Trump Administration
Air Force One: The Trump administration plans to accept a luxury Boeing 747-800 plane from the Qatari royal family that will be upgraded to serve as Air Force One, a senior official with direct knowledge of the matter said. The official said the plane would be donated to President Trump’s presidential library when he leaves office, allowing him to continue using it as a private citizen. The plan — involving possibly the biggest foreign gift ever received by the U.S. government — raises substantial ethical issues. Read more ›
Trade war: Top economic officials from the United States and China met in Geneva for a second day of high-stakes negotiations aimed at easing tensions from Mr. Trump’s trade war. The minimum tariff of 145 percent that Mr. Trump imposed on all Chinese imports has effectively cut off trade between the world’s two largest economies. Read more ›
Middle East visit: As Mr. Trump prepares to head to the Middle East this week for the first major foreign trip of his second term, the president’s relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is showing signs of division. Read more ›
Troy Closson
As Newark Liberty International Airport, one of the nation’s busiest airports, struggled with technological disruptions and staffing shortages, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned in a television interview on Sunday that more U.S. airports could face similar disruptions as the busy summer travel season approached.
Mr. Duffy, who recently announced a multibillion-dollar proposal to modernize and overhaul the country’s air traffic control system, said in the interview that he would meet with the leaders of major airlines this week to create a plan for scaling back flights at Newark. He did not offer additional details, including by how much flights could be reduced.
The comments came after an air traffic control facility that guides planes at Newark had a brief radar outage on Friday, after a similar 90-second outage at the end of last month. Another air traffic equipment outage on Sunday morning led to a ground stop for about 45 minutes for flights arriving to Newark, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The problems have resulted in major delays and cancellations, led to safety concerns for travelers and emerged as a major challenge for the Trump administration.
When asked whether it remained safe to fly out of Newark, Mr. Duffy maintained that “we are the safest airspace,” and added that he and his family regularly traveled through the airport.
Still, Mr. Duffy said that the country and Congress had not paid enough attention to improving the “antiquated systems” across major airports, and described the recent issues at Newark as a consequence of “stress on an old network.”
“What you see in Newark is going to happen in other places across the country,” Mr. Duffy said an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press With Kristen Welker.” “It has to be fixed.”
He added, “I’m concerned about the whole airspace.”
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement on social media that the Sunday outage was the result of a “telecommunications issue” at a Philadelphia facility that guides aircraft in and out of Newark airspace.
The agency said that it “briefly slowed aircraft in and out of the airport while we ensured redundancies were working as designed,” and that operations had returned to normal by about 10:50 a.m.
The troubles at the nation’s airports have created significant havoc for travelers, stranding some far from their destinations. In Georgia, an equipment outage on Sunday led to a ground stop for more than an hour at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the area’s largest airport, according to the F.A.A.
After the brief outage at Newark in April, in which air traffic controllers were temporarily unable to communicate with pilots or see aircraft, there were thousands of cancellations and delays stretching more than five hours at Newark in the following days.
Mr. Duffy’s pitch to improve air travel includes investments in digitizing flight data management tools and upgrading the radio systems controllers use to communicate with pilots, though many details remain unclear, and his plan would require approval from Congress. He is also seeking to extend the retirement age for air traffic controllers.
The Federal Aviation Administration has attributed many of the problems at Newark to equipment failures and shortages of controllers and other staff members. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday.
On Sunday morning, though, the F.A.A. warned travelers at Newark to brace for more misery because of staffing issues: Some arriving flights were delayed by an average of two hours and 32 minutes.
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Erica L. Green
President Trump urged Ukrainian officials to meet this week with their Russian counterparts to discuss a cease-fire, but continued to cast doubt on whether either side wants to make a deal. Trump said that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, “doesn’t want to have a Cease Fire Agreement with Ukraine” even after Putin proposed to meet Ukrainian officials on Thursday in Turkey.
Trump also said that he was “starting to doubt that Ukraine will make a deal with Putin,” but implored the country’s leaders to take the meeting in a post on his social media site. “At least they will be able to determine whether or not a deal is possible, and if it is not, European leaders, and the U.S., will know where everything stands, and can proceed accordingly,” Trump wrote.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters in Geneva that the talks with China were “productive” and that additional details would be disclosed on Monday.
The U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer, described the two nations as having struck a “deal” that will help them work toward resolving their differences, without offering specifics.
The United States had been seeking lower tariffs, pushing China to roll back export curbs on minerals and stop the flow of fentanyl precursors to the United States. Greer also mentioned the $1.2 trillion trade surplus China runs with the rest of the world, which has made it difficult for other countries to maintain competitive manufacturing industries.
Ana Swanson
The trade talks between U.S. and Chinese officials in Geneva have concluded for the day. We’re waiting to hear if there will be any further updates today on their outcome.
Maggie Haberman
The Trump administration plans to accept a luxury Boeing 747-8 plane as a donation from the Qatari royal family that will be upgraded to serve as Air Force One, in possibly the biggest foreign gift ever received by the U.S. government, a senior official with direct knowledge of the matter said.
The plane will then be donated to President Trump’s presidential library when he leaves office, the official said, allowing him to continue using it as a private citizen.
The plan raises substantial ethical issues, given the immense value of the lavishly-appointed plane and the fact that Mr. Trump plans to use it after he leaves office. Sold new, a commercial Boeing 747-8 costs in the range of $400 million.
Mr. Trump’s own private plane, known as “Trump Force One,” is an older 757 jet that first flew in the early 1990s and was then used by the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Mr. Trump bought it in 2011. The Qatari jet, if Mr. Trump continued flying it after leaving office, would give him a substantially newer plane for his own use.
The plan — reported earlier by ABC News — is expected to be announced in the coming days, as Mr. Trump makes the first extended foreign trip of his presidency to three nations in the Middle East, including Qatar. It will fulfill the president’s desire for a new Air Force One, after repeated delays involving a government contract to Boeing for two new jets to serve that purpose.
Mr. Trump toured the Qatari-owned 747, which is just over a decade old, while it was parked at the Palm Beach International Airport in February. The New York Times reported then that the jet was being considered as a possible new Air Force One.
The plane being donated by Qatar is expected to be retrofitted by a military contractor called L3Harris, in Texas, and that work can begin once the government approves how the plane is being acquired, the official said. It is expected to be finished being equipped with military capabilities by the end of the year, the official said, allowing Mr. Trump to use it while in office.
A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
A Defense Department official said on Sunday that the Air Force has not yet reached any agreement on a contract to refurbish the Qatari 747 to make the security upgrades and modifications necessary for an AF1, and the Air Force could not legally do so until it actually took ownership of the plane.
Assuming that were to happen, the official said, it would still take an extended period of time to complete the contract and, more important, to do the actual upgrades and modifications.
“We’re talking years, not months,” the Defense Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details about a future Air Force One.
The model that the government is using for addressing the ethical issues raised by the donation, the official said, is the one followed by President Ronald Reagan’s presidential library when it received the Air Force One he had flown on after it was retired from use. But at the time, Mr. Reagan did not use the plane to fly around himself. It was set up in the museum portion of his library.
Another person with knowledge of the effort to acquire the plane said that the Qataris had initially offered to donate it immediately to the Trump library, and then have Mr. Trump use it while in office. But government lawyers said that would be a violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, the person said.
The current plan has been signed off on by government lawyers who concluded it does not violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution and that the Defense Department can accept the gift, the official said.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
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Erica L. Green
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in an interview aired on Sunday that he believed that it was safe to fly out of Newark Liberty International Airport, which experienced another brief radar outage on Friday morning, but that he supported scaling back flights from there. In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Duffy said he would be convening a meeting of all the airlines that serve Newark to determine what the scaleback would look like.
The latest Newark outage was the latest in a series of mishaps at the nation’s busiest airports. Duffy told the host, Kristen Welker, he was “concerned about the whole airspace,” in the U.S. and reiterated his plan to overhaul air traffic systems with measures like updating old infrastructure and extending the retirement age for air traffic controllers.
Erica L. Green
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick continued to defend President Trump’s tariff strategy on Sunday, though he declined to give any updates on the ongoing trade talks with China. During an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Lutnick denied that tariffs would affect American consumers, saying that the “businesses and countries primarily eat the tariffs.”
Michael Gold
Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 2 Republican, said Sunday that he was against raising taxes on the highest earners, an idea that President Trump has floated in recent days. “I oppose raising taxes on anyone,” he said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Michael D. Shear
Michael Shear has written about the relationships between Benjamin Netanyahu and the last three American presidents.
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met President Trump at the White House in February, the two men could not have been more in sync. The president had designated Houthi militants in Yemen as a terrorist organization. They both spoke of stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb. Mr. Trump even mused about expelling Palestinians from Gaza.
“You say things others refuse to say,” Mr. Netanyahu gushed in the Oval Office, with cameras running. “And then, after the jaws drop, people scratch their heads. And they say, ‘You know, he’s right.’”
Two months later, in another White House visit, Mr. Netanyahu sat almost silently next to the president for more than a half-hour as Mr. Trump expounded on topics having nothing to do with Israel.
That meeting, in April, underscored a growing divide between the two men, who are increasingly in disagreement on some of the most critical security issues facing Israel.
As Mr. Trump heads this week to the Middle East for his first major foreign trip, the president has, for now, rejected Mr. Netanyahu’s desire for joint military action to take out Tehran’s nuclear abilities. Instead, Mr. Trump has begun talks with Iran, leaving Mr. Netanyahu to warn that “a bad deal is worse than no deal.”
This past week, Mr. Trump announced an agreement with the Iranian-backed Houthi militias in Yemen to halt U.S. airstrikes against the militants, who agreed to cease attacks against American vessels in the Red Sea. The news from Mr. Trump, which Israeli officials said was a surprise to Mr. Netanyahu, came only days after a Houthi missile struck Israel’s main airport in Tel Aviv, prompted an Israeli response.
In a video posted on X, Mr. Netanyahu responded to Mr. Trump’s announcement by saying: “Israel will defend itself by itself. If others would join us, our American friends, very well. If they don’t, we will defend ourselves.”
Mike Huckabee, the United States ambassador to Israel, said in an Israeli television interview on Friday that “the United States isn’t required to get permission from Israel.”
And there is even some evidence of a divide on Gaza. Mr. Trump’s emissaries are still trying to get a deal to stop the war, even though he has largely supported the prime minister’s conduct of the conflict and has offered almost no public criticism of Israel’s increased bombardment and blockade of food, fuel and medicine since a cease-fire collapsed two months ago.
On Monday, the prime minister announced plans to intensify the war even as the president’s envoys continued to seek a new diplomatic path to end the conflict. But Mr. Trump has not wagged his finger at Mr. Netanyahu the way President Joseph R. Biden Jr. did throughout the first year of the war in Gaza, which began after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Now, this moment is testing the relationship of the two men, both of whom are politically divisive, fiercely combative and have outsize egos. At stake is the short- and long-term security in a region that has long been wracked by war. Analysts in the Middle East and the United States say that changing the arc of history there in part hinges on how Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu bridge their differences during a time of major geopolitical shifts.
“Trump is ‘what you see is what you get’ and rarely hides things. His default is to say what he thinks,” said Eli Groner, who served for more than three years as the director general in the prime minister’s office. “Netanyahu’s default is to keep things extraordinarily close to his chest.”
Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu have for years publicly cited a warm and close relationship as evidence of their own political prowess and have flattered each other repeatedly. People close to the two leaders say they are in some ways kindred spirits who respect each other for the political and personal attacks they have endured during their careers.
Mr. Trump has accused liberals in his government, judges and intelligence officials of conspiring against him. Mr. Netanyahu has blamed courts in his country from blocking necessary policies and he says his political rivals orchestrated his trials on charges of fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes.
“The DNA of both of them is very similar,” said Mike Evans, an evangelical Christian who founded the Friends of Zion museum in Israel and is a longtime supporter of both the president and the prime minister. “They both have gone through similar experiences — Bibi with the deep state in Israel and Donald Trump with the deep state in America.”
John Bolton, who served as the national security adviser in the White House from 2018 to 2019, said Mr. Trump always viewed the relationship with Mr. Netanyahu as critical to his own political support in the United States, especially among evangelical voters.
“They both saw it to their political advantage to be friendly,” he said of the two leaders. “That was certainly Trump’s calculation.”
But behind closed doors, there have been disagreements and some clashes, with implications for the situation now facing them.
Mr. Trump has long harbored anger about Mr. Netanyahu’s decision to congratulate Mr. Biden on his 2020 election victory. The president claimed — falsely — that the prime minister was the first world leader to do so. At the end of 2021, Mr. Trump used an expletive while recalling the snub in an interview with a book author.
For his part, Mr. Netanyahu has privately expressed frustration with some of Mr. Trump’s policies, particularly over the president’s desire to reach a deal with Iran. A right-wing newspaper usually aligned with the prime minister wrote this month that Mr. Netanyahu thought Mr. Trump “says all the right things” but does not deliver.
When it comes to Iran, Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Trump may be operating on different timelines. The president appears willing to let diplomats work on a deal that might restrict Tehran’s ability to enrich uranium and slow its progress toward a bomb. Mr. Netanyahu is eager to move against Iran militarily, before it is too late to stop its progress.
“Netanyahu thinks the timeline is pretty short to make a decision,” said Mr. Bolton, who is an advocate of taking military action. In an interview with Time magazine in April, Mr. Trump said that he had argued against Mr. Netanyahu’s proposal to launch a joint attack to set back Iran’s nuclear program.
“I didn’t stop them. But I didn’t make it comfortable for them because I think we can make a deal without the attack,” Mr. Trump said in the interview.
The White House has said that Mr. Trump does not have plans to visit Israel on his trip to the region this week, though Mr. Huckabee said the president would visit the country by the end of the year. That is a change from the president’s first term, when his first foreign trip included Israel along with stops in Saudi Arabia and parts of Europe.
It remains unclear how extensively Mr. Trump will confront the war in Gaza while he is in the Middle East.
Mr. Trump came into office vowing to end the war between Israel and Hamas, end Palestinian suffering, and return the hostages whom the militant group seized in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. (Always on his mind, according to those close to him: the prospect of being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. A spokesman for Mr. Trump said in March that the prize was illegitimate until Mr. Trump, “the ultimate peace president,” was honored for his accomplishments.)
More than 50,000 Palestinians have died, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths. About 130 hostages have been released, and the Israeli military has retrieved the bodies of at least 40 others. As many as 24 hostages are thought to still be alive, according to the Israeli government.
Some families of the Israeli and American hostages still held in Gaza are working quietly to urge Mr. Trump to use his trip to the Middle East as an opportunity to put pressure on Mr. Netanyahu, according to people familiar with the diplomatic lobbying effort.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has seemed less engaged in trying to resolve the conflict after bragging in February about his grand vision of creating a “Gaza Riviera” once the Palestinians had all been relocated to other countries.
When Mr. Netanyahu visited the White House in April, some in Israel viewed the scene as embarrassing for the prime minister.
Mr. Evans, who has known Mr. Netanyahu since he was a young man, said the prime minister would not relent, even if Mr. Trump did push him to end the war before the Israeli military had destroyed Hamas and returned all of the hostages.
“Does Netanyahu believe that Hamas is going to give him all the hostages if they pull out of Gaza?” Mr. Evans said. “I don’t think he believes it for a moment.”
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Alan Rappeport and Ana Swanson
Reporting from Washington
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Sunday that the United States had made “substantial progress” in talks with China after a weekend of meetings in Geneva, and that additional details would be announced on Monday.
Any indication of a trade truce between the world’s two largest economies would lift financial markets and ease concerns among companies, investors and economists that the global economy was poised for a sharp downturn.
Although there were no immediate details about an agreement, Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, who joined Mr. Bessent in the negotiations, suggested that some form of a “deal” had been reached that addressed the Trump administration’s national security concerns about China’s trade practices. But Mr. Greer did not say whether the two nations had agreed to drop any of the punishing tariffs that have been imposed over the past months.
“It’s important to understand how quickly we were able to come to agreement, which reflects that perhaps the differences were not so large as maybe thought,” Mr. Greer said after the talks, noting that the U.S. tariffs were a response to what the Trump administration viewed as a national emergency. “We’re confident that the deal we struck with our Chinese partners will help us work toward resolving that national emergency.”
The Chinese government did not immediately provide a statement on the negotiations.
The comments from Mr. Trump’s top economic officials came after two days of marathon negotiations between the two countries. The talks were an attempt to ease tensions that have flared this year after Mr. Trump initiated a trade war by ratcheting up tariffs on Chinese imports.
The talks have major implications for the global economy, which has been rocked by the tariffs that the United States and China have imposed on each other in recent months. Mr. Trump has imposed a minimum tariff of 145 percent on all Chinese imports, while China has hit American products with a 125 percent import tax.
Though the two governments have taken an outwardly tough position, officials in both countries have indicated they would like to find a path to bring the tariffs down. The tariffs are so punitive they are already disrupting the world’s supply chains.
American companies at risk of bankruptcy are scrambling to source products from countries other than China. Chinese factories are shuttering their doors, or looking for ways around the U.S. tariffs and exporting more to Southeast Asia. At the same time, many U.S. businesses are weighing how much they can increase prices to help offset the tariff costs.
Economists have warned that the trade dispute will slow global growth and fuel inflation, potentially tipping the United States into a recession. Those economic fears have pressured Mr. Trump into seeking a deal with China.
The two sides met to negotiate in historically neutral territory: Geneva, which is also home to the World Trade Organization. Dozens of officials from the countries were camped out on Saturday and Sunday at the residence of the Swiss ambassador to the United Nations, a stately villa that overlooks the lake at the center of the city.
After roughly seven hours of talks on Saturday, the United States said it would not release any formal statement about the proceedings.
Mr. Trump hailed the initial conversations as a success.
“A very good meeting today with China, in Switzerland,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Saturday night. “Many things discussed, much agreed to. A total reset negotiated in a friendly, but constructive, manner.”
The discussions were led by Mr. Bessent and Mr. Greer for the United States and by He Lifeng, China’s vice premier for economic policy.
It’s unclear which, if any, of the outstanding issues between the countries had been resolved.
The Trump administration has accused China of unfairly subsidizing key sectors of its economy and flooding the world with cheap goods. And the United States has been pressuring China to take more aggressive steps to curb exports of precursors for fentanyl, a drug that has killed tens of thousands of Americans.
Mr. Trump initially added a 20 percent tariff to Chinese exports, accusing the country of not doing enough to stop the flow of fentanyl to the United States. When the president announced global tariffs at the beginning of April, he added another 34 percent tariff on China. And when China retaliated with its own measures, Mr. Trump quickly raised tariffs on Chinese products to a minimum of 145 percent.
Ahead of the meetings in Geneva, Mr. Trump suggested that he would be open to lowering those tariffs to 80 percent. But the White House spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said that China would have to make concessions for the tariffs to be reduced.
The United States is expected to press China not just on the issue of tariffs and fentanyl shipments, but also on its other export bans that threaten U.S. companies. In response to Mr. Trump’s trade moves, Beijing placed export restrictions on key minerals and magnets, which are needed by companies that manufacture electric vehicles, semiconductors, aircraft, missiles, submarines and other military technologies.
China has been steadfast in saying it does not intend to make trade concessions in response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs. Officials there have insisted that the nation agreed to engage in talks at the request of the United States. U.S. officials have disputed that.
The trade talks this weekend were intended to set the stage for broader economic negotiations between the two countries.
“We think the takeaway is to lower expectations for what might emerge from talks between U.S. and Chinese officials this weekend,” Nancy Vanden Houten, U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, wrote in a research note on Saturday.
Ms. Vanden Houten explained that even if the United States reduced the tariff rate on Chinese imports to 80 percent, the overall effective tariff rate for imports would be three times higher than projections from when Mr. Trump was elected. Some analysts and executives have said that tariffs above 50 percent are generally high enough to prohibit trade.
But Mr. Trump appears poised to declare that any concessions made by China are a win for the United States.
Reiterating his call for China to open up its markets to American companies on Saturday, Mr. Trump declared: “GREAT PROGRESS MADE!!!”
Amy Chang Chien contributed reporting from Taipei, Taiwan.
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