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--:-- Tracy Mumford: From the New York Times, it's the headlines. Today's Wednesday, February 5th.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Here's what we're covering. Last night, Donald Trump made one of the most brazen declarations by any recent American president.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too. We'll own it.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: He declared that the United States should assume control over Gaza and that the territory's roughly 2 million residents should be moved out.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Gaza is a hellhole right now. It was before the bombing started, frankly. And we're going to give people a chance to live in a beautiful community that's safe and secure.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Trump framed it as a humanitarian issue, saying Gaza is basically unlivable after Israeli attacks have turned much of it into rubble.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: He also framed it almost as a real estate deal. And I don't want to be cute. I don't want to be a wise guy.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: But the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so bad. This could be so magnificent.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Trump said that the U.S. should level what's left of Gaza and redevelop it. And he said all Gazans should be relocated to countries like Egypt and Jordan, even though both countries have long rejected any kind of mass resettlement.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: He announced the plan after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: And as Trump laid out the idea, Netanyahu was next to him, smiling.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Hamas, which still controls Gaza, immediately rejected the plan, calling it a recipe for creating chaos.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Trump did not cite any legal authority that would give the U.S. the right to take ownership of Gaza.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: And he did not address the fact that forcibly removing a population violates international law.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Instead, he claimed that everyone he'd spoken to loves the idea.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Do a real job. Do something different. Just can't go back. If you go back, it's going to end up the same way it has for 100 years.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: This was an absolutely extraordinary, shocking intervention from President Trump.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: No one thought that the president of the United States would propose American occupation of territory in the Middle East.
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--:-- Patrick Kingsley: I'm Patrick Kingsley, the Times Jerusalem bureau chief.
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--:-- Patrick Kingsley: To Palestinians, it was horrifying. This would be, to them, an act of ethnic cleansing on a more terrifying scale than any they have experienced since the birth of Israel in 1948.
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--:-- Patrick Kingsley: But in Israel, most aspects of this plan are a dream come true for Prime Minister Netanyahu and his base on the Israeli right.
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--:-- Patrick Kingsley: Since the beginning of the war, they have been proposing the wholesale displacement of Gaza's entire population.
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--:-- Patrick Kingsley: That idea was shot down by Egypt and the Biden administration early on in the war.
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--:-- Patrick Kingsley: Now President Trump has come back and presented it as his own plan.
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--:-- Patrick Kingsley: Even in parts of the Israeli left, there was a sense that it was a good thing that President Trump was upending decades of foreign policy convention about the future of Israel and Palestine.
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--:-- Patrick Kingsley: But all that said, the plan to many experts seemed so unworkable that they wondered if even President Trump realized that.
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--:-- Patrick Kingsley: And if so, whether it was simply the opening gambit in negotiations around the Middle East about the future of Gaza.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Meanwhile, Trump's facing a growing number of legal challenges as he tries to aggressively push through his domestic agenda.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: On Tuesday alone, FBI staffers sued to stop Trump's team from releasing the names of everyone who worked on the January 6th investigations, saying they feared they could be targeted.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: The Treasury Department was hit with a lawsuit after giving Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency access to the private information of millions of Americans.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: And a federal judge signed a restraining order temporarily blocking the Justice Department from moving transgender women into men's prisons, which Trump had ordered.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: In all, the Trump administration is now facing more than two dozen lawsuits.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Some legal experts say Trump may be intentionally testing the limits of his power.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Any lawsuits and subsequent appeals could push his policies all the way up to the Supreme Court.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: That could give the conservative majority there the opportunity to expand presidential power.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: The way many Americans shop online may have just hit a wall under President Trump's new trade rules for China.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Until this week, millions of small packages a day had been coming into the U.S. from China with little to no paperwork or customs checks because of a longstanding exemption on low-value shipments.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: That's how online retailers like Shein and Timu have been able to send vast amounts of cheap clothes and products directly to American customers.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: But now Trump's gotten rid of the exemption, in part because of fears smugglers have been using small packages to get fentanyl into the U.S.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Yesterday, the Postal Service stopped accepting all packages from China.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: It's not clear how long the pause will last, and the Postal Service wouldn't confirm that it's connected to Trump's new rules.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: But trade experts say the policy change may have caught the Postal Service off guard and overwhelmed customs officials who suddenly have to screen millions more packages.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Trump's trade war with China is also starting to hit American businesses.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: My colleague Danielle Kay has been looking at the impact of the new 10% tariffs on all Chinese imports.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: When looking at these tariffs and the potential fallout, economists really talk about how this is likely to ripple through the entire U.S. economy and especially hit small businesses pretty hard.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: So I called a handful of small businesses to get a sense of how they're thinking through how these tariffs might affect their business and affect their customers.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Can you tell me a little bit about the business and what you sell?
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--:-- Sarah Pitkin: We are a family hardware store. And we sell everything from barbecue grills to traditional hardware, paint, and lawn and garden.
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--:-- Sarah Pitkin: One woman I spoke with, her name is Sarah Pitkin. She and her sister own four hardware stores in Virginia.
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--:-- Sarah Pitkin: A lot of goods are made in China. Some of the specific ones that are really causing concern would be power tools because there a very low margin in power tools.
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--:-- Sarah Pitkin: And so we make just enough to actually bring them in and put them on the shelf.
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--:-- Sarah Pitkin: She said power tools barbecue grills electronics parts all those are things where she expects costs to rise because of these tariffs.
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--:-- Sarah Pitkin: And then because of that, she'll be forced to raise prices for her customers.
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--:-- Sarah Pitkin: So we have to figure out where that break point is between people still wanting to buy it and still making sales.
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--:-- Sarah Pitkin: Or if we raise the price too much, people will shy away from buying it and then we make absolutely nothing.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: And finally...
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: The computer game The Sims turned 25 this week.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: That's a quarter century of people basically playing God with their little gibberish-speaking Sims, building them dream houses, pushing them to fall in love, or leaving them to swim forever in the backyard pool by taking away the ladder.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: The Sims remember that you did that, by the way.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: When the game was first released back in 2000, most computer and video games were linear and goal-oriented.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: You played through the levels, saved a princess, beat the final boss.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: But The Sims was different. It was about building a world.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: The unstructuredness was seen as a risk.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: The inventor of the game told The Times that when he first proposed it, everyone in the room hated the idea.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: The game proved them wrong.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Over the years, 500 million people have played it.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: And it paved the way in part for other massively popular games like Minecraft that are all built around world building and designing your own adventure.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Everybody wants that, it seems.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: If you play the latest version of The Sims, The Sims can even play The Sims.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, a look at Elon Musk's slash and burn campaign against the federal government.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: That's next in the New York Times audio app, where you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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--:-- Tracy Mumford: I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow. Thank you.
