should not just be investigated, but jailed.

“That is not okay,” Comey said on CNN Wednesday. “This is the United States of America.”

[Trump grants pardon to former Bush official; some say he is using the law as a political tool]

Former Justice Department officials critical of Trump have stopped short of calling for the president to be removed from office by impeachment. So far, their pleas have mostly been that voters and legislators take notice. Bellinger said he hoped that more Republicans who held senior Justice Department positions, in particular, would join the chorus of voices defending the agency.

Trump campaigned on a promise of shaking up Washington, and he reiterated that on Thursday.

“I’m fighting a battle against a horrible group of deep-seated people — drain the swamp — that are coming up with all sorts of phony charges against me, and they’re not bringing up real charges against the other side,” he said.

Yates said that while voters might have rightly expected Trump to bring significant policy changes, “I think what you don’t expect and what’s a lot more dangerous to us as a country is this all-out assault on institutions and norms that are really essential to our democracy.”

“Just like us” was the dream of the show, right? “Best behavior” blackness. That’s one way to think about it, the cynical, uncharitable, myopic way, the way you’d think about it if you wanted to psychologize Bill Cosby as Cliff Huxtable.

I couldn’t have known how vertiginous the entire Huxtable project was. I was, like, 10, 13, 15 years old when the show was a thing. But eventually, I could see that Cliff became a play for respectability. This is how you comport yourself among white people, young black child. Take a little bit of Howard with you on your way to Harvard. But then, in 2004, at an NAACP ceremony commemorating 50 years since the Brown v. Board of Education decision, he gave the notorious “Pound Cake” speech, where prodding for a particular kind of self-betterment turned tsk-y. He compared incarcerated black men to jailed civil rights activists, the apples and oranges of the black criminal-justice crisis. He ruminated on names that didn’t seem, to him, like Bill.

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“We are not Africans,” he said. “Those people are not Africans, they don’t know a damned thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed, and all that crap and all of them are in jail.” Maybe this was Cliff unplugged — and unhinged. Mohammed? But it was a dare to flirt with distance, to reconsider all those applications I filed, to see Bill Cosby as someone who, despite hours of comedy like “Bill Cosby Is Not Himself These Days” and “Bill Cosby: Himself,” might not be willing or able to see who “himself” actually is. I called this a speech, but he performed it like another standup special.

This is the heavy thing about this verdict. The sorting of the ironies has been left to us. Mr. Cosby made blackness palatable to a country historically conditioned to think the worst of black people. And to pull that off, he had to find a morally impeccable presentation of himself and his race. This is what Sidney Poitier, his friend and movie partner, was always up against: inhabiting the superhumanly unimpeachable. But Mr. Cosby might have managed to pull a fast one, using his power and wealth to become the predator that white America mythologized in a campaign to terrorize, torture and kill black people for centuries. Mr. Cosby told lots of jokes. This was his sickest one.

Mr. Cosby’s guilty verdict happens to fall during a week in which Kanye West brought a lot of people a lot more grief, not with new music but with a blizzard of tweets that included an expressed affinity for President Trump, right down to wearing a Make America Great Again cap of his own. Mr. West began his career as a kind of black-sheep Huxtable. (His first album was “The College Dropout.”) But he eventually gathered a sense of politics — racialized, pro-black politics. And then he married into the Kardashian family and things got as vivid and incoherent as one of Cliff’s Van Den Akker sweaters. This is how you get a blistering indictment of racial closed-mindedness like 2013’s “Black Skinhead” but also an embrace of people who’ve been reluctant to shame white supremacists.

This seems like a reasonable moment to wonder whether the Huxtable mold is one that needs breaking — or at least expansion. Mr. West presents a new vexation that’s the opposite of Mr. Cosby’s stringent black conservatism. He can be offensive and rude and self-aggrandizing. But that mind-set also feels like a way to move beyond America’s Dad. Disrespectability politics.

We’re in a moment of cleaving terrible people from their great work. It’s a luxury conundrum, one that feels like a mockery of tremendous human suffering. With Mr. Cosby, though, these are questions worth seriously considering. How do I, at least, cleave this man from the man he seduced me into becoming?

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Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, will invoke his Fifth Amendment right in a lawsuit filed against the president by Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film star better known as Stormy Daniels.

Mr. Cohen’s decision, disclosed Wednesday in a court filing in California, where the suit was filed, came a day before a federal judge in Manhattan was set to hold a hearing regarding materials seized from Mr. Cohen during an F.B.I. raid earlier this month.

Mr. Cohen cited the Manhattan investigation in his filing on Wednesday, saying that, if called as a witness in Ms. Clifford’s lawsuit, “I will assert my 5th Amendment rights in connection with all proceedings in this case due to the ongoing criminal investigation by the F.B.I. and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.”

Ms. Clifford was paid $130,000 to keep quiet about claims that she had an affair with Mr. Trump. She sued last month to get out of the nondisclosure agreement she signed in October 2016, alleging that it was void because Mr. Trump had never signed it.

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Citing the Fifth Amendment in the Clifford case allows Mr. Cohen to avoid being deposed and revealing sensitive information in the more important criminal investigation. That investigation — which prosecutors say has been going on for months — became public in dramatic fashion on April 9, when agents from the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided Mr. Cohen’s office, apartment and a room at the Loews Regency Hotel he had been using. The inquiry is said to be focusing on hush-money payments that Mr. Cohen made to — or helped arrange for — Ms. Clifford and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who has also said she had an affair with Mr. Trump.

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For days now, prosecutors from the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan have been sparring with Mr. Cohen’s lawyers — and with lawyers for Mr. Trump — for the right to review the records first, a step that will shape the contours of how the government presses its investigation into whether Mr. Cohen tried to suppress negative news coverage of the president in the run-up to the 2016 election.

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The conservative majority on the Supreme Court seemed to agree Wednesday that President Trump has the authority to ban travelers from certain majority-Muslim countries if he thinks that it is necessary to protect the country.

Lower courts have struck down each of the three iterations of the president’s travel-ban proclamation, the first of which was issued just a week after he took office in January 2017. But the conservative-leaning Supreme Court may be Trump’s best hope, and it gave the administration a boost by allowing the ban to go into effect in December while considering the challenges to it.

[In travel-ban case, Supreme Court considers ‘the president’ vs. ‘this president’]

Solicitor General Noel Francisco told the justices that the president was well within his power to issue the proclamation and that it came after a thorough, worldwide review of the vetting procedures of countries.

“The vast majority of the world, including the vast majority of the Muslim world, was just fine,” Francisco said, while a “tiny” number of countries were not.

If it were meant to be a Muslim ban, he said, “it would be the most ineffective Muslim ban that one could possibly imagine, since not only does it exclude the vast majority of the Muslim world, it also omits three Muslim-majority countries that were covered by past orders.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was most active in advancing the notion that the president is privy to national security information that courts are ill prepared to second-guess.

And Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who always seems to occupy the pivotal position when conservative and liberal justices disagree, asked questions that mostly seemed supportive of the president’s authority.

It would seem almost impossible for challengers to prevail without one of those justices joining their colleagues on the left.

The high-profile hearing, the last of the court’s term as it turns now to writing opinions, called for the justices to balance their usual deference to the president on matters of national security with a never-before-seen barrage of campaign statements, tweets, retweets and comments from the president tying Muslims to terrorism.

Just hours after Francisco told the court the president had made it “crystal clear . . . he had no intention of imposing the Muslim ban,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders sidestepped a reporter’s question about whether the administration disavowed Trump’s campaign promise to enact one.

Sanders read a statement about the ban that said residents of many majority-Muslim countries could travel to the United States. “I think that alone in action answers your question clearly,” she said.

The court is considering the iteration of Trump’s travel ban, issued last fall, that barred various travelers from eight countries, six of them with Muslim majorities. They are Syria, Libya, Iran, Yemen, Chad, Somalia, North Korea and Venezuela. But restrictions on North Korea and Venezuela are not part of the challenge. Chad was removed from the list earlier this month.

The first questions for Francisco came from the two liberal justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, who had noted their dissent from the high court’s earlier order to allow the ban to go into effect while challenges continued.

Sotomayor suggested that Congress had already taken steps to ensure national security by implementing a heightened vetting process for travelers from other countries.

“Where does a president get the authority to do more than Congress has already decided is adequate?” she asked.

Francisco pointed to the removal of Chad from the list as evidence that the review process was working as anticipated, by encouraging more cooperation from countries to help screen out those who might intend to harm the United States.

The challengers are led by the state of Hawaii, which said its citizens and educational institutions have suffered because of the ban.

Former Obama administration acting solicitor general Neal K. Katyal, representing Hawaii, said Trump had taken an “iron wrecking ball” to the law Congress had implemented to govern immigration and keep the nation safe.

“If you accept this order, you’re giving the president a power no president in 100 years has exercised, an executive proclamation that countermands Congress’s policy judgments,” Katyal said.

Conservative justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch, along with Roberts, peppered Katyal with questions on how the president had exceeded his lawful authority, given that Congress had granted the executive branch broad latitude to bar people’s entry into the United States.

Alito noted the law says that if the president found the entry of “any aliens” to be detrimental to U.S. interests, he could bar them. How, he asked, did the travel ban not fall “squarely” within that power?

Alito also said the ban affected only 8 percent of the world’s Muslim population.

“If you look at what was done, it does not look at all like a Muslim ban,” Alito said.

Roberts posited a hypothetical: If the intelligence agencies told the president that 20 Syrian nationals planned to enter the United States with biological weapons, could the president ban the entry of Syrians to stop them? Katyal conceded that he could, because in that instance — unlike this one — there was a true emergency.

Roberts asked whether there were a “statute of limitations” on a president’s campaign statements.

“Tomorrow, he issues a proclamation disavowing those statements, then the next day he could reenter this and your discrimination argument would not be applicable?” Roberts asked.

Katyal said that it probably would. But Trump and his administration have “rekindled” the comments.

Justice Elena Kagan similarly asked Francisco about a hypothetical anti-Semitic candidate for president who, once elected, put in place a proclamation blocking entry for citizens of Israel. She asked: Could the courts intervene in such a situation?

“This is an out-of-the-box kind of president in my hypothetical,” Kagan added, prompting laughter from the courtroom.

Francisco called it a “tough hypothetical” but said such a president could impose the measure if it came at the recommendation of staffers who had identified a genuine national security problem.

In contrast, Francisco said Trump’s travel ban is an “easy case” because it came after a multiagency review and on the advice of Cabinet officials. He conceded that if Cabinet officials knew the president was ordering a ban based on religious animus, because he told them as much, they would be “duty bound” to resign or refuse to comply with his order to come up with a justification.

“Is everything that the president said effectively that?” Kagan asked.

Kennedy picked up on Kagan’s questioning, asking Francisco to consider a local candidate for mayor who made “hateful’ comments and then upon being elected acted on those impulses. “You would say whatever he said in the campaign is irrelevant?” Kennedy asked.

Francisco said he would.

But Kennedy had more, and tougher, questions for Katyal.

When Katyal said Trump’s travel ban had no end, Kennedy said, “So you want the president to say, ‘I’m convinced that in six months we’re going to have a safe world?’ ”

And if there is a question about whether there is a threat to security, Kennedy asked Katyal, did he think “that’s for the courts to do, not the president?”

The justices are reviewing a unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco. That panel said the third version of the travel ban suffered from the deficiencies of the first two — that Trump had again exceeded his lawful authority and that he had not made a legally sufficient finding that entry of those blocked would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond struck down the ban on the constitutional question. The 9-to-4 decision took a deep dive into Trump’s statements and tweets since he became president and concluded that the proclamation, like the first two, was motivated not by national security concerns but by antipathy toward Muslims.

The case is Trump v. Hawaii. The court will issue its decision some time before the conclusion of the term at the end of June.