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The sheriff’s office did not say how long the siblings may have been held captive.

Sheriff’s deputies provided food and water to the siblings, who claimed that they were starving. They were later transported to hospitals for treatment. Their conditions were not released.

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California records show that Mr. Turpin had received state approval to run a private school, the Sandcastle Day School, at the family’s home, a one-story stucco house in a subdivision built in recent years. The school enrolled six students this year, in grades sixth through 12th, and Mr. Turpin was listed as the principal.

Perris, about 70 miles southeast of Los Angeles, is one of the largest cities in Riverside County, which became an emblem of bankruptcy and foreclosure during the depths of the recent recession. Known as the Inland Empire, the region has rebounded in recent years.

The couple filed for bankruptcy in California in 2011, stating in court documents that they owed between $100,000 and $500,000 in debt. At that time, Mr. Turpin worked as an engineer at Northrop Grumman, the defense contractor, and earned $140,000 annually, records show. Ms. Turpin’s occupation was listed as a homemaker.

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Their bankruptcy lawyer, Ivan Trahan, said in a phone interview on Monday night that the parents spoke often about their children. They had 12 at the time of their bankruptcy, Mr. Trahan said, adding that the children never visited his law office.

“They spoke about them highly,” Mr. Trahan said.

He said Ms. Turpin told him that the family loved Disneyland in Southern California and visited often.

“We remember them as a very nice couple,” Mr. Trahan said. “This is shocking.”

On Sunday evening, a van and three cars were parked in the driveway at the Turpins’s house, and TV news station trucks lined their streets. Neighbors said they rarely saw the parents or the children, except for when some of the siblings were mowing the yard.

The Turpins moved to California from Texas around 2010, the parents wrote on Facebook, after Mr. Turpin returned to work for Northrop Grumman. On a family photo of the parents and 12 children (the youngest had not yet been born) posted on their Facebook page in 2011, a friend asked if all the children pictured were theirs.

“Yes all 12 are our children and we are very proud of them,” the Turpins replied.

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In Washington, Martin Luther King III, a son of Dr. King, noted Mr. Trump’s remarks and said, “I don’t even think we need to spend any time even talking about what it says and what it is.”

“Now the problem is that you have a president who says things but has the power to execute and create racism,” Mr. King said. “That’s a dangerous power and a dangerous position, and we cannot tolerate that. We’ve got to find a way to work on this man’s heart.”

While two of Dr. King’s adult children spoke out against the president on Monday, another relative, in an interview on Fox News on Saturday, defended Mr. Trump. “President Trump is not a racist,” Alveda C. King, a niece of Dr. King and a former Georgia state legislator, told “Fox and Friends.”

In brief remarks at Ebenezer, Mr. Trump’s housing and urban development secretary, Ben Carson, suggested that he had concerns about some of the remarks attributed to the president.

“I’m a member of this administration, and I don’t agree with the president about everything or of how it’s said,” said Mr. Carson, who noted, to some laughter, that he did not “even agree with everything that I’ve said.”

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“There is something to be said about understanding messaging,” Mr. Carson said, “and if the way you say things is so inflammatory that people can’t hear your message, it’s not helpful, and that’s why I don’t do that anymore.”

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Despite the partisan firestorm that has resulted from Mr. Trump’s remarks, elected officials in both parties publicly celebrated Dr. King’s work in Georgia, his birthplace and the site of his marble-encased tomb along Auburn Avenue in Atlanta. Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, wrote on Twitter that “Dr. King’s legacy is a guiding light.”

Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican of Georgia, said it was a day to “honor and remember the leadership and wisdom of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose legacy continues to make a positive difference in the lives of many people in our state and around the world.”

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During a visit to Georgia last week, Mr. Trump approved legislation that upgraded the designation of National Park Service sites that honor Dr. King in Atlanta. And on Friday, he signed a proclamation marking the holiday on Monday and encouraged “all Americans to observe this day with acts of civic work and community service in honor of Dr. King’s extraordinary life.”

The White House on Monday tweeted a video message from Mr. Trump in which he says that Dr. King’s dream is “the promise stitched into the fabric of our nation, etched into the hearts of our people and written into the soul of humankind.”

Mr. Trump spent part of the holiday in Florida at the Trump International Golf Club, but White House officials did not confirm whether he played golf.

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SportsPulse: USA TODAY Sports NFL insider Jarrett Bell attempts to put into words the unbelievable finish in Minnesota, and how important situational football meant in a weekend of classic games.
USA TODAY Sports

MINNEAPOLIS – In giant white letters on signage throughout the stadium, and in purple print on white towels placed on each of the 66,000 seats at U.S. Bank Stadium, the Minnesota Vikings made their intentions clear.

Bring it home, the signs said. Home, as in, to the Super Bowl, which will be played here in Minneapolis in three weeks.

The Vikings are now just one win away from becoming the first team to play a Super Bowl at home, after a stunning finished secured a 29-24 divisional-round win against the New Orleans Saints on Sunday.

Vikings receiver Stefon Diggs scored the game-winning 61-yard touchdown as time expired, as Saints safety Marcus Williams dove at his legs rather than trying for a tackle. After Diggs regained his balance, he had a clear path to the end zone, where he was mobbed by teammates while fireworks exploded inside the stadium.

Quarterback Case Keenum led fans in a “Skol” chant while waiting for 11 Saints players to return from the locker room in order to take a kneeldown on the extra point attempt.

It was a stunning end to a game the Saints appeared to have won in the closing seconds, following a 43-yard field goal by Saints kicker Wil Lutz with 25 seconds remaining. Lutz’ kick came 64 seconds after the Vikings took a 24-21 lead on a 53-yard field goal by Kai Forbath.

The Vikings will travel to play the No. 1 seed Philadelphia Eagles in the NFC Championship Game next week, a game in which Minnesota is likely to be favored, thanks to the top-ranked defense that largely shut down Drew Brees and the Saints offense on Sunday.

The Vikings intercepted Brees twice in the first half and held the Saints without a third-down conversion in the first two quarters.

More: Steelers’ Mike Tomlin gambled and lost against Jaguars, ending their NFL playoff hopes

More: Jaguars handle Steelers, crash AFC Championship Game party

For much of the game, each time Brees and the Saints offense seemed to find life, the Vikings defense found an answer – from Andrew Sendejo’s leaping interception on a deep pass in the first quarter, to a no-look deflection by defensive end Everson Griffen that wound up in the arms of linebacker Anthony Barr, to safety Harrison Smith’s third-down sack just before halftime that forced a long field goal attempt that was missed.

But this had been the Vikings’ winning formula for much of the season: bring pressure with Griffen and the rest of the hearty defensive front and play tight coverage in the secondary with Smith, Sendejo and cornerback Xavier Rhodes.

Minnesota finished the regular season ranked No. 1 in total defense and points allowed.

But the Vikings defense showed cracks in the second half of the game, as Brees and the Saints found momentum after Sendejo knocked out of the game with a concussion on a hit by receiver Michael Thomas.

Thomas caught a touchdown one play later to spark a Saints rally, and scored again early in the fourth quarter to cut Minnesota’s lead to 17-14.

The Vikings managed to extend the lead back to 20-14 on their next possession on a 49-yard field goal by Kai Forbath on a drive that featured two questionable challenges by Saints coach Sean Payton, who wanted to review a deep completion by Jarius Wright and if Keenum was down before a third-down incompletion. Payton lost both challenges – and two timeouts.

New Orleans secured its first lead on a 14-yard touchdown grab from running back Alvin Kamara to make it 21-20. That was the first of four lead changes in the final three minutes and one second.

Follow Lindsay H. Jones on Twitter @bylindsayhjones.

PHOTOS: Best of NFL divisional round

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A blunder that caused more than a million people in Hawaii to fear that they were about to be struck by a nuclear missile fed skepticism Sunday about the government’s ability to keep them informed in a real emergency.

Residents and tourists alike remained rattled a day after the mistaken alert was blasted out to cellphones across the islands with a warning to seek immediate shelter and the ominous statement “This is not a drill.”

“My confidence in our so-called leaders’ ability to disseminate this vital information has certainly been tarnished,” said Patrick Day, who sprang from bed when the alert was issued Saturday morning. “I would have to think twice before acting on any future advisory.”

The erroneous warning was sent during a shift change at the state’s Emergency Management Agency when someone doing a routine test hit the live alert button, state officials said.

“I’m not a racist. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed, that I can tell you,” Mr. Trump said as he arrived at Trump International Golf Club for dinner with Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader.

The rift over Mr. Trump’s comments, and how they have since been recounted, risked further eroding trust between Democrats and Republicans at the beginning of a critical week for Congress. Government funding is set to expire on Friday, and lawmakers will need to pass a stopgap spending measure to avoid a government shutdown on Saturday.

And lawmakers are already facing a difficult fight over the politically volatile subject of immigration, with the fates of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants hanging in the balance. Adding to the uncertain picture for those immigrants, the Trump administration resumed accepting renewals for the program over the weekend, under orders from a federal judge who is hearing a legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s dismantling of the program.

But in Congress, the battle took on an increasingly personal dimension as Mr. Perdue and Mr. Cotton essentially accused Mr. Durbin of lying about the president’s comments, even after the vulgar remarks were widely reported and the White House did not immediately dispute that the president had made them.

“I didn’t hear that word either,” Mr. Cotton said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And I was sitting no further away from Donald Trump than Dick Durbin was.”

Mr. Cotton said Mr. Durbin “has a history of misrepresenting what happens in White House meetings,” an assertion that Mr. Perdue made in his own interview Sunday morning on ABC’s “This Week.”

Ben Marter, a spokesman for Mr. Durbin, responded by suggesting that Mr. Perdue and Mr. Cotton should not be believed.

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“Credibility is something that’s built by being consistently honest over time,” Mr. Marter wrote on Twitter. “Senator Durbin has it. Senator Perdue does not. Ask anyone who’s dealt with both.”

Mr. Graham had previously told a fellow South Carolina Republican, Senator Tim Scott, that reports in the news media of Mr. Trump’s language were “basically accurate.” A spokesman for Mr. Graham did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday.

Senator Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who is part of a bipartisan group of senators that has developed an immigration proposal, said on Sunday that people in the room with Mr. Trump during Thursday’s meeting told him that the president had used the inflammatory language.

“I was in a meeting directly afterwards where those who had presented to the president our proposal spoke about the meeting,” he said on “This Week.” “I heard that account before the account even went public.”

The other lawmakers at the meeting, all Republicans, have not offered any public recollection of what the president said.

The Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, who also attended the meeting, said on “Fox News Sunday” that she did not recall the president “saying that exact phrase.”

Mr. Durbin had told reporters on Friday that Mr. Trump called African nations “shitholes,” which Mr. Durbin said was “the exact word used by the president, not just once, but repeatedly.” He called the president’s comments “hate-filled, vile and racist.” At the meeting, Mr. Durbin said Mr. Trump also questioned whether the United States needed more Haitians.

Mr. Graham is said to have admonished the president during the meeting, telling him that “America is an idea, not a race.”

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Saying that President Barack Obama had exceeded his authority when he created the program that shields from deportation young immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children, known as Dreamers, Mr. Trump moved to end it in September.

He gave Congress six months to find a fix for the program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

Democrats have been pushing to secure a deal by Friday’s government funding deadline that would protect Dreamers, hoping to capitalize on the leverage they have as a result of that deadline. Democratic votes will be needed to pass the stopgap spending measure in the Senate, where government funding measures require 60 votes, and Democratic votes might be needed in the House as well.

Republican leaders say they want to address DACA as well, but separately from funding the government. Compared with their Democratic counterparts, Republican leaders are operating on a longer time frame for taking action, given the six-month window that Mr. Trump gave Congress. They also have to contend with internal divisions over immigration policy.

The bipartisan group of senators, including Mr. Durbin and Mr. Graham, reached an agreement last week that would provide a path to citizenship for DACA recipients while also providing money for border security and making other changes to immigration policy.

But Mr. Trump dismissed the proposal, calling it a “big step backwards.” And on Sunday, he offered a pessimistic take on Twitter: “DACA is probably dead because the Democrats don’t really want it, they just want to talk and take desperately needed money away from our military.”

Still, administration officials said they intended to abide by an order from Judge William Alsup of Federal District Court in San Francisco last week to restart the DACA program, with some modifications, while a legal challenge plays out. On Saturday, officials did just that by updating the program’s website to once again accept renewals.

But administration officials hope the judge’s decision will be temporary. Officials said the president’s lawyers are examining whether to appeal his order, which could lead to a ruling allowing the administration to shut the program down again. The administration could also choose to modify its legal reasoning to satisfy the judge’s criticisms.

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Either way, immigrant rights activists are not counting on legal action to be the ultimate protection for the Dreamers. Several said they believe the only real solution for the hundreds of thousands of young immigrants is to convince Congress to act soon.

The court ruling could lessen the pressure for that kind of action — at least in the short term — since some young immigrants can once again renew their protected status for another two years.

Lawyers and directors of community legal services spent Sunday preparing fact sheets and answering calls that have been flooding their offices.

Most of the calls that Hasan Shafiqullah, the director of the immigration unit of the Legal Aid Society of New York, said he has been receiving started with the burning questions “Is this real? Can I file?”

The answer, for now, he said, is yes. But he is concerned for his clients about another turnabout in the courts.

“It’s just the emotional roller coaster that our clients are on,” he said.

Allan Wernick, the director of CUNY Citizenship Now, a legal services program at the City University of New York, said filing renewals could be very powerful, at least symbolically, to Mr. Trump.

“The more applications get in, the more it is clear that his ending the program has real-world impact,” he said.

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Chelsea E. Manning, the transgender former Army private who was convicted of passing sensitive government documents to WikiLeaks, is seeking to run for the U.S. Senate in Maryland, according to federal election filings.

Manning would be challenging Democrat Benjamin L. Cardin, who is in his second term in the Senate and is up for reelection in November. Cardin is Maryland’s senior senator and is considered an overwhelming favorite to win a third term.

Manning declined to speak about her filing or to say why she might be running when reached at her home in Bethesda on Saturday.

She said she might release a statement in the coming days.

“Our only statement on the record is ‘No statement,’ ” Manning said.

Manning, 30, who was formerly known as Bradley Manning, was convicted in 2013 of the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. history and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Last year, as President Barack Obama was nearing the end of his term in office, he commuted Manning’s sentence to time served, and she was released from a military prison in Kansas.

The news of Manning’s filing caught Maryland’s political class by surprise Saturday afternoon. It was first reported in a tweet by the conservative media outlet Red Maryland.

Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has an extensive fundraising base in Maryland and is not considered particularly vulnerable to a challenge from any known figures within the state. However, a candidate with national name recognition, such as Manning, who comes in from the outside could tap a network of donors interested in elevating a progressive agenda.

Without mentioning Manning, Sue Walitsky, Cardin’s spokeswoman, said: “Senator Cardin is looking forward to a vigorous debate of the issues and a robust conversation with Maryland voters.”

Manning would also have to file with Maryland State Board of Elections to get her name on the ballot.

Manning moved to Maryland after her release from prison. Since then, she has written for the Guardian and Medium on issues of transparency, free speech and civil liberties, transgender rights and computer security, according to her website.

Manning’s statement of candidacy was filed with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday.

She is running as a Democrat and refers to Maryland as her “home state” on her website. The Democratic primary is scheduled for the end of June.

Manning’s first column for the Guardian said Obama’s election in 2008 was a political awakening for her.

Manning wrote that Obama left behind “hints of a progressive legacy” but very few permanent accomplishments.

“This vulnerable legacy should remind us that what we really need is a strong and unapologetic progressive to lead us,” Manning wrote. “What we need as well is a relentless grassroots movement to hold that leadership accountable.”

Evan Greer, campaign director of the nonprofit organization Fight for the Future and a close supporter of Manning’s while she was imprisoned, said the news is exciting.

“Chelsea Manning has fought for freedom and sacrificed for it in ways that few others have,” Greer wrote in an email. “The world is a better place with her as a free woman, and this latest news makes it clear she is only beginning to make her mark on it.”

Todd Eberly, a political-science professor at St. Mary’s College in Maryland, said Donald Trump’s unexpected rise to the presidency opened the door for political neophytes such as Manning.

“My initial thought quite literally was, ‘Donald Trump is president, Oprah Winfrey is the leading contender for Democrats in 2020, why the hell not Chelsea Manning in the U.S. Senate?’ ” he said

Judging from her past statements, Manning’s brand could be one of “unapologetic progressivism, no compromise, take no prisoners,” he said.

Manning enlisted in the military in 2007 and was deployed to Iraq two years later as an intelligence analyst, according to her website.

In 2010, Manning was arrested after she provided a trove of nearly 750,000 documents to WikiLeaks that included information about the U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, State Department cables and information about prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.

Manning’s high-profile leak drew media coverage around the world. U.S. officials said the material placed the lives of U.S. soldiers and Afghan informants at risk, but Manning said she had a duty to inform the public about how the United States was conducting its wars.

Three years later, Manning was convicted on multiple charges, including violating the Espionage Act, and received a lengthy sentence. While serving time at Fort Leavenworth, Manning attempted suicide and went on a hunger strike, before the Army approved her for gender reassignment surgery.

Her case remains politically divisive. She has been lauded as a hero by some on the left but also decried as a traitor by many, including President Trump.

Her felony convictions do not appear to bar her from running for the Senate. The Constitution simply requires that a senator be at least 30 years old, have been a citizen of the United States for nine years and be a resident of the state from which the person is seeking office.

Katherine Shaver contributed to this report.

As the new year heads into its third week, President Trump remains on a personal political losing streak. None of his opponents — not the Democrats, not the Never Trumpers, not any of the others — can damage him as badly as he hurts himself.

It was only a few days ago when he opened up an immigration negotiating session with bipartisan members of Congress to the cameras and was lauded in some quarters for doing so. He was described in some accounts as a president doing the real business of the country. That proved to be a one-off moment.

Before and after, the conversation around the presidency — the conversation at times forced by the president — involved topics that were alternately disquieting and shocking, from questions about his mental fitness and stability to serve as president (which he helped elevate with tweets) to the racist and vulgar comment he made about African and other nations in a private meeting.

Together they reinforce a portrait of a president who doesn’t appear to understand or appreciate the importance of the immigrant experience, often lacks clarity of his own views or the details of issues he is negotiating, and who projects an image that regularly flies in the face of standards long applied to those who occupy the Oval Office.

Trump has tried to wiggle away from asking why the United States must take immigrants from what he called “shithole countries.” Amid the firestorm set off by Post reporter Josh Dawsey’s account of the meeting, Trump acknowledged that he used some “tough” language during the meeting at the White House but said he never used the exact words attributed to him.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), who was present in the meeting, condemned President Trump’s remarks as “hate-filled, vile and racist.” (Kiichiro Sato/AP)

His claim was quickly undercut by others. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), one of the attendees, directly contradicted the president’s statement, saying the president used words that were “hate-filled, vile and racist.” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who has been courted by the president, issued a statement of his own that implicitly backed up Durbin. Graham said he had conveyed his feelings about what was said at the meeting directly to the president at the time. Graham notably did not side with Trump’s version of events.

[Trump’s comment condemned at home and abroad]

Two other senators at the meeting, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.), both of whom opposed the bipartisan deal Durbin and Graham had brought to the president for his consideration, claimed they could not recall the language “specifically,” which is hardly an affirmation of the president’s explanation.

Trump has been at this place before on the issue of race. In 2011, as he was toying with running for president, he trafficked in the false allegation that President Obama was not born in the United States, claiming at one point that he had sent private investigators to Hawaii to find the evidence.

Obama punctured that canard by producing his long-form birth certificate. But the overt attempt to profit from the birther issue paid dividends politically for Trump and set him on a path that eventually put him in the Oval Office.

Through the course of the 2016 campaign, he attacked Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. He attacked a federal judge born in the United States of Mexican heritage, a judge who happened to be overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University. He got into a fight with a Gold Star family, who happened to be Muslim and whose son was killed in the Iraq War, after they used the platform of the Democratic National Committee to criticize his campaign proposal for a ban on Muslim immigration.

As president, he twice offered kind words for the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, saying that among them were some “very fine people.” Later, he called National Football League players who knelt during the national anthem, in protest of policing practices in some African American communities, sons of bitches and said the owners should fire them.

[Republicans scramble to head off damage from Trump comment]

Now he has used a horrible vulgarity to denigrate nations whose immigrants to the United States have made valuable contributions to the country. He compounded his dismissal of those countries by asking why the United States country cannot take more immigrants from places such as Norway, which happens to be predominantly white.

Condemnations came quickly from different parts of the political spectrum. A U.N. human rights spokesman said there was no other word than “racist” to describe Trump’s comment. The episode once again left the president politically isolated, save for those who either agree with him or are willing to set aside their discomfort, as many voters did when he was elected.

What the president said in the Oval Office on Thursday was only the most shocking of the comments that have marked the early days of 2018. He has continued his attacks on the First Amendment and freedom of the press. He has questioned the libel laws of the country, which protect the press in covering public figures, except in cases of recklessness and malice.

His response to events that go against him is to lash out by declaring that the processes of our democratic system are rigged or broken. His perspective on democratic governance is viewed almost entirely through the lens of whether he, personally, is winning or losing.

For some Trump advisers and for many Republican elected officials, there is an almost automatic reaction to turn away when things like this occur, either to pretend what happened did not happen or to dismiss them as a president blowing off steam, like somebody ranting in a bar.

The consequences are far greater. As these kinds of comments pile one on top of another, they define the Trump presidency — and, in the eyes of much of the world, the current state of United States and the Republican Party itself — as much as the policies he and party leaders are pursuing.

At no time, officials said, was there any indication that a nuclear attack had been launched on the United States. The Federal Communications Commission announced that it had begun “a full investigation into the FALSE missile alert in Hawaii.”

The alert went out at about 8:10 a.m., lighting up phones of people still in bed, having coffee by the beach at a Waikiki resort, or up for an early surf. “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” it read.

Hawaii has been on high emotional alert — it began staging monthly air-raid drills, complete with sirens, in December — since President Trump and Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, began exchanging nuclear threats. Estimates vary, but it would take a little more than half an hour for a missile launched from North Korea to reach Hawaii, traversing an arc of roughly 5,700 miles. State officials said that residents here would have as little as 12 minutes to find shelter once an alert was issued.

Within moments of the first announcement, people flocked to shelters, crowding highways in scenes of terror and helplessness. Emergency sirens wailed in parts of the state, adding to the panic.

“I was running through all the scenarios in my head, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to pull over to,” said Mike Staskow, a retired military captain.

Allyson Niven, who lives in Kailua-Kona, said her first instinct was to gather her family as she contemplated what she thought would be her final minutes alive.

“We fully felt like we were about to die,” she said. “I drove to try to get to my kids even though I knew I probably wouldn’t make it, and I fully was visualizing what was happening while I was on the road. It was awful.”

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Ray Gerst was vacationing on Oahu with his wife to celebrate their 28th wedding anniversary. He received the alert as they pulled up for their tour of Kualoa Ranch.

“All the buses stopped, and people came running out of the ranch and said, ‘Just sit still for a minute, nobody get off the bus, nobody get off the bus,’” he said.

They were taken into the mountains, Mr. Gerst said, and dropped off at a concrete bunker. They sheltered in place for about 15 minutes, he said, during which time they had no cell signal.

“It was scary,” Mr. Gerst said. “I mean, there was no intel.”

At Konawaena High School on the Island of Hawaii, where a high school wrestling championship was taking place, school officials, more accustomed to alerts of high surf or tsunamis, moved people to the center of the gym as they tried to figure out how to take shelter from a missile.

“Everyone cooperated,” said Kellye Krug, the athletic director at the school. “Once they were gathered, we let them use cellphones to reach loved ones. There were a couple kids who were emotional, the coaches were right there to console kids. After the retraction was issued, we gave kids time to reach out again.”

Matt LoPresti, a state representative, told CNN that he and his family headed for a bathroom. “I was sitting in the bathtub with my children, saying our prayers,” he said.

Natalie Haena, 38, of Honolulu, said she was getting ready to take her daughter to ice skating lessons when the alert came. “There’s nothing to prep for a missile coming in,” she said. “We have no bomb shelters or anything like that. There’s nowhere to go.”

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In Washington, Lindsay Walters, a deputy press secretary, said that President Trump had been informed of the events. “The president has been briefed on the state of Hawaii’s emergency management exercise,” she said. “This was purely a state exercise.”

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Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii said the mistake was “totally inexcusable.”

“The whole state was terrified,” he said. “There needs to be tough and quick accountability and a fixed process.”

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While the cellphone alerting system is in state authorities’ hands, the detection of missile launches is the responsibility of the United States Strategic Command and Northern Command. It was the military — not Hawaiian officials — that was the first to declare there was no evidence of a missile launch.

The false alert was a stark reminder of what happens when the old realities of the nuclear age collide with the speed — and the potential for error — inherent in the internet age. The alert came at one of the worst possible moments — when tension with North Korea has been at one of the highest points in decades, and when Mr. Kim’s government has promised more missile tests and threatened an atmospheric nuclear test.

During the Cold War there were many false alarms. William J. Perry, the defense secretary during the Clinton administration, recalled in his memoir, “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink,” a moment in 1979 when, as an undersecretary of defense, he was awakened by a watch officer who reported that his computer system was showing 200 intercontinental ballistic missiles headed to the United States. “For one heart-stopping second I thought my worst nuclear nightmare had come true,” Mr. Perry wrote.

It turned out that a training tape had been mistakenly inserted into an early-warning system computer. No one woke up the president. But Mr. Perry went on to speculate what might have happened if such a warning had come “during the Cuban Missile Crisis or a Mideast war?”

The United States faces an especially difficult problem today, not just because of tense relations with North Korea but also because of growing fears inside the military about the cyber vulnerability of the nuclear warning system and nuclear control systems.

Because of its location, Hawaii — more than any other part of the United States — has been threatened by escalating tensions and the risks of war, and preparations have already begun there.

On Friday, the day before the erroneous alert, several hundred people attended an event in Honolulu sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce in which military commanders, politicians and others discussed the threat to the islands’ population.

“The U.S. is the designated recipient — and that’s because we are public enemy No. 1 to North Korea,” Dan Leaf, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and Pacific Command deputy commander, was quoted as saying in the Honolulu Star Advertiser.

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The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency has been holding “are you ready” drills. As a chain of islands, Hawaii is subject to all kinds of threats — hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis — but officials have made clear that none is more urgent now than the threat of an attack by North Korea, given how little time there would be between an alert and the detonation of a bomb.

The fifth page of an emergency preparation pamphlet issued by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency features a picture of a rocket lifting off: “Nuclear Threat — Unlikely But Cannot Ignore It.”

Vern T. Miyagi, the administrator of the agency, said that during the drill, an employee — whom he did not identify — mistakenly pushed a button on a computer screen to send out the alert, rather than one marked to test it. He said the employee answered “yes” when asked by the system if he was sure he wanted to send the message.

Mr. Miyagi, going through a detailed timeline of the events at an afternoon news conference, said the agency tried to correct the error on social media. It took 38 minutes to send out a follow-up message canceling the original alert, which he acknowledged was a shortcoming with the alert system that the agency would fix.

Mr. Rapoza said he did not know if anyone would be disciplined for the mistake. “At this point, our major concern is to make sure we do what we need to do to reassure the public,” he said. “This is not a time for pointing fingers.”

The panic that followed the alert — if relatively short-lived — gripped the islands. There were reports of people seeking shelter by parking their cars inside a highway tunnel that cuts through a mountain. When the announcement was rescinded, a digital highway sign read: “Missile alert in error: There is no threat.”

People in Hawaii tend to know what to do to protect themselves to threats of a tsunami or a hurricane. The prospect of nuclear annihilation was entirely new terrain.

“So this was the most terrifying few minutes of my LIFE!” Paul Wilson, a professor at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, said on Twitter. “I just want to know why it took 38 minutes to announce it was a mistake?!?”

Chris Tacker, a veteran who lives in Kealakekua, said the mistake had left her angry and frustrated.

“I didn’t know where to go,” she said. “Anyone try to dig a hole in lava? Good luck trying to build a shelter. I’m stocking my liquor cabinet.”

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Still, she added, “If we don’t have our sense of humor about this, it’s all over.”

Correction: January 13, 2018

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a retired Air Force lieutenant general quoted in the Honolulu Star Advertiser. The general’s name is Dan Leaf, not Leak.

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He also ordered targeted sanctions against the head of Iran’s judiciary, Sadeq Larijani, a powerful figure whom the administration holds culpable for the violent crackdown on the protests, as well as against an Iranian cyberwarfare unit that it accuses of internet censorship.

The nuclear deal, Mr. Trump said, drove Iranians into the streets because the government misused the proceeds from the lifting of sanctions. “It has served as a slush fund for weapons, terror and oppression, and to further line the pockets of corrupt regime leaders,” he said in a statement.

But that is precisely why European leaders argue that keeping the deal in place makes even more sense now: because it keeps a harsh spotlight on Iran’s leaders, and their malfeasance, rather than allowing the Iranians to paint the United States and its allies as the villains.

Diplomats from several European countries said that renegotiating the deal was a nonstarter. The best Mr. Trump could hope for, one official said, would be a commitment from Europe to begin work on a new and separate agreement. Such a step, they said, would require the participation of China and Russia, which are also signatories to the deal, as well as Iran itself — something the White House ruled out.

“If we want seriously to be able to raise the price to the Iranians of what they are doing internally and externally, we need the Europeans,” said Dennis B. Ross, a former adviser to President Barack Obama who helped devise his Iran policy. “But if they think that we are only interested in walking away from the nuclear deal, they won’t join us.”

The administration, other experts said, is locked into a policy that has two major pillars: dismantling Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal and confronting Iran on its aggression in the region, through its support of militant groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and other proxies in Yemen, Syria and Iraq.

That is not surprising, given that the defense secretary, Jim Mattis, and the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, are former commanders who served in Iraq and blame Iran for the death of American soldiers there.

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Even below that level, the administration’s Iran policy is heavily influenced by the military. Joel Rayburn, the top Iran policymaker at the National Security Council, is a former military intelligence officer, as is Andrew L. Peek, a senior Iran policymaker at the State Department. Several of the department’s nonmilitary Iran experts have been pushed out in recent months.

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Now, the administration is suddenly grappling with an Iranian government that is weakened and divided by the protests — a political development that the Americans did not anticipate.

“When you’re dealing with Iran’s regional affairs, you’re dealing with how it supplies proxies and militias,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who worked in the Obama administration. “If you’re thinking about Iran’s internal problems, that is a more difficult problem. You’re thinking about fissures, and how to exploit them.”

Mr. Takeyh said Mr. Obama was similarly caught off guard in 2009 by the protests that became known as the Green Movement. At the time, he was trying to entice Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, into talks. That is one reason he reacted so little to those protests — a reaction that Mr. Trump criticized in his statement on Friday.

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Ideally, Mr. Ross said, policy toward Iran would be a mix of coercive measures and diplomatic inducements. “With Obama, one could argue that the coercive part of the equation was not believable,” he said. “With Trump, the diplomatic side of the equation may prove not to be believable.”

The White House appears to recognize the weakness in its diplomatic ranks. It is considering the appointment of a special envoy for Iran, who could negotiate with the Europeans on the nuclear deal, as well as marshal a stronger response to Iran’s behavior in the region.

Any envoy would face a tough task: Administration officials said Mr. Trump was demanding an agreement that would eliminate all “sunset clauses,” under which Iran can resume activities like enriching uranium, and would explicitly link its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Iran fought against both of these demands in the negotiations that led to the 2015 deal.

With North Korea, the administration’s policy has been more balanced between diplomacy and military planning. But the talks between the Koreas have undermined Mr. Trump’s strategy, which is to impose maximum pressure on Pyongyang — including the threat of a military strike — to pressure Mr. Kim into giving up his nuclear arsenal.

The White House has sent General McMaster and the N.S.C.’s top Asia policymaker, Matthew Pottinger, to San Francisco, where they will meet with their counterparts from South Korea and Japan to discuss the implications of the North-South dialogue.

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General McMaster has spoken publicly about the need to prepare for a “preventive war” against North Korea. Mr. Pottinger, a retired Marine, also has a background in military intelligence, though at other times, he worked as a journalist and for a hedge fund.

White House officials are deeply skeptical of the overture from Mr. Kim to South Korea. They say he is trying to drive a wedge between South Korea and the United States. And they have urged the South Koreans to keep the exchanges limited to narrow issues, like security at the coming Winter Olympics in the South Korean town of Pyeongchang.

Mr. Trump, however, appears caught between continuing to heap ridicule on Mr. Kim and taking credit for the diplomatic opening. At Camp David last weekend, the president said he hoped the talks ranged far beyond the Olympics, and he backed them in a call with South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in.

The trajectory of the talks may be out of Mr. Trump’s control anyway, according to experts on the region. Mr. Moon was elected on a platform of reducing tensions with the North. Young South Koreans, in particular, view Mr. Trump’s threats of war on North Korea with alarm — sometimes even more than the danger posed by Mr. Kim.

“The North Korea issue may be entering a new phase,” said Evan S. Medeiros, the top Asia adviser in Mr. Obama’s N.S.C. “Moon’s agenda and perceptions seem to be evolving, and, as cynical as we all are about North Korea, it is worth asking the question: Is Kim actually looking for a negotiated off-ramp, and what would such behavior look like?”

“Is the Trump administration, which has understandably focused on coercive tools to date, nimble enough to respond to this evolution?” he said.

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