U.S. and China Agree to Temporarily Slash Tariffs in Bid to Defuse Trade War  —  The 145 percent U.S. tariff on Chinese goods will come down to 30 percent for 90 days, while the two sides continue talks aimed at resolving their differences.  —  The United States and China said Monday …

Trump Heads to the Middle East With a Single Goal: Deals, Deals, Deals  —  President Trump has always viewed the presidency as a worldwide hunt for deals.  And there is no better place for that than the Gulf, where a few men wield absolute authority over vast wealth.

A Common Sense Budget Reconciliation Bill  —  My committee's legislation supports U.S. innovation, strengthens Medicaid, and ends Green New Deal-style waste.  —  When President Trump took the podium for his Second Inaugural Address, he promised a “revolution of common sense” …

Auction to Dine With Trump Creates Foreign Influence Opportunity … The sale of face-to-face access to President Trump using the Trump family's own cryptocurrency has done more than benefit him financially, though it has certainly done that.  —  Mr. Trump announced last month that leading buyers …

Trump to accept luxury jet from Qatar to use as Air Force One  —  The Trump administration is set to accept a luxury plane from the Qatari royal family that will be retrofitted and used as Air Force One during the president's second term, two people familiar with the agreement told CNN.

White South Africans Granted Refugee Status by Trump Leave for U.S.  —  Dozens of Afrikaners who claim discrimination in their home country left Johannesburg on Sunday.  Their departure for the U.S. came as the Trump administration was halting virtually all refugee admissions.

The Federalist Society is surprisingly ambivalent about Trump  —  Few organizations have profited as handsomely off of President Donald Trump's rise to power as the Federalist Society, a kind of bar association for right-wing lawyers.  —  “We're going to have great judges, conservative …

Flights Could Be Disrupted Across U.S., Transportation Secretary Warns  —  After a series of problems at Newark Liberty International Airport, the secretary, Sean Duffy, said he would meet with airline leaders on Wednesday to plan to scale back Newark flights.

Americans have tuned out Gaza at the worst possible moment  —  Israel's war in Gaza, which has long been a moral atrocity, is on the brink of becoming unimaginably worse.  —  Earlier this month, Israel's security cabinet approved a plan that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as “the concluding moves” of the war in Gaza.

“The Wolves Came”: Richard Steigmann-Gall on Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins's *Did it Happen Here?  Perspectives on Fascism and America*  —  Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins has edited a book which he hoped would finally put to bed the hotly contested Fascism Debate that arose from Trump's 2016 candidacy …

Will we allow ICE to behave as a secret police?  —  I had missed the story from two weeks ago about what happened after (apparent) agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), one wearing a balaclava to hide his face, seized two men at the Charlottesville, Va. courthouse.

Defanging NEPA  —  Can you buy your way out of judicial review?  —  The House Natural Resource Committee has released its portion of the draft reconciliation bill that's working its way through Congress.  Among other things, the committee draft includes a provision that aims to make NEPA unenforceable in the courts.