Trumps

Oct. 15 (UPI) — A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Trump administration to halt firings of workers amid the shutdown, according to two labor unions that brought the lawsuit against the federal government.

The Trump administration on Friday announced that it has begun laying off 4,100 federal workers as the federal purse has run dry with Congress since Oct. 1, failing to pass a stopgap funding bill to keep the government open.

On Sept. 30, ahead of the shutdown and amid Trump administration threats to institute mass firings if the government shuttered, the American Federation of Government Employees, with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the layoffs.

Then on Oct. 4, the union filed a motion for a temporary restraining order.

On Wednesday, Judge Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California sided with the unions, issuing the temporary restraining order they sought, stating that the reduction-in-force notices issued to the more than 4,000 federal employees were likely illegal, exceeded the Trump administration’s authority and were capricious.

In her scathing rebuke of the Trump administration, the appointee of President Bill Clinton described Trump’s mass firings amid a government shutdown as “unprecedented.”

In her order, she outlined how some employees could not even find out if they had been fired because the notices were sent to government email accounts, which they may not have access to because of the shutdown.

Those who do receive the notices are then unable to prepare for their terminations because human resources staff have been furloughed, she said, adding that in one case at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, human resources staff were brought back into the office to issue the layoff notices only to then be directed to lay themselves off.

She then chastised the Trump administration for carrying out the layoffs to punish the Democratic Party, which it blames for the shutdown.

“But this is precisely what President Trump has announced he is doing,” she said, pointing to a social media post from the president on the second day of the shutdown saying he had a meeting with Russell Vought, the White House budget chief, to determine which of the many “Democrat Agencies” to cut.

“I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” Trump wrote in the Oct. 2 post, which was quoted in full in Illston’s order.

Illston gave the administration two days to provide the court with more information on the issued notices.

“This decision affirms that these threatened mass firings are likely illegal and blocks layoff notices from going out,” Lee Saunders, president of AFSCME, said in a statement.

“Federal workers have already faced enough uncertainty from the administration’s relentless attacks on the important jobs they do to keep us safe and healthy.”

As the order was issued, Vought said that he expects thousands of federal workers to be fired in the coming days.

“Much of the reporting has been based on kind of court snapshots, which they have articulated as in the 4,000 number of people,” he said on The Charlie Kirk Show podcast. “But that’s just a snapshot, and I think it’ll get much higher. And we’re going to keep those RIFs rolling throughout the shutdown.”

Democrats said they will only support a stopgap bill that extends and restores Affordable Care Act premium tax credits, arguing that failing to do so would raise healthcare costs for some 20 million Americans.

Republicans — who control the House, Senate and the presidency — are seeking a so-called clean funding bill that includes no changes. They argue that the Democrats are fighting to provide undocumented migrants with taxpayer-funded healthcare, even though federal law does not permit them to receive Medicaid or ACA premium tax credits.

The parties continue to trade blame for the shutdown as it extends for more than two weeks, with some 750,000 federal workers furloughed.

Spain argues NATO funding should address real threats, not arbitrary targets, amidst Trump’s tariff retaliation plans.

The European Commission and Spain’s government have dismissed US President Donald Trump’s latest threat to impose higher tariffs on Madrid over its refusal to meet his proposed NATO target for defence spending.

Trump said on Tuesday that he was “very unhappy” with Spain for being the only NATO member to reject the new spending objective of 5 percent of economic output, adding that he was considering punishing the Mediterranean country.

“I was thinking of giving them trade punishment through tariffs because of what they did, and I think I may do that,” Trump added. He had previously suggested making Spain “pay twice as much” in trade talks.

Trade policy falls under the remit of Brussels, and the European Commission would “respond appropriately, as we always do, to any measures taken against one or more of our member states”, commission spokesperson Olof Gill said in a press briefing on Wednesday.

The trade deal between the European Union and the United States signed in July was the right platform to address any issues, Gill added.

“The defence spending debate is not about increasing spending for the sake of increasing it, but about responding to real threats,” Spain’s Economy and Trade Ministry said in a statement.

“We’re doing our part to develop the necessary capabilities and contribute to the collective defence of our allies.”

Spain has more than doubled nominal defence spending from 0.98 percent of gross domestic product in 2017 to 2 percent this year, equivalent to about 32.7bn euros ($38bn).

Defence Minister Margarita Robles said allies weren’t discussing the 5 percent target for 2035 in Wednesday’s meeting because they were prioritising the present situation in Ukraine, but wouldn’t completely rule out a shift in Spain’s position.

Targeted tariffs by the US against individual EU member states are rare, but there are precedents, said Ignacio Garcia Bercero, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based economic think tank Bruegel.

In 1999, the US hit the EU with 100 percent punitive tariffs on products such as chocolate, pork, onions and truffles in retaliation for an EU import ban on hormone-treated beef. But those tariffs excluded Britain, which at the time was still a member of the trade bloc.

The US could impose anti-dumping penalties on European products that are mostly produced in Spain, said Juan Carlos Martinez Lazaro, professor at Madrid’s IE business school.

In 2018, Washington imposed a combination of duties of more than 30 percent on Spanish black table olives at the request of Californian olive growers. Spain’s share of the US market plummeted from 49 percent in 2017 to 19 percent in 2024.

Another option would be moving the naval and air bases the US has in southern Spain to Morocco – an idea floated by former Trump official Robert Greenway – which would damage the local economies through the loss of thousands of indirect jobs.

WASHINGTON — Entering the third week of a government shutdown, Democrats say they are not intimidated or cowed by President Trump’s efforts to fire thousands of federal workers or by his threats of more firings to come.

Instead, Democrats appear emboldened, showing no signs of caving as they returned to Washington from their home states Tuesday evening and, for an eighth time, rejected a Republican bill to open the government.

“What people are saying is, you’ve got to stop the carnage,” said Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, describing what he heard from his constituents, including federal workers, as he traveled around his state over the weekend. “And you don’t stop it by giving in.”

Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz said the firings are “a fair amount of bluster” and he predicted they ultimately will be overturned in court or otherwise reversed. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, speaking about Republicans, said the shutdown is just “an excuse for them to do what they were planning to do anyway.” And Senate Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer of New York said Wednesday that the layoffs are a “mistaken attempt” to sway Democratic votes.

“Their intimidation tactics are not working,” added House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York. “And will continue to fail.”

Democratic senators say they are hearing increasingly from voters about health insurance subsidies that expire at the end of the year, the issue that the party has made central to the shutdown fight.

Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware said that the impact of the expiring health insurance subsidies on millions of people, along with cuts to Medicaid enacted by Republicans earlier this year, “far outweighs” any of the firings of federal workers that the administration is threatening.

Republicans, too, are confident in their strategy not to negotiate on the health care subsidies until Democrats give them the votes to reopen the government. The Senate planned to vote again Wednesday and Thursday on the Republican bill, and so far there are no signs of any movement on either side.

“We’re barreling toward one of the longest shutdowns in American history,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said earlier this week.

Moderate Democrats aren’t budging

In the first hours of the shutdown, which began at 12:01 a.m. EDT Oct. 1., it was not clear how long Democrats would hold out.

A group of moderate Democrats who had voted against the GOP bill immediately began private, informal talks with Republicans. The GOP lawmakers hoped enough Democrats would quickly change their votes to end a filibuster and pass the spending bill with the necessary 60 votes.

But the bipartisan talks over the expiring health care subsidies have dragged on without a resolution so far. Two weeks later, the moderates, including Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Gary Peters of Michigan, are still voting no.

“Nothing about a government shutdown requires this or gives them new power to conduct mass layoffs,” Peters said after the director of the White House’s budget director, Russell Vought, announced that the firings had started on Friday.

D.C.-area lawmakers see advantages to shutdown

Another key group of Democrats digging in are lawmakers such as like Kaine who represent millions of federal workers in Virginia and Maryland. Kaine said the shutdown was preceded by “nine months of punitive behavior” as the Republican president has made cuts at federal agencies “and everybody knows who’s to blame.”

“Donald Trump is at war with his own workforce, and we don’t reward CEOs who hate their own workers,” Kaine said.

Appearing at a news conference Tuesday alongside supportive federal workers, Democratic lawmakers from Maryland and Virginia called on Republicans to come to the negotiating table.

“The message we have today is very simple,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. “Donald Trump and Russ Vought stop attacking federal employees, stop attacking the American people and start negotiating to reopen the federal government and address the looming health care crisis that is upon us.”

Thousands are losing their jobs, and more to follow

In a court filing Friday, the White House Office of Management and Budget said well over 4,000 federal employees from eight departments and agencies would be fired in conjunction with the shutdown.

On Tuesday, Trump said his administration is using the shutdown to target federal programs that Democrats like and “they’re never going to come back, in many cases.”

“We are closing up Democrat programs that we disagree with and they’re never going to open again,” he said.

On Capitol Hill, though, the threats fell flat with Democrats as they continued to demand talks on health care.

“I don’t feel any of this as pressure points,” Jeffries said. “I view it as like the reality that the American people confront and the question becomes, at what point will Republicans embrace the reality that they have created a health care crisis that needs to be decisively addressed?”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., held firm that Republicans would not negotiate until Democrats reopen the government.

The firings, Thune has repeatedly said, “are a situation that could be totally avoided.”

Jalonick and Groves write for the Associated Press. AP writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

During a trip to the Middle East marking the end of Israel’s war on Gaza, United States President Donald Trump turned to another source of strife in the region: the tensions between Tehran and Washington.

In remarks to the Israeli Knesset on Monday, Trump, who took the unprecedented step of bombing Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this year amid a 12-day war between Israel and Iran, offered a “hand of friendship”.

“We are ready when you are, and it will be the best decision that Iran has ever made, and it’s going to happen,” Trump said of a possible agreement with Tehran.

“The hand of friendship and cooperation is open. I’m telling you, they [Iran] want to make a deal. It would be great if we could make a deal.”

But despite the dovish rhetoric, the Trump administration has continued to take a hard line against Iran, and analysts say that a path towards better relations between the two countries remains filled with obstacles.

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a US-based think tank, said that the Israeli and US attacks in June, which came as nuclear negotiations between Washington and Tehran were ongoing, undermined advocacy for diplomacy in Iran.

“There’s a perception that the US is using diplomacy to lull Iran into a false sense of security,” Parsi said.

‘Iran is open to a deal’

Iran itself has not closed the door to diplomacy, but its leaders have not rushed to renew talks with the US, either.

“If we receive a reasonable, balanced, and fair proposal from the Americans for negotiations, we will certainly consider it,” Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi said during a television interview on Saturday.

Iran had rejected an Egyptian invitation to attend a summit on the war in Gaza in Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday, citing US attacks and sanctions.

Talks over Iran’s nuclear programme have not resumed since the Trump administration’s bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities. Israel started the war in June, days before the US and Iranian officials were set for another round of talks.

The US, which during Trump’s first term in 2018 withdrew from a previous deal limiting Iran’s nuclear programme, has also insisted that any new agreement include a total ban on Iranian uranium enrichment.

That demand goes beyond the original deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which only curbed Iran’s uranium enrichment programme under a strict international inspection system.

Iran has depicted that new demand as a denial of its rights as a sovereign country, noting that the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) does not prohibit uranium enrichment.

The impasse over enrichment has become a sticking point in negotiations.

“Iran is open to a deal,” Parsi told Al Jazeera. “But regardless of Trump’s positive tone and kind words, what he is looking for is for Iran to capitulate. As long as he insists on zero enrichment, I don’t think he will get a deal.”

Israel’s war with Iran, which included Israel’s assassination of high-level military figures and civilian nuclear scientists, as well as air strikes that killed hundreds of people, has also increased scepticism about the prospects of a lasting deal with the US.

In a speech to the Knesset on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lauded the US decision to bomb Iran during the war as a “biblical miracle”.

Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, Israel has struck a series of blows against Iran and allied groups, such as Hezbollah, across the Middle East, leaving it significantly weakened and giving the US little incentive to make concessions on uranium enrichment and other issues.

Trump often reiterates that Iran’s nuclear programme has been “obliterated” by the US strikes on key facilities, but the extent of the damage remains unclear.

The Pentagon said earlier this year that the Iranian nuclear programme had been set back by one to two years. But Rafael Grossi, the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has said that Iran could be enriching uranium again within months.

Trump can ‘let Iran sweat’

Iran insists that it is not seeking a nuclear weapon, while Israel is widely believed to possess an undeclared nuclear arsenal.

Gregory Brew, an Iran analyst at the US-based Eurasia Group, argued that time is on Trump’s side in the confrontation with Iran.

“Trump can sound optimistic about diplomacy, but he can also afford to wait and let Iran sweat,” Brew told Al Jazeera via email.

“With its nuclear programme in ruins, and with new Israeli strikes likely if Iran takes steps to rebuild the programme, [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei and the rest of the leadership don’t have many good options.”

Iran is also facing renewed sanctions from the UN after France, Germany and the United Kingdom triggered a so-called snapback of sanctions in August, arguing that Iran had violated the terms of the JCPOA.

Tehran countered that the US unilaterally withdrew from the agreement in 2018, and called another deal allowing inspections of its nuclear facilities by the IAEA “no longer relevant” after the US and Israeli strikes.

Iran was incensed at the IAEA for failing to condemn strikes against its nuclear facilities, which Tehran argues are protected under international law.

“There’s no upside for Trump in resuming talks without Iranian concessions, and there’s currently little downside in letting pressure build, as Iran has been weakened to the point that its ability to threaten Israel or US interests in the region is fairly limited,” said Brew.

“Trump may be willing to let the matter rest for a few months to see if increased economic pain forces Iran back to the negotiating table on favourable terms.”

WASHINGTON — Troops patrol train stations and streets in the nation’s capital. Masked federal law enforcement agents detain District of Columbia residents. Congress passes bills that further squeeze the city’s autonomy. And the one person who could act as a voice for Washington on Capitol Hill has been a rare sight.

Even longtime allies say Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton, the district’s nonvoting delegate in the House, has not risen to the challenge of pushing back against the Trump administration’s intervention into her city. They cite her age, 88, and her diminished demeanor.

That has raised questions about the 18-term lawmaker’s future in that office and has led to calls for her to step aside and make way for a new generation of leaders. The race to replace her has began in earnest, with two members of the D.C. Council, including a former Norton aide, announcing campaigns for the 2026 contest.

“D.C. is under attack as at no other time in recent history, and we need a new champion to defend us,” Donna Brazile, a onetime Norton chief of staff, wrote in a Washington Post opinion essay.

Brazile acknowledged Norton’s legendary service and why she might wish to continue. “As I’ve told her in person,” Brazile said, “retirement from Congress is the right next chapter for her — and for the District.”

Norton has so far resisted that call. Her office declined to make her available for an interview, and her campaign office did not respond to requests for comment. The oldest member of the House, Norton came to office in 1991 and has indicated she plans to run next year.

Federal intervention created new demands

Washington is granted autonomy through a limited home rule agreement passed by Congress in 1973 that allowed residents to elect a mayor and a city council. But federal political leaders retain ultimate control over local affairs, including the approval of the budget and laws passed by that council.

That freedom came under further restrictions after Republican President Trump issued an emergency order in August. It was meant to combat crime as he federalized the city’s police department and poured federal agents and National Guard troops into the city. Trump’s emergency order expired in September, but the troops and federal officers remain.

While the D.C. delegate position is a nonvoting one, it grants the people of the district, who have no other representation in Congress, a voice through speechmaking on the House floor and bill introduction.

Even without a vote in Congress, “there are so many things that the delegate can do from that position, even if it’s just using the bully pulpit,” said Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, a voting rights group. “Even if it’s just giving folks encouragement or showing that fight that a lot of people want to see.”

At public appearances, Norton has seemed unsteady and struggled to read from prepared notes, including at a recent committee hearing focused on stripping some of Washington’s independence on prosecuting crime.

During Trump’s monthlong security emergency and since, Norton has not been as publicly visible as city officials, who attended protests and held media events denouncing the intervention.

Without a push for party unity from congressional leaders on Washington’s interests, the delegate’s role has added importance, said George Derek Musgrove, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

“The delegate really has to be a one-person whip operation to try and hold the caucus in line against this Republican onslaught,” Musgrove said.

City leaders step in

It is unclear what a more energetic delegate could have done, given Trump’s expansive view of executive power and Republican control of Congress. Nonetheless, some critics of her performance have suggested it might have helped the city avoid a recent federal budget plan that created a $1.1-billion budget hole earlier this year. Months later, Congress has yet to approve a fix for the shortfall, even though Trump has endorsed one.

With Norton quiet, other leaders in the Democratic-run city have filled the void since Trump’s emergency declaration.

Mayor Muriel Bowser has stepped in as the district’s main mediator with the administration and Congress, joined by the council, although that outreach has been fragmented. D.C. Atty. Gen. Brian Schwalb sued the administration in the most combative stance against the federal government’s actions.

As Norton left a recent House hearing about the district, she responded with a strong “no” when asked by reporters whether she would retire.

Among those seeking to challenge her in next year’s Democratic primary are two council members — Robert White Jr., a former Norton aide, and Brooke Pinto. Many others in the city have expressed interest. Allies, including Bowser and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, have declined to publicly endorse another Norton run.

A push for new faces

Norton’s life is a journey through American history.

In 1963, she split her time between Yale Law School and Mississippi, where she volunteered for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. One day during the Freedom Summer, civil rights activist Medgar Evers picked her up at the airport. He was assassinated that night. Norton also helped organize and attended the 1963 March on Washington.

Norton went on to become the first woman to lead the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which helps enforce anti-discrimination laws in the workplace. She ran for office when her predecessor retired to run for Washington mayor.

Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from Virginia and a staunch Norton ally who worked with her on a number of bills, said voters should know who she is and what she is capable of, even now.

“She saved the city,” he said, listing off accomplishments such as the 1997 act that spared the city from bankruptcy, as well as improving college access. “She was a great partner.”

Davis said both major political parties are yearning for new faces.

“She’s still very well respected. She’s got a lot seniority,” he said. “I think she’s earned the right to go out on her terms. But that’s gonna be up to the voters.”

Fields, Brown and Khalil write for the Associated Press.

China has accused the United States of “double standards” after US President Donald Trump threatened to impose an additional 100 percent tariff on Chinese goods in response to Beijing’s curbs on exports of rare earth minerals.

China says its export control measures announced last week were in response to the US restrictions on its entities and targeting of Beijing’s maritime, logistics and shipbuilding industries.

Trump’s tariff threats, which come weeks ahead of the likely meeting between the US president and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, have the potential to reignite a trade war months after Washington lowered the China tariffs from 125 to 30 percent.

The actions by the world’s two largest economies threaten to ignite a new trade war, adding further uncertainty to global trade. So what’s the recent history of US trade measures against China, and will the two countries be able to resolve their differences?

Why did China tighten export controls on rare earths?

On October 9, China expanded export controls to cover 12 out of 17 rare-earth metals and certain refining equipment, effective December 1, after accusing Washington of harming China’s interests and undermining “the atmosphere of bilateral economic and trade talks”.

China also placed restrictions on the export of specialist technological equipment used to refine rare-earth metals on Thursday.

Beijing justified its measures, accusing Washington of imposing a series of trade curbs on Chinese entities despite the two sides being engaged in trade talks, with the last one taking place in Madrid, Spain last month.

Foreign companies now need Beijing’s approval to export products containing Chinese rare earths, and must disclose their intended use. China said the heightened restrictions come as a result of national security interests.

China has a near monopoly over rare earths, critical for the manufacture of technology such as electric cars, smartphones, semiconductors and weapons.

The US is a major consumer of Chinese rare earths, which are crucial for the US defence industry.

At the end of this month, Trump and Xi are expected to meet in South Korea, and experts speculate that Beijing’s move was to gain bargaining advantage in trade negotiations with Washington.

China’s tightening of restrictions on rare earths is “pre-meeting choreography” before Trump’s meeting with Xi, Kristin Vekasi, the Mansfield chair of Japan and Indo-Pacific Affairs at the University of Montana, told Al Jazeera.

How did Trump respond?

On October 10, Trump announced the imposition of a 100 percent tariff on China, effective from November 1.

“Based on the fact that China has taken this unprecedented position … the United States of America will impose a Tariff of 100 percent on China, over and above any Tariff that they are currently paying,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform.

He added that this would come into effect on November 1 or before that. Trump added that the US would also impose export controls on “any and all critical software”.

Earlier on October 10, Trump accused China of “trade hostility” and even said he might scrap his meeting with Xi. It is unclear at this point whether the meeting will take place.

“What the United States has is we have a lot of leverage, and my hope, and I know the president’s hope, is that we don’t have to use that leverage,” US Vice President JD Vance told Fox News on Sunday.

How did China respond to that?

China deemed the US retaliation a “double standard”, according to remarks by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce spokesperson on Sunday.

China said that Washington had “overstretched the concept of national security, abused export control measures” and “adopted discriminatory practices against China”.

“We are living in an era of deeper intertwining of security and economic policies. Both the US and China have expanded their conceptions of national security, encompassing a range of economic activities,” Manoj Kewalramani, chairperson of the Indo-Pacific Studies Programme at the Takshashila Institution in Bangalore, India, told Al Jazeera.

“Both have also weaponised economic interdependence with each other and third parties. There are, in other words, no saints in this game.”

Kewalramani said that China started expanding the idea of “national security” much earlier than others, especially with its “comprehensive national security concept” introduced in 2014.

Through this, China began to include many different areas, such as economics, technology, and society, under the term “national security”. This shows that China was ahead of other countries in broadening what counts as a national security issue.

China threatened additional measures if Trump went ahead with his pledge.

“Willful threats of high tariffs are not the right way to get along with China. China’s position on the trade war is consistent: we do not want it, but we are not afraid of it,” the Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesperson said in a statement.

“Should the US persist in its course, China will resolutely take corresponding measures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests,” the statement said.

What trade measures has the US taken against China in recent history?

2025: Trump unleashes tariff war

A month after taking office for his second term, Trump signed an executive order imposing a 10 percent tariff on all imports from China, citing a trade deficit in favour of China. In this order, he also imposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada. China levied countermeasures, imposing duties on US products in retaliation.

In March, the US president doubled the tariff on all Chinese products to 20 percent as of March 4. China imposed a 15 percent tariff on a range of US farm exports in retaliation; these took effect on March 10.

Trump announced his “reciprocal tariffs,” imposing a 34 percent tariff on Chinese products. China retaliated, also announcing a 34 percent tariff on US products. This was the first time China announced export controls on rare earths.

Hours after the reciprocal tariffs went into effect, Trump paused them for all his tariff targets except China. The US and China continued to hike tit-for-tat levies on each other.

Trump slapped 145 percent tariffs on Chinese imports, prompting China to hit back with 125 percent tariffs. Washington and Beijing later cut tariffs to 30 percent and 10 percent, respectively, in May, then agreed to a 90-day truce in August for trade talks. The truce has been extended twice.

December 2024: The microchip controls are tightened

In December 2024, Trump’s predecessor, former US President Joe Biden, tightened controls on the sale of microchips first introduced on October 2022.

Under the new controls, 140 companies from China, Japan, South Korea and Singapore were added to a list of restricted entities. The US also banned more advanced chip-making equipment to certain countries. Even products manufactured abroad with US technology were restricted.

April 2024: Biden signs the TikTok ban

Biden signed a bill into law that would ban TikTok unless it was sold to a non-Chinese buyer within a year. The US government alleged that TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance was linked to the Chinese government, making the app a threat to national security.

ByteDance sued the US federal government over this bill in May 2024.

In September this year, Trump announced that a deal was finalised to find a new owner of TikTok.

October 2023: Biden introduces more restrictions on chips

In October 2023, Biden restricted US exports of advanced computer chips, especially those made by Nvidia, to China and other countries.

The goal of this measure was to limit China’s access to “advanced semiconductors that could fuel breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and sophisticated computers that are critical to [Chinese] military applications,” Gina Raimondo, who was secretary of the US Department of Commerce during the Biden administration, told reporters.

Prior to this, Biden signed an executive order in August 2023, creating a programme that limits US investments in certain high-tech areas, including semiconductors, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence, in countries deemed to be a security risk, like China.

October 2022: Biden restricts Chinese access to semiconductors

Biden restricted China’s access to US semiconductors in October 2022. The rules further expanded restrictions on chipmaking tools to include industries that support the semiconductor supply chain, blocking both access to American expertise and the essential components used in manufacturing the tools that produce microchips.

Semiconductors are used in the manufacturing of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The US government placed these restrictions back then to limit China’s ability to acquire the ability to produce semiconductors and advance in the technological race.

The restrictions made it compulsory for entities within China to apply for licences to acquire American semiconductors. Analysis by the US-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace described these licences as “hard to get” back then.

Recently, some US lawmakers are calling for even more restrictions, warning that China could quickly reverse-engineer advanced semiconductor technologies on its own, outpace the US in the sector, and gain a military edge.

May 2020: Trump cracks down on Huawei

In May 2020, the US Bureau of Industry and Security intensified rules to stop Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, from using American technology and software to design and make semiconductors in other countries.

The new rules said that semiconductors are designed for Huawei using US technology or equipment, anywhere in the world, would need US government approval before being sent to Huawei.

May 2019: Trump bans Huawei

Trump signed an executive order blocking Chinese telecommunications companies like Huawei from selling equipment in the US. The Shenzhen-based Huawei is the world’s largest provider of 5G networks, according to analysis by the New York City-based think tank the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Under this order, Huawei and 114 related entities were added to a list that requires US companies to get special permission (a licence) before selling certain technologies to them.

The rationale behind this order was the allegation that Huawei threatened US national security, had stolen intellectual property and could commit cyber espionage. Some US lawmakers alleged that the Chinese government was using Huawei to spy on Americans. The US did not publicise any evidence to back these allegations.

Other Western countries had also cooperated with the US.

March 2018: Trump imposes tariffs on China

During his first administration, Trump imposed sweeping 25 percent tariffs on Chinese goods worth as much as $60bn. In June of 2018, Trump announced more tariffs.

China retaliated by imposing tariffs on US products. Beijing deemed Trump’s trade policies “trade bullyism practices”, according to an official white paper, as reported by Xinhua news agency.

In September 2018, Trump issued another round of 10 percent tariffs on Chinese products, which were hiked to 25 percent in May 2019.

During the Obama administration (2009-2017)

In 2011, during US President Barack Obama’s tenure, the US-China trade deficit reached an all-time high of $295.5bn, up from $273.1bn in the previous year.

In March 2012, the US, European Union, and Japan formally complained to China at the World Trade Organization (WTO) about China’s limits on selling rare earth metals to other countries. This move was deemed “rash and unfair” by China.

In its ruling, the world trade body said China’s export restraints were breaching the WTO rules.

In 2014, the US indicted five Chinese nationals with alleged ties to China’s People’s Liberation Army. They were charged with stealing trade technology from American companies.

What’s next for the US-China trade war?

Trump and Xi are expected to meet in South Korea on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), which is set to begin on October 31.

But the latest trade dispute has clouded the Xi-Trump meeting.

On Sunday, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, downplaying the threat: “Don’t worry about China, it will all be fine! Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment. He doesn’t want Depression for his country, and neither do I. The U.S.A. wants to help China, not hurt it!!!”

In an interview with Fox Business Network on Monday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, “President Trump said that the tariffs would not go into effect until November 1. He will be meeting with [Communist] Party Chair Xi in [South] Korea. I believe that meeting will still be on.”

When it comes to which of the two players is more affected by the trade war, Kewalramani said that he thinks “what matters is who is willing to bear greater pain, endure greater cost”.

“This is the crucial question. I would wager that Beijing is probably better placed because Washington has alienated allies and partners with its policies since January. But then, China’s growing export controls are not simply aimed at the US. They impact every country. So Beijing has not also endeared itself to anyone,” Kewalramani said, pointing out how Trump’s tariffs and China’s rare earth restrictions target multiple countries.

“The ones affected the most are countries caught in the midst of great power competition.”

On Sunday, US VP Vance told Fox News about China: “If they respond in a highly aggressive manner, I guarantee you, the president of the United States has far more cards than the People’s Republic of China.”

Kewalramani said that so far, Beijing has been more organised, prepared and strategic than the US in its policies.

“That said, it has overreached with the latest round of export controls. US policy, meanwhile, has lacked strategic coherence. The US still is the dominant global power and has several cards to play. What matters, however, is whether it can get its house in order.”

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There has been a huge wave of relief across European and US markets after Friday proved to be a dark day for investors.

Leading European stock indexes started the week in the green, as well as the US futures, while bitcoin, silver and gold rallied.

After leading stock indexes on the Wall Street dropped between 1.9 and 3.6% on Friday, Asian indexes followed the lead on Monday morning, and unanimously lost between 1% and 1.7%.

US stocks skidded on Friday after US President Donald Trump threatened to crank tariffs higher on China, signalling more trouble ahead between the two biggest economies. He was responding to restrictions Beijing is imposing on exports of rare earths, which are materials that are critical for the manufacturing of everything from consumer electronics to jet engines.

However, by the European opening on Monday, investors appeared to be cheered by the US president’s promising words, as he commented on the mounting US-China trade tensions on social media, saying, “Don’t worry about China, it will all be fine!”

Stock markets appear to reverse the losses from the end of last week, the FTSE 100 in London was up by 0.3% at around 10h CET on Monday, the Paris CAC 40 cheered the promise of a new government by gaining 0.7% and the Dax in Frankfurt joined the crowd by rising 0.5% by this time.

The Ibex 35 in Madrid also gained 0.8% and the European benchmark Stoxx 600 was up by nearly 0.5%.

Crypto rallies after Friday’s sharp decline

Bitcoin approached $115,000 on Monday, while Ethereum exceeded $4,200.

“The crypto market capitalisation stood at $3.9 trillion on Monday, up 4.4% from the previous day but down 6% from pre-Friday crash levels,” Alex Kuptsikevich, the FxPro chief market analyst, said.

Gold was up by more than 2.3%, trading at $4,092 an ounce, nearing 11h CET, while oil prices were also climbing, the US benchmark crude was up by nearly 0.9% at 59.85 a barrel, whereas the international benchmark Brent cost $63.69 a barrel, 1.5% increase in the price.

Meanwhile, US futures advanced, with the contract for the S&P 500 gaining 1.1% while that for the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 1.5% and Nasdaq futures were climbing 2% by 10.30 CET.

In other dealings early Monday, the dollar rose 152.22 Japanese yen from 151.89 yen late Friday. The euro fell to $1.1605 from $1.1614.

Beijing says it will not back down in the face of threats, urging the US to resolve differences through negotiations.

China has called United States President Donald Trump’s new tariffs on Chinese goods hypocritical as it defended its curbs on exports of rare earth elements and equipment, while stopping short of imposing additional duties on US imports.

In a lengthy statement on Sunday, China’s Ministry of Commerce said its export controls on rare earths, which Trump had labelled “surprising” and “very hostile”, were introduced in response to a series of US measures since their trade talks held in Madrid, Spain, last month.

“China’s stance is consistent,” the ministry said in a statement posted online. “We do not want a tariff war but we are not afraid of one.”

Trump on Friday retaliated to the Chinese curbs on rare earth exports by announcing a 100 percent tariff on Chinese exports to the US and new export controls on critical software, effective from November 1.

Beijing cited Washington’s decision to blacklist Chinese firms and impose port fees on China-linked ships as examples of what it called “provocative and damaging” actions, calling Trump’s tariff threat a “typical example of double standards”.

“These actions have severely harmed China’s interests and undermined the atmosphere for bilateral economic and trade talks. China firmly opposes them,” the ministry said.

Unlike earlier rounds of tit-for-tat tariffs, China has not yet announced any countermeasures.

Rare earths have been a major sticking point in recent trade negotiations between the two superpowers. They are critical to manufacturing everything from smartphones and electric vehicles to military hardware and renewable energy technology.

China dominates the global production and processing of these materials. On Thursday, it announced new controls on the export of technologies used for the mining and processing of critical minerals.

The renewed trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies also risk derailing a potential summit between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea later this month. It would have been their first face-to-face encounter since Trump returned to power in January.

The dispute has also rattled global markets, dragging down major tech stocks and worrying companies reliant on China’s dominance in rare earth processing.

HAMAS does not believe in peace and still poses a chilling threat to the West, analysts have warned.

The terror group signed up to Trump’s peace plan which says it must disarm, but has not specifically pledged to do so – and experts have taken this as a bad omen.

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A ceasefire officially came into force on Friday – clearing the way for the first phase of Donald Trump’s sweeping peace plan to return the hostages and demilitarise Gaza.

The US announced it would deploy up to 200 troops to Israel to help support peacekeeping efforts in Gaza.

However, signs of trouble are already brewing after a Hamas official rejected the idea of Tony Blair running the strip – one of Trump’s cornerstone measures.

Egyptian-born scholar Dalia Ziada said the much-heralded Gaza ceasefire could prove a deadly illusion.

Ziada, who defied her country’s consensus by backing Israel and was forced to flee after death threats, told The Sun: “Part of me is very happy because finally this brutal war is coming to an end.

“The hostages will be returned. The people in Gaza will be relieved from the horrors of the war.

“Hamas is obviously defeated to the point that they had to finally accept a ceasefire deal.”

But she praised Washington’s muscular return to Middle East power politics: “I am excited to see the United States coming back to the Middle East with its heavy weight and being involved on that level as a partner.”

Ziada’s optimism about a deal stops there, however – warning that the world is underestimating the nature of the enemy.

“This deal is being made with a terrorist organisation, Hamas,” she said.

“Hamas adopts the jihad ideology, violent resistance ideology. They do not believe in peace.”

Even the language, she noted, betrays Hamas’s intent.

“Actually, what they believe in is Hudna. Hudna is truce,” Ziada explained.

“It’s mainly: ‘Let’s take a break so we can rearm, regroup and come back and kill you again’.”

Hussain Abdul-Hussain, an experienced war journalist and researcher, agrees that Hamas will “absolutely not” honour disarmament.

He pointed to their reluctance throughout negotiations to relinquish weapons – and emphasised they have agreed to “freeze their activity and take a break” rather than “give this up for good”.

Abdul-Hussain believes the ceasefire will hold for a while, but not forever.

He ominously warned: “It [fighting] will come back. We just don’t know when.”

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Ziada argues that Hamas only accepted Trump’s ceasefire plan because they ran out of options.

She said: “Actually, it’s the last card in Hamas’ hands. The last card in Hamas’ hands was hostages. And that’s why they did everything they can to avoid giving away this card.

“But now Hamas has no other option but to accept, especially after President Trump’s very clear and very direct threatening to them that in case they do not agree, there will be total obliteration.”

But the deal is being struck with “Hamas leaders in suits” in Doha, not the hardened fighters still embedded in Gaza.

That split could prove explosive.

Ziada warned: “I don’t expect that the militia on the ground will be very cooperative.

“We started to see the first sign of this lack of cooperation from the very confused reports coming out of Hamas.”

‘Heavyweight murderers’ loose on the streets

While the remaining Hamas leaders have decided to make enough of the right noises to satisfy the peace deal conditions, they have had no contact with the prisoners who are to be released from Israeli jails.

As part of the deal, Israel will release 250 life sentence prisoners – who likely harbour a severe grudge against Israel and the West.

Richard Pater, CEO of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), said: “250 heavyweight murderers, Palestinian terrorists, are being released,

“They’re not being released back into the West Bank and they’ll never be allowed to enter Israel – but some of them are going to be moved to Gaza.”

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He said it is a major concern that one of the released convicts will become the new Yahya Sinwar – the terrorist mastermind of October 7.

Sinwar was himself released in a similar prisoner exchange.

Pater fears this deal is “kicking the can down the road”, because “there will be the motivation and the ability of these hardened terrorist leaders to potentially rebuild”.

‘Zero trust’

Asked whether she believed Hamas would stick to the deal, Ziada was brutally clear: “There are no guarantees. First of all, I have zero faith or zero trust in Hamas.

“One hundred per cent. I mean, zero, zero trust in Hamas.”

Even with heavyweights like Egypt, Qatar and Turkey leaning on Hamas to comply, she believes this first stage — halting fighting and releasing hostages — will be the easy part.

The rest of Trump’s 20-point peace plan will be far harder.

She said: “This is, by the way, the easiest step because this is mainly about stop the war, release the hostages, exchange prisoners. That’s it.

“The most difficult part is the other 19 points on the plan.”

Pater warned “there are 101 problems that can still occur” throughout stages two and three of the peace plan – when Hamas is supposed to disarm and the IDF eventually withdraw entirely.

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‘They will never disarm’

If anyone imagines Hamas laying down its weapons, Ziada said, they are deluding themselves.

“At this moment Hamas did not say very clearly that they will disarm,” she said.

“They will not disarm under any condition or any pressure. I cannot even picture it like Hamas going and handing their weapons because this means their end.”

Even a temporary pause in violence could serve to revive Hamas’s jihadist ambitions.

“Hamas was drained in the past month to the extent that they started to reach out to the camps of the people displaced inside Gaza and recruit teenagers,” Ziada revealed.

“This will once again revive Hamas appetite to go back to this jihadist struggle.”

And Hamas has already signalled its intent.

Ziada said: “Only days ago in the anniversary of October 7, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad issued a celebratory statement wherein they said, ‘we will continue our Jihad, we will continue our violent resistance’.”

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The terror within

Ziada’s most chilling warning, however, goes far beyond Gaza.

She said the threat has now metastasised into Western societies themselves.

“People are so focused on Gaza like we are all zooming in into Gaza, but we fail to see the consequences of what the past two years has done to our world,” she said.

“The threat to the UK is coming from inside the UK. The threat to the US security is coming from inside the US.

“The attack on the West will continue — the attack on Western values and Western principles and Western way of life will continue in different forms, either by violence or even through nonviolent means as we see in political arenas.”

Abdul-Hussain reminded us that violent Islamist attacks predate October 7, and similarly warned that threat is not going away.

He said: “This is an issue that the West will have to deal with, with or without peace or ceasefire or whatever arrangement exists between Israel and the Palestinians.

And Pater insisted that the UK needs a programme of deradicalisation just as much as Gaza.

He said: “For example, the UK banning the Muslim Brotherhood movement, proscribing it as a terror organisation, not being afraid to call out Islamic extremism for what it is, will be important steps to deradicalise the population.”

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“Palestine has become the all-encompassing flag and image for this Islamist global movement. But this movement exists.

“It exists in the West and Gaza is just an extension of it.”

A fragile hope

Yet even amid the warnings, Ziada said there is reason to hope.

She said: “The tears I saw in the eyes of the hostages’ families, their excitement that their children and family members will finally be coming back from this hell… it puts a smile on my face.”

For now, she admits, the world will celebrate a pause in the bloodshed.

But her message is clear: Hamas is not finished — and the West ignores that reality at its peril.

WASHINGTON — President Trump was passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday despite jockeying from his fellow Republicans, various world leaders and — most vocally — himself.

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was awarded the prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it was honoring Machado “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”

Machado, however, said she wanted to dedicate the win to Trump, along with the people of her country, as she praised the president for support of her cause.

The White House responded bitterly to the news of the award Friday, with communications director Steven Cheung saying members of “the Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace” because they didn’t recognize Trump, especially after the Gaza ceasefire deal his administration helped strike this week.

“He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will,” Cheung wrote on social media.

The White House did not comment on Machado’s recognition, but Trump on social media shared Machado’s post praising him.

Her opposition to President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela aligns with the Trump administration’s own stance on Venezuela, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously praised her as “the personification of resilience, tenacity, and patriotism.”

Trump, who has long coveted the prestigious prize, has been outspoken about his desire for the honor during both of his presidential terms, particularly lately as he takes credit for ending conflicts around the world. The Republican president had expressed doubts that the Nobel committee would ever grant him the award.

“They’ll have to do what they do. Whatever they do is fine. I know this: I didn’t do it for that. I did it because I saved a lot of lives,” Trump said Thursday.

Although Trump received nominations for the prize, many of them occurred after the Feb. 1 deadline for the 2025 award, which fell just a week and a half into his second term. His name was, however, put forward in December by Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York, her office said in a statement, for his brokering of the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states in 2020.

A long history of lobbying for the prize

Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said the committee has seen various campaigns in its long history of awarding the peace prize.

“We receive thousands and thousands of letters every year of people wanting to say what for them leads to peace,” he said. “This committee sits in a room filled with the portraits of all laureates, and that room is filled with both courage and integrity. So we base only our decision on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel.”

The peace prize, first awarded in 1901, was created partly to encourage ongoing peace efforts. Alfred Nobel stipulated in his will that the prize should go to someone “who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Three sitting U.S. presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and Barack Obama in 2009. Jimmy Carter won the prize in 2002, a full two decades after leaving office. Former Vice President Al Gore received the prize in 2007.

Obama, a Democrat who was a focus of Trump’s attacks well before the Republican was elected, won the prize early in his tenure as president.

“They gave it to Obama for doing absolutely nothing but destroying our country,” Trump said Thursday.

Wars in Gaza and elsewhere

As one of his reasons for deserving the award, Trump often says he has ended seven wars, though some of the conflicts the president claims to have resolved were merely tensions and his role in easing them is disputed.

But while there is hope for the end to Israel and Hamas’ war, with Israel saying a ceasefire agreement with Hamas came into effect Friday, much remains uncertain about the aspects of the broader plan, including whether and how Hamas will disarm and who will govern Gaza. And little progress seems to have been made in the Russia-Ukraine war, a conflict Trump claimed during the 2024 campaign that he could end in one day.

As Trump pushes for peaceful resolutions to conflicts abroad, the country he governs remains deeply divided and politically fraught. Trump has kicked off what he hopes to be the largest deportation program in American history to remove immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. He is using the levers of government, including the Justice Department, to go after his perceived political enemies. He has sent the military into U.S. cities over local opposition to stop crime and crack down on immigration enforcement.

He withdrew the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, dealing a blow to worldwide efforts to combat global warming. He touched off global trade wars with his on-again, off-again tariffs, which he wields as a threat to bend other countries and companies to his will. He asserted presidential war powers by declaring cartels to be unlawful combatants and launching lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean that he alleged were carrying drugs.

The full list of people nominated is secret, but anyone who submits a nomination is free to talk about it. Trump’s detractors say supporters, foreign leaders and others are submitting Trump’s name for nomination for the prize — and announcing it publicly — not because he deserves it but because they see it as a way to manipulate him and stay in his good graces.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who this summer said he was nominating Trump for the prize, on Friday reposted Cheung’s response with the comment: “The Nobel Committee talks about peace. President @realDonaldTrump makes it happen.”

“The facts speak for themselves,” Netanyahu’s office said on X. “President #Trump deserves it.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who sent troops to Ukraine in 2022 and has sought to show alignment with Trump, told reporters in Taijikistan on Friday that it’s not up to him to judge whether Trump should have received the prize, but he praised the ceasefire deal for Gaza.

He also criticized the Nobel Committee’s prior decisions, saying it has in the past awarded the prize to those who have done little to advance global peace.

Putin’s remarks nearly echoed the comments Trump made about Obama, and the U.S. leader responded to his Russian counterpart’s praise by posting on social media: “Thank you to President Putin!”

Others who formally submitted a nomination for Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize — but after this year’s deadline — include Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and Pakistan’s government, all citing his work in helping end conflicts in their regions.

Pesoli and Price write for the Associated Press. AP writers Chris Megerian in Washington, Geir Moulson in Berlin and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — It has been four months since Elon Musk, President Trump’s bureaucratic demolition man, abandoned Washington in a flurry of recriminations and chaos.

But the Trump administration’s crusade to dismantle much of the federal government never ended. It’s merely under new management: the less colorful but more methodical Russell Vought, director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.

Vought has become the backroom architect of Trump’s aggressive strategy — slashing the federal workforce, freezing billions in congressionally approved spending in actions his critics often call illegal.

Now Vought has proposed using the current government shutdown as an opportunity to fire thousands of bureaucrats permanently instead of merely furloughing them temporarily. If any do return to work, he has suggested that the government need not give them back pay — contrary to a law Trump signed in 2019.

Those threats may prove merely to be pressure tactics as Trump tries to persuade Democrats to accept spending cuts on Medicaid, Obamacare and other programs.

But the shutdown battle is the current phase of a much larger one. Vought’s long-term goals, he says, are to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” and “deconstruct the administrative state.”

He’s still only partway done.

“I’d estimate that Vought has implemented maybe 10% or 15% of his program,” said Donald F. Kettl, former dean of the public policy school at the University of Maryland. “There may be as much as 90% to go. If this were a baseball game, we’d be in the top of the second inning.”

Along the way, Vought (pronounced “vote”) has chipped relentlessly at Congress’ ability to control the use of federal funds, massively expanding the power of the president.

“He has waged the most serious attack on separation of powers in American history,” said Elaine Kamarck, an expert on federal management at the Brookings Institution.

He’s done that mainly by using OMB, the White House office that oversees spending, to control the day-to-day purse strings of federal agencies — and deliberately keeping Congress in the dark along the way.

“If Congress has given us authority that is too broad, then we’re going to use that authority aggressively,” Vought said last month.

Federal judges have ruled some of the administration’s actions illegal, but they have allowed others to stand. Vought’s proposal to use the shutdown to fire thousands of bureaucrats hasn’t been tested in court.

Vought developed his aggressive approach during two decades as a conservative budget expert, culminating in his appointment as director of OMB in Trump’s first term.

In 2019, he stretched the limits of presidential power by helping Trump get around a congressional ban on funding for a border wall, by declaring an emergency and transferring military funds. He froze congressionally mandated aid for Ukraine, the action that led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Even so, Vought complained that Trump had been needlessly restrained by cautious first-term aides.

“The lawyers come in and say, ‘It’s not legal. You can’t do that,’” he said in 2023. “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office over whether something is legal.”

Vought is a proponent of the “unitary executive” theory, the argument that the president should have unfettered control over every tentacle of the executive branch, including independent agencies such as the Federal Reserve.

When Congress designates money for federal programs, he has argued, “It’s a ceiling. It is not a floor. It’s not the notion that you have to spend every dollar.”

Most legal experts disagree; a 1974 law prohibits the president from unilaterally withholding money Congress has appropriated.

Vought told conservative activists in 2023 that if Trump returned to power, he would deliberately seek to inflict “trauma” on federal employees.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work.”

When Vought returned to OMB for Trump’s second term, he appeared to be in Musk’s shadow. But once the flamboyant Tesla chief executive flamed out, the OMB director got to work to make DOGE’s work the foundation for lasting changes.

He extended many of DOGE’s funding cuts by slowing down OMB’s approval of disbursements — turning them into de facto freezes.

He helped persuade Republicans in Congress to cancel $9 billion in previously approved foreign aid and public broadcasting support, a process known as “rescission.”

To cancel an additional $4.9 billion, he revived a rarely used gambit called a “pocket rescission,” freezing the funds until they expired.

Along the way, he quietly stopped providing Congress with information on spending, leaving legislators in the dark on whether programs were being axed.

DOGE and OMB eliminated jobs so quickly that the federal government stopped publishing its ongoing tally of federal employees. (Any number would only be approximate; some layoffs are tied up in court, and thousands of employees who opted for voluntary retirement are technically still on the payroll.)

The result was a significant erosion of Congress’ “power of the purse,” which has historically included not only approving money but also monitoring how it was spent.

Even some Republican members of Congress seethed. “They would like a blank check … and I don’t think that’s appropriate,” said former Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

But the GOP majorities in both the House and Senate, pleased to see spending cut by any means, let Vought have his way. Even McConnell voted to approve the $9-billion rescission request.

Vought’s newest innovation, the mid-shutdown layoffs, would be another big step toward reducing Congress’ role.

“The result would be a dramatic, instantaneous shift in the separation of powers,” Kettl said. “The Trump team could kill programs unilaterally without the inconvenience of going to Congress.”

Some of the consequences could be catastrophic, Kettl and other scholars warned. Kamarck calls them “time bombs.”

“One or more of these decisions is going to blow up in Trump’s face,” she said.

“FEMA won’t be capable of reacting to the next hurricane. The National Weather Service won’t have the forecasters it needs to analyze the data from weather balloons.”

Even before the government shutdown, she noted, the FAA was grappling with a shortage of air traffic controllers. This week the FAA slowed takeoffs at several airports in response to growing shortages, including at air traffic control centers in Atlanta, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.

In theory, a future Congress could undo many of Vought’s actions, especially if Democrats win control of the House or, less likely, the Senate.

But rebuilding agencies that have been radically shrunken would take much longer than cutting them down, the scholars said.

“Much of this will be difficult to reverse when Democrats come back into fashion,” Kamarck said.

Indeed, that’s part of Vought’s plan.

“We want to make sure that the bureaucracy can’t reconstitute itself later in future administrations,” he said in April in a podcast with Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was slain on Sept. 10.

He’s pleased with the progress he’s made, he told reporters in July.

“We’re having fun,” he said.

Congratulations are in order for President Trump. He said he would bring home Israel’s hostages and end the horrific fighting in Gaza, and that appears to be exactly what he is doing with this week’s deal. While many of the ideas that went into Trump’s 20-point peace plan predated his reelection, he and his team deserve a standing ovation for translating those ideas into a practical proposal, defining a first phase that was both big and digestible and putting together all the pieces that made its agreement possible.

Success, however, does have its downsides. Remember the Pottery Barn rule of foreign policy, made famous during the Iraq war? “You break it, you own it.” We now have the Trump corollary: “You patch it, you own it.”

Despite coming to office eager to shed America’s Middle East commitments, Trump just took on a huge one: responsibility for a peace plan that will forever bear his name. On Oct. 6, 2023, the day before Hamas’ assault, Arab-Israeli relations were poised for the historic breakthrough of Saudi-Israel normalization; two years later, Arab-Israeli relations — including Trump’s first-term Middle East peacemaking achievement of the Abraham Accords — are hanging on by a thread. By offering a plan that promises not just an end to fighting in Gaza but building a full and enduring regional peace, the president has taken on the task of repairing the damage wrought by Hamas’ unholy war. In other words: fixing the Middle East.

How Trump fulfills this not inconsequential responsibility has major consequences for America’s role in the region and in the world. The Chinese are watching whether, when the going gets rough, he will have the mettle to maintain a broad alliance. The Russians are watching whether the president will strictly enforce the letter of the deal or let certain unpleasant aspects slip. The Iranians will be watching whether Trump will find himself so drowning in the details of Gaza reconstruction that he won’t be able to stitch together a repeat of the highly successful Arab-Israeli coalition that protected Israel a year ago from Iran’s barrages of ballistic missiles and drones. And all these adversaries — and others — will wonder whether the intense U.S. focus needed to ensure implementation of this deal will distract the president from their own areas of mischief.

Those are some of the international stakes. There’s a difficult road ahead in achieving the deal itself. Some of the most vexing challenges will include:

• Implementing a highly complex Gaza peace plan that, in its requirements for disarmament, envisions Hamas to be fully complicit in its organizational suicide — or at least its institutional castration;
• Having the U.S. military orchestrate the recruitment, deployment and management of multinational forces to police the territory just as the Israel Defense Forces are withdrawing from it, a tricky maneuver fraught with risk;
• Creating and supervising a transitional administration that will oversee everything from humanitarian relief to rubble and ordnance removal to massive reconstruction projects, all the while preventing what’s left of Hamas from stealing goods to divert to underground weapons factories, an art that it perfected after previous ceasefires;
• Securing buy-in from the United Nations and its specialized agencies, which need to play an essential role in delivering food and medical services, without buckling under pressure to rehabilitate the deeply flawed U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, an organization that bears special responsibility for keeping the Palestinian-Israeli conflict alive for decades;
• Preventing Qatar and Turkey — longtime friends of Hamas who have emerged in recent weeks as diplomatic Good Samaritans — from translating their current status into a malign influence over the direction of Palestinian politics, which can only be worrisome to Israel and the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and a long-term detriment to the cause of peace;
• And dealing every step of the way with an Israeli prime minister of a rightist coalition who will likely view every decision, great and small, through the lens of a fateful election he is expected to call very soon that will show whether the Israeli people want to punish him for the terrible errors that left Israel unprepared for Hamas’ 2023 attack or reward him for the impressive victories Israel’s military achieved across the region in the two years that followed.

Getting this far was a huge achievement. Ensuring effective execution — never a strong suit for a “big idea guy” like Trump — is a thousand times more difficult. This can’t be done with a small team of White House officials chatting on Signal. It will require an army of — please excuse the term — experts: experts in military command and control, experts in ordnance removal and disposal, experts in civilian rehabilitation and reconstruction, experts in communication and community engagement. Corporate subcontracting can address some of this, as can the impressive talents of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but don’t be fooled into thinking that a consulting company or a former foreign official can pick up the slack of the entire U.S. government. This plan, after all, has Trump’s name on it, not Deloitte’s or Blair’s.

The president has at least one more vital task in this matter. He must explain to the American people why we are doing this. For nearly 20 years, American presidents of both parties have said they wanted to pivot away from the Middle East, but they continually find themselves entangled in the region’s often byzantine conflicts and politics. Americans deserve to know why the “America First” president has decided that American interests are intimately bound up in the success of this peace plan. Our domestic divisions notwithstanding, fair-minded people on both sides of the aisle will be rooting for Trump’s success in this peace deal.

For now, sure, the president should enjoy the accolades and celebrate the coming release of Hamas’ hostages. The morning after will come soon enough.

Robert Satloff is executive director of the Washington Institute.

ELWOOD, Ill. — National Guard members from Texas were at an Army training center in Illinois on Tuesday, the most visible sign yet of the Trump administration’s plan to send troops to the Chicago area despite a lawsuit and vigorous opposition from Democratic elected leaders.

The Associated Press saw military personnel in uniforms with the Texas National Guard patch at the U.S. Army Reserve Center in Elwood, 35 miles southwest of Chicago. On Monday, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott posted a picture on social media showing National Guard members from his state boarding a plane, but he didn’t specify where they were going.

There was no immediate comment from the office of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. But the Democrat had predicted that Illinois National Guard troops would be activated, along with 400 from Texas.

Pritzker has accused President Trump of using troops as “political props” and “pawns.” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson told reporters that the administration isn’t sharing much information with the city.

“That is what is so difficult about this moment: You have an administration that is refusing to cooperate with a local authority,” Johnson said Tuesday.

A federal judge gave the Trump administration two days to respond to a lawsuit filed Monday by Illinois and Chicago challenging the plan. A hearing is scheduled for Thursday. The lawsuit says that “these advances in President Trump’s long-declared ‘War’ on Chicago and Illinois are unlawful and dangerous.”

Trump’s bid to deploy the military on U.S. soil over local opposition has triggered a conflict with blue state governors. In Oregon, a judge over the weekend blocked the Guard’s deployment to Portland.

The Trump administration has portrayed the cities as war-ravaged and lawless amid its crackdown on illegal immigration. Officials in Illinois and Oregon, however, say that military intervention isn’t needed and that federal involvement is inflaming the situation.

Trump has said he would be willing to invoke the Insurrection Act if necessary. It allows the president to dispatch active-duty troops in states that are unable to put down an insurrection or are defying federal law.

“If I had to enact it — I’d do that,” Trump said Monday. “If people were being killed, and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”

The sight of armed Border Patrol agents making arrests near famous landmarks has amplified concerns from Chicagoans already uneasy after an immigration crackdown that began last month. Agents have targeted immigrant-heavy and largely Latino areas.

The Chicago mayor signed an executive order Monday barring federal immigration agents and others from using city-owned property, such as parking lots, garages and vacant lots, as staging areas for enforcement operations.

Separately, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois is also suing the federal government, accusing it of unleashing a campaign of violence against peaceful protesters and journalists during weeks of demonstrations outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in suburban Broadview.

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in response to the lawsuit that the 1st Amendment doesn’t protect “rioting.”

In Oregon, the Portland ICE facility has been the site of nightly protests for months, peaking in June when local police declared a riot, with smaller clashes occurring since then. In recent weeks, the protests typically drew a couple of dozen people — until the deployment was announced. Over the weekend, larger crowds gathered outside the facility, and federal agents fired tear gas.

Most violent crime around the U.S. has declined in recent years. In Portland, homicides from January through June decreased by 51% to 17 this year compared with the same period in 2024, data show. In Chicago, homicides were down 31% to 278 through August, police data show.

Since starting his second term, Trump has sent or talked about sending troops to 10 cities, including Baltimore; Memphis, Tenn.; the District of Columbia; New Orleans; and Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

A federal judge in September said the administration “willfully” broke federal law by deploying Guard members to Los Angeles over protests about immigration raids.

Hooley and Fernando write for the Associated Press. Fernando reported from Chicago. AP reporters Sarah Raza in Sioux Falls, S.D.; Scott Bauer in Madison, Wis.; and Ed White in Detroit contributed to this report.

Oct. 5 (UPI) — Israel continued its airstrikes on Gaza on Sunday, even as negotiators headed to Egypt for talks on a U.S.-proposed peace plan that calls for Hamas to release all hostages and seeks new governance for the Palestinian territory.

The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said Sunday that 63 Palestinians were killed and another 153 wounded in bombings carried out by Israeli forces in the last 24 hours, reported Haaretz. The strikes come despite Israeli officials agreeing to ease their offensive on Gaza City and President Donald Trump calling for the bombings to halt as his peace plan to end the two-year conflict is put to the test.

Israeli officials believe there are still 20 living hostages being kept in Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas militants that triggered Israel’s military campaign in the Palestinian enclave, which has drawn growing international condemnation.

Negotiations will begin Monday in Sharm el-Sheikh, focusing on the first phase of the plan that calls for Hamas to release the remaining hostages and for Israel to withdraw its troops in Gaza to a line agreed upon with Hamas.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told ABC News Sunday that “this is the closest we’ve come to getting all of the hostages released.”

“But there’s a lot of pitfalls along the way,” he added.

The initial talks will be “technical” and will focus on working out specific details of the negotiation’s first phase, Israeli government spokesperson Shosh Bedrosian said in a video posted to X.

But she added that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the talks will last for just a few days and he will not tolerate Hamas attempting to delay the release of all hostages past the 72-hour deadline.

“The prime minister is in regular contact with President Trump, who stressed Hamas must move quickly ‘or else all bets will be off,'” she said.

The Palestinian militant group signaled Friday that it was ready to release all Israeli hostages living and dead, but said it needed more than 72 hours to arrange their release.

Hamas is eager to end the conflict and begin a prisoner exchange with Israel, a senior Hamas official told the Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat. The official added that Israel’s occupation of Gaza must not obstruct the implementation of the peace plan.

President Donald Trump said in a social media post Sunday that there had been positive discussions with Hamas and other countries on ending the war.

“I am told that the first phase should be completed this week, and I am asking everyone to MOVE FAST,” he said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Sunday that he intends to seek a court order in an attempt to stop President Trump’s deployment of California National Guard troops to Oregon.

Calling the president’s action a “breathtaking abuse of power,” Newsom said in a statement that 300 California National Guard personnel were being deployed to Portland, Ore., a city the president has called “war-ravaged.”

“They are on their way there now,” Newsom said of the National Guard. “This is a breathtaking abuse of the law and power.”

Trump’s move came a day after a federal judge in Oregon temporarily blocked the federalization of Oregon’s National Guard.

The president, who mobilized the California National Guard amid immigration protests earlier this year, has pursued the use of the military to fight crime in cities including Chicago and Washington, D.C., sparking outrage among Democratic officials in those cities. Local leaders, including those in Portland, have said the actions are unnecessary and without legal justification.

“The Trump Administration is unapologetically attacking the rule of law itself and putting into action their dangerous words — ignoring court orders and treating judges, even those appointed by the President himself, as political opponents,” Newsom said.

In June, Newsom and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta filed a federal lawsuit over Trump’s mobilization of the state’s National Guard during immigration protests in Los Angeles. California officials are expected to file the court order over Sunday’s deployment using that existing lawsuit.

Newsom has ratcheted up his rhetoric about Trump in recent days: On Friday, the governor lashed out at universities that may sign the president’s higher education compact, which demands rightward campus policy shifts in exchange for priority federal funding.

“I need to put pressure on this moment and pressure test where we are in U.S. history, not just California history,” Newsom said. “…This is it. We are losing this country.”

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court justices like to talk about the Constitution’s separation of powers and how it limits the exercise of official authority.

But Chief Justice John G. Roberts and his conservative colleagues have given no sign so far they will check President Trump’s one-man governance by executive order.

To the contrary, the conservative justices have repeatedly ruled for Trump on fast-track appeals and overturned federal judges who said the president had exceeded his authority.

The court’s new term opens on Monday, and the justices will begin hearing arguments.

But those regularly scheduled cases have been overshadowed by Trump’s relentless drive to remake the government, to punish his political enemies, including universities, law firms, TV networks and prominent Democrats, and to send troops to patrol U.S. cities.

The overriding question has become: Are there any legal limits on the president’s power? The Supreme Court itself has raised the doubts.

A year ago, as Trump ran to reclaim the White House, the justices blocked a felony criminal indictment against him related to his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, mob attack on the Capitol as Congress met to certify Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, for which Trump was impeached.

Led by Roberts, the court ruled for Trump and declared for the first time that presidents were immune from being prosecuted for their official actions in the White House.

Not surprisingly, Trump saw this as a “BIG WIN” and proof there is no legal check on his power.

This year, Trump’s lawyers have confidently gone to Supreme Court with emergency appeals when lower-court judges have stood in their way. With few exceptions, they have won, often over dissents from the court’s three liberal Democrats.

Many court scholars say they are disappointed but not surprised by the court’s response so far to Trump’s aggressive use of executive power.

The Supreme Court “has been a rubber stamp approving Trump’s actions,” said UC Berkeley law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “I hope very much that the court will be a check on Trump. There isn’t any other. But so far, it has not played that role.”

Roberts “had been seen as a Republican but not a Trump Republican. But he doesn’t seem interested or willing to put any limits on him,” said UCLA law professor Adam Winkler. “Maybe they think they’re saving their credibility for when it really counts.”

Acting on his own, Trump moved quickly to reshape the federal government. He ordered cuts in spending and staffing at federal agencies and fired inspectors general and officials of independent agencies who had fixed terms set by Congress. He stepped up arrests and deportations of immigrants who are here illegally.

But the court’s decisions on those fronts are in keeping with the long-standing views of the conservatives on the bench.

Long before Trump ran for office, Roberts had argued that the Constitution gives the president broad executive authority to control federal agencies, including the power to fire officials who disagree with him.

The court’s conservatives also think the president has the authority to enforce — or not enforce — immigration laws.

That’s also why many legal experts think the year ahead will provide a better test of the Supreme Court and Trump’s challenge to the constitutional order.

“Overall, my reaction is that it’s too soon to tell,” said William Baude, a University of Chicago law professor and a former clerk for Roberts. “In the next year, we will likely see decisions about tariffs, birthright citizenship, alien enemies and perhaps more, and we’ll know a lot more.”

In early September, Trump administration lawyers rushed the tariffs case to the Supreme Court because they believed it was better to lose sooner rather than later.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the government could face up to a $1-trillion problem if the court delayed a decision until next summer and then ruled the tariffs were illegal.

“Unwinding them could cause significant disruption,” he told the court.

The Constitution says tariffs, taxes and raising revenue are matters for Congress to decide. Through most of American history, tariffs funded much of the federal government. That began to change after 1913 when the 16th Amendment was adopted to authorize “taxes on incomes.”

Trump has said he would like to return to an earlier era when import taxes funded the government.

“I always say ‘tariffs’ is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” he said at a rally after his inauguration in January. “Because tariffs are going to make us rich as hell. It’s going to bring our country’s businesses back that left us.”

While he could have gone to the Republican-controlled Congress to get approval, he imposed several rounds of large and worldwide tariffs acting on his own.

Several small businesses sued and described the tariffs as “the largest peacetime tax increase in American history.”

As for legal justification, the president’s lawyers pointed to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. It authorizes the president to “deal with any unusual or extraordinary threat … to the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States.”

The law did not mention tariffs, taxes or duties but said the president could “regulate” the “importation” of products.

Trump administration lawyers argue that the “power to ‘regulate importation’ plainly encompasses the power to impose tariffs.” They also say the court should defer to the president because tariffs involve foreign affairs and national security.

They said the president invoked the tariffs not to raise revenue but to “rectify America’s country-killing trade deficits and to stem the flood of fentanyl and other lethal drugs across our borders.”

In response to lawsuits from small businesses and several states, judges who handle international trade cases ruled the tariffs were illegal. However, they agreed to keep them in place to allow for appeals.

Their opinion relied in part on recent Supreme Court’s decisions which struck down potentially far-reaching regulations from Democratic presidents on climate change, student loan debt and COVID-19 vaccine requirements. In each of the decisions, Roberts said Congress had not clearly authorized the disputed regulations.

Citing that principle, the federal circuit court said it “seems unlikely that Congress intended to … grant the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs.”

Trump said that decision, if allowed to stand, “could literally destroy the United States of America.” The court agreed to hear arguments in the tariffs case on Nov. 5.

A victory for Trump would be “viewed as a dramatic expansion of presidential power,” said Washington attorney Stephanie Connor, who works on tariff cases. Trump and future presidents could sidestep Congress to impose tariffs simply by citing an emergency, she said.

But the decision itself may have a limited impact because the administration has announced new tariffs last week that were based on other national security laws.

Last month, Trump administration lawyers asked the Supreme Court to rule during the upcoming term on the birthright citizenship promised by the 14th Amendment of 1868.

They did not seek a fast-track ruling, however. Instead, they said the court should grant review and hear arguments on the regular schedule early next year. If so, a decision would be handed down by late June.

The amendment says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States.”

And in the past, both Congress and the Supreme Court have agreed that rule applies broadly to all children who are born here, except if their parents are foreign ambassadors or diplomats who are not subject to U.S. laws.

But Trump Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer said that interpretation is mistaken. He said the post-Civil War amendment was “adopted to grant citizenship to freed slaves and their children, not to the children of illegal aliens, birth tourists and temporary visitors.”

Judges in three regions of the country have rejected Trump’s limits on the citizenship rule and blocked it from taking effect nationwide while the litigation continues.

Bettina Aptheker was a 20-year-old sophomore at UC Berkeley when she climbed on top of a police car, barefoot so she wouldn’t damage it, and helped start the Free Speech Movement.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand,” she told a crowd gathered in Sproul Plaza on that October Thursday in 1964, quoting abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

She was blinded by the lights of the television cameras, but the students roared back approval, and “their energy just sort of went through my whole body,” she told me.

Berkeley, as Aptheker describes it, was still caught in the tail end of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, when the 1st Amendment was almost felled by fear of government reprisals. Days earlier, administrators had passed rules that cracked down on political speech on campus.

Aptheker and other students had planned a peaceful protest, only to have police roll up and arrest a graduate student named Jack Weinberg, a lanky guy with floppy hair and a mustache who had spent the summer working for the civil rights movement.

Well-versed in those non-violent methods that were finally winning a bit of equality for Black Americans, hundreds of students sat down around the cruiser, remaining there more than 30 hours — while hecklers threw eggs and cigarette butts and police massed at the periphery — before the protesters successfully negotiated with the university to restore free speech on campus.

History was made, and the Free Speech Movement born through the most American of traits — courage, passion and the invincibility of youth.

“You can’t imagine something like that happening today,” Aptheker said of their success. “It was a different time period, but it feels very similar to the kind of repression that’s going on now.”

Under the standards President Trump is pushing on the University of Southern California and eight other institutions, Aptheker would likely be arrested, using “lawful force if necessary,” as his 10-page “compact for academic excellence” requires. And the protest of the students would crushed by policies that would demand “civility” over freedom.

If you somehow missed his latest attack on higher education, the Trump administration sent this compact to USC and eight other institutions Thursday, asking them to acquiesce to a list of demands in return for the carrot of front-of-the-line access to federal grants and benefits.

While voluntary, the agreement threatens strongman-style, that institutions of higher education are “free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forgo federal benefits.”

That’s the stick, the loss of federal funding. UCLA, Berkeley and California’s other public universities can tell you what it feels like to get thumped with it.

“It’s intended to roll back any of the gains we’ve made,” Aptheker said of Trump’s policies. “No university should make any kind of deal with him.”

The greatest problem with this nefarious pact is that much of it sounds on the surface to be reasonable, if not desirable. My favorite part: A demand that the sky-high tuition of signatory universities be frozen for five years.

USC tuition currently comes in at close to $70,000 a year without housing. What normal parent thinks that sounds doable?

Even the parts about protests sound, on the surface, no big deal.

“Truth-seeking is a core function of institutions of higher education. Fulfilling this mission requires maintaining a vibrant marketplace of ideas where different views can be explored, debated, and challenged,” the document reads. “Signatories acknowledge that the freedom to debate requires conditions of civility.”

Civility like taking your shoes off before climbing on a police car, right?

As with all things Trump, though, the devil isn’t even in the details. It’s right there in black and white. The agreement requires civility, Trump style. That includes abolishing anything that could “delay or disrupt class instruction,” which is pretty much every protest, with or without footwear.

Any university that signs on also would be agreeing to “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”

So no more talking bad about far-right ideas, folks. That’s belittling to our racists, misogynists, Christian nationalists and conservative snowflakes of all persuasions. Take, for example, the increasingly popular conservative idea that slavery was actually good for Black people, or at least not that bad.

Florida famously adopted educational standards in 2023 that argue slavery helped Black people learn useful skills. In another especially egregious example from the conservative educational nonprofit PragerU, a video for kids about Christoper Columbus has the explorer arguing, “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem.”

And of course, Trump is busy purging the Smithsonian of any hints that slavery was a stain on our history.

Would it be violating Trump’s civility standards for a Black history professor to belittle such ideas as unserious and bonkers? What about debates in a feminism class that discuss Charlie Kirk’s comment that a good reason for women to go to college is to find a husband?

Or what about an environmental science class that teaches accurately that climate change denial is unscientific, and that it was at best anti-intellectual when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently referred to efforts to save the planet as “crap”? Would that be uncivil and belittling to conservatives?

Belittle is a tiny word with big reach. I worry that entire academic departments could be felled by it, and certainly professors of certain persuasions.

Aptheker, now 81, went on to become just the sort of professor Trump would likely loathe, teaching about freedom and inclusivity at UC Santa Cruz for decades. It was there that I first heard her lecture. I was a mixed-race kid who had been the target of more than one racial slur growing up, but I had never heard my personal experiences put into the larger context of being a person of color or a woman.

Listening to Aptheker and professors like her, I learned not only how to see my life within the broader fabric of society, but learned how collective action has improved conditions for the most vulnerable among us, decade after decade.

It is ultimately this knowledge that Trump wants to crush — that while power concedes nothing without a demand, collective demands work because they are a power of their own.

Even more than silencing students or smashing protests, Trump’s compact seeks to purge this truth, and those who hold it, from the system. Signing this so-called deal isn’t just a betrayal of students, it’s a betrayal of the mission of every university worth its tuition, and a betrayal of the values that uphold our democracy.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has rightfully threatened to withhold state funding from any California university that signs, writing on social media that the Golden State “will not bankroll schools that sell out their students, professors, researchers, and surrender academic freedom.”

Of course, some universities will sign it willingly. University of Texas called it an “honor” to be asked. There will always be those who collaborate in their own demise.

But authoritarians live with the constant fear that people like Aptheker will teach a new generation their hard-won lessons, will open their minds to bold ideas and will question old realities that are not as unbreakable as they might appear. Universities, far from assuaging that constant fear, should fight to make it a reality.

Anything less belittles the very point of a university education.

Israeli attacks across the besieged Gaza Strip have killed at least 61 Palestinians, medical sources said, despite calls from United States President Donald Trump for Israel to stop its bombardment after Hamas said it had accepted some elements of Trump’s 20-point plan to end Israel’s war.

At least 45 of the victims killed in bombardments and air strikes on Saturday were in the famine-struck Gaza City, where the Israeli army has been pressing an offensive in recent weeks, forcing some one million residents to flee to the overcrowded south.

Eighteen people were killed and several others wounded in an Israeli strike on a residential home in the Tuffah neighbourhood in Gaza City, medics said. The attack also damaged several buildings nearby.

In a statement shared on Telegram, Gaza’s civil defence agency said seven children between the ages of two months and eight years old were among those killed.

Israeli forces also targeted a displacement camp in al-Mawasi in southern Gaza, killing two children and wounding at least eight others.

Al-Mawasi is a so-called safe humanitarian zone that the Israeli army has been ordering Palestinian families to evacuate to. But the area has been repeatedly targeted over the last few weeks and months.

There have also been air raids on other areas, including in Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, according to Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary, reporting from az-Zawayda.

“Hospitals are unable to treat all of these Palestinians,” she said, referring to the handful of battered medical facilities that remain functional in the north amid a severe fuel shortage.

“What is happening on the ground doesn’t show that there is any type of ceasefire,” she said.

Trump demands urgency

On Saturday, Trump urged Hamas to move quickly to release captives and finalise negotiations over his plan to end the war, “or else all bets will be off”.

“I will not tolerate delay, which many think will happen, or any outcome where Gaza poses a threat again. Let’s get this done, FAST. Everyone will be treated fairly!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

In a separate post later on Saturday, Trump said Israel had agreed to an initial “withdrawal line” and that it was also shared with Hamas.

“When Hamas confirms, the Ceasefire will be IMMEDIATELY effective, the Hostages and Prisoner Exchange will begin, and we will create the conditions for the next phase of withdrawal,” he wrote.

Hamas had agreed to certain key parts of Trump’s 20-point proposal, including Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and the release of Israeli captives and Palestinian prisoners. But the group has left some questions unanswered, such as whether it would be willing to disarm.

Trump will be sending his envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, to Egypt to finalise the technical details of the captive release and discuss a lasting peace deal, according to a White House official. Egypt will also host delegations from Israel and Hamas on Monday to discuss things further, the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.

The first phase of Trump’s proposal includes the return of all captives, dead and alive, in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners.

Speaking to reporters from Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed negotiators will be working on a timeline for the release of the remaining captives under Trump’s Gaza plan in Egypt.

He also reiterated that the US proposal includes the demilitarisation of Hamas.

That will be achieved either through Trump’s proposal or through Israeli military action, he said. He added he hoped to announce the return of the captives, all while the Israeli military remained deep in Gaza.

Adnan Hayajneh, a professor of international relations and US foreign policy at Qatar University, said Hamas wants guarantees that if it releases the Israeli captives, there will be implementation of the rest of Trump’s 20-point plan. This includes a clear picture of what the future governance of Gaza will look like.

“There’ll be a long negotiation, and Hamas will take part in it,” Hayajneh told Al Jazeera.

Arab leaders also aired some reservations about the plan to Trump, “but most of the reservations were not taken into consideration regarding the governance of Gaza, the military forces … the future of arms,” said the professor.

“If you look at the plan, it’s almost a surrender for Hamas,” he added. “I think they’re leaving that bargaining chip, which is very important, the hostages, for the last minute.”

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed more than 67,000 people, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, and experts believe the actual toll could be as much as three times higher.

Hamas has announced it accepts parts of US President Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza ceasefire plan but wants more talks on several key points. Here’s a breakdown of what we know so far.