On King day, Trump, icon's son have talk

WASHINGTON -- President-elect Donald Trump on Monday met with the eldest son of Martin Luther King Jr. on the holiday devoted to the civil-rights icon, moving to reach out to members of the black community who have been alarmed by his rhetoric and his policy positions.

The hastily arranged session came as tensions escalated between the incoming president and a number of prominent black elected officials after Trump feuded publicly with Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who fought and bled for civil rights alongside King.

The incoming president has encountered distrust from minority-group members across the country, many of whom have been offended by his questioning whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States, appalled that his candidacy drew backing from white supremacist organizations, and dismayed at policy proposals they consider antithetical to their interests.

Trump on Monday did not address those issues, ignoring questions shouted by reporters in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York after emerging with Martin Luther King III from a meeting that lasted nearly an hour.

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Trump's brief appearance was in contrast to Obama, who spent part of Monday -- his final observance of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday in office -- making a stop at a homeless shelter in Washington.

Martin Luther King III, who said he pressed Trump on the need for measures to increase voter participation, called the meeting "constructive."

King, the president of the Drum Major Institute, a progressive New York-based public policy organization, has campaigned for years to establish a form of free government photo identification that could make it easier for Americans who lack a driver's license or other official ID to cast ballots. He and the other attendees, including the Rev. James Forbes, have urged Trump to endorse the idea of making such identification free.

In an op-ed published in The Washington Post, King noted that Trump won in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where turnout among minority-group members declined and stricter voter identification requirements may have deterred some from voting.

"While we can't know how those affected would have voted, we can agree that every citizen should have the unfettered opportunity to vote," he wrote. "Indeed, my concern is not how people vote, but simply that they vote."

According to one of the meeting's participants, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation, Trump expressed a serious interest in making photos available on Social Security cards and said he would study the issue in further detail.

King told reporters at Trump Tower that while he disagreed with the president-elect's comments about Lewis, he believed that "at some point in this nation, we've got to move forward."

"He said that he is going to represent all Americans. He said that over and over again," King said. "I believe that's his intent, but I think we also have to consistently engage with pressure, public pressure. It doesn't happen automatically."

'A lot of distrust'

But other black leaders said Trump's relationship with the black community would not improve unless the president-elect altered both his tone and his policy positions.

"There's a lot of anxiety, there's a lot of distrust, there are people who have expressed to me that they're scared of what his policies might entail," said Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League. "There's a lot of work for him to do if he's really sincere about building a working relationship on some of the issues we're concerned about."

The Rev. Al Sharpton said nothing underscored Trump's challenge more vividly than his outburst in a pair of Twitter postings on Saturday that called Lewis -- who was brutally beaten in the "Bloody Sunday" march in 1965 in Selma, Ala. -- "all talk," and said that instead of "falsely complaining" about the election results, Lewis should focus on fixing his "falling apart" and "crime infested" Georgia district.

Lewis represents a district that includes part of the wealthy enclave of Buckhead; the world's busiest airport, Hartsfield-Jackson; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Trump's remarks were apparently a reaction to an interview Friday in which Lewis said he would not attend the inauguration and that he did not see Trump as a legitimate president because of questions of whether Russian hacking had affected the American election.

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"If you can disrespect John Lewis on Martin Luther King Day, then what are you saying about the rest of us?" Sharpton said, adding that no single meeting Trump could hold would alleviate the concerns felt in the black community. "He seems to have a one-dimensional, very negative view of what black America looks like, and that is frightening to many black Americans."

On Monday, King sought to diffuse the furor surrounding Trump's remarks about Lewis, saying, "In the heat of emotion, a lot of things get said on both sides."

Lashing out at critics

With his inauguration days away, Trump continued to lash out at critics in the intelligence community and Democrats in Congress who are vowing to skip his swearing-in ceremony.

In a Sunday night tweet, the Republican questioned whether the CIA director himself leaked information about an unsubstantiated dossier of potentially compromising personal information about Trump.

The criticism from the incoming president came hours after CIA chief John Brennan said Trump lacks a full understanding of the threat Moscow poses to the United States, delivering a public lecture to the president-elect that further highlighted the state of Trump's relations with American intelligence agencies.

Trump shot back in a Twitter post Sunday, saying: "Oh really, couldn't do much worse - just look at Syria (red line), Crimea, Ukraine and the buildup of Russian nukes. Not good! Was this the leaker of Fake News?"

Meanwhile, a growing number of Democrats in Congress have vowed to skip Trump's inauguration.

Lewis said in his interview that he would boycott Friday's event. About three dozen Democratic members of Congress have said they also will sit out the Trump ceremony. Among them is Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee, who said Monday that "this president 'semi-elect' does not deserve to be president of the United States. He has not exhibited the characteristics or the values that we hold dear."

Also on Monday, Trump lost a member of his incoming administration over accusations of plagiarism.

Conservative media commentator Monica Crowley will not be joining the Trump administration, according to a transition official.

Crowley, a frequent on-air presence at Fox News Channel, had been expected to join Trump's National Security Council as a spokesman.

On Monday, she withdrew her name from consideration after CNN reported last week that several passages in a 2012 book Crowley wrote were plagiarized. Publisher HarperCollins has pulled the book.

Health care goals

Also on Monday, a spokesman for Trump sought to elaborate on the president-elect's plans to replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, vowing that the new administration would lower health care costs by infusing more competition into the marketplace, including by allowing insurers to sell health plans across state lines.

Trump's goal is "to get insurance for everybody through marketplace solutions, through bringing costs down, through negotiating with pharmaceutical companies, allowing competition over state lines," Sean Spicer, the incoming White House spokesman, said during an interview on NBC's Today show.

Asked whether Trump's replacement plan amounts to an expansion of government health care, Spicer insisted Monday that it does not, saying access would be improved and costs would be driven down through marketplace competition.

"The competition is sorely missing," Spicer said. "We're not negotiating with drug manufacturers to drive the cost down. We're not instilling a sense of competition to allow them to negotiate over state lines. There's a lot of things missing, which by their very nature would drive the cost down, and the beautiful thing about someone like Donald Trump is he comes in from a very successful business perspective. He knows how to negotiate great deals, and at this point, he can now use his negotiating skills to benefit the American people and give them a much better health care system than they have."

Spicer's comments followed a weekend interview with The Washington Post in which Trump said he is nearing completion of a plan to replace Obama's signature health care law with the goal of "insurance for everybody," while also promising to force drug companies to negotiate directly with the government on prices in Medicare and Medicaid.

Trump declined to provide specifics during the weekend interview, and Spicer offered few details. But he did go one step further by saying Trump wants to make it easier to sell health plans across state lines.

Information for this article was contributed by Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt of The New York Times; by Jonathan Lemire, Julie Pace, Steve Peoples, Raf Casert and Kirsten Grieshaber of The Associated Press; by Juliet Eilperin, John Wagner and Amy Goldstein of The Washington Post; and by Shannon Pettypiece, Kathleen Miller and Toluse Olorunnipa of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 01/17/2017