The Headlines - Trump’s Takeover Plan for Gaza, and U.S.P.S. Halts Packages From China

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

Plus, how The Sims turned gamers into gods.  On Today’s Episode:With Gaza Plan, an Unbound Trump Pushes an Improbable Idea, by Peter BakerTrump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab, by Charlie SavageU.S. Postal Service Halts Parcel Service From China as Trump’s Trade Curbs Begin, by Keith Bradsher, Ana Swanson and Jordyn HolmanSmall-Business Owners Say Tariffs Will Squeeze Them, and Their Customers, by Danielle KayeThe Sims Turned Players Into Gods. And Farmers. And Vampires. And Landlords, by Zachary SmallTune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. 

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Wednesday, February 5th. Here's what we're covering. Last night, Donald Trump made one of the most brazen declarations by any recent American president. The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We'll own it. He declared that the United States should assume control over Gaza

and that the territory's roughly two million residents should be moved out. 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. Trump framed it as a humanitarian issue, saying Gaza is basically unlivable after Israeli attacks have turned much of it into rubble. 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. But the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so magnificent.

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. He announced the plan after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. And as Trump laid out the idea, Netanyahu was next to him, smiling. Hamas, which still controls Gaza, immediately rejected the plan, calling it a recipe for creating chaos. Trump did not cite any legal authority that would give him the right to take ownership of Gaza, and he did not address the fact that forcibly removing a population violates international law.

Instead, he claimed that everyone he'd spoken to loves the idea. 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. This was an absolutely extraordinary, stunning, shocking intervention from President Trump. No one thought that the President of the United States would propose American occupation of territory in the Middle East. Patrick Kingsley is the Times Jerusalem bureau chief. 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. But in Israel, most aspects of this plan are a dream come true for Prime Minister Netanyahu and his base on the Israeli right. Since the beginning of the war, they have been proposing the wholesale displacement of Gaza's entire population. That idea was shot down by Egypt and the Biden administration early on in the war.

Now, President Trump has come back and presented it as his own plan. 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. All that said, the plan to many experts

seems so unworkable that they wondered if even President Trump realized that, and if so, whether it was simply the opening gambit in negotiations around the Middle East about the future of Gaza. Meanwhile, Trump's facing a growing number of legal challenges as he tries to aggressively push through his domestic agenda. On Tuesday alone, multiple lawsuits came in. 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. Unions representing government workers sued over Trump's efforts to push out 2 million

federal employees with a buyout offer. And the Treasury Department is also facing a lawsuit after giving Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency access to the private information of millions of Americans. All of these are part of more than two dozen lawsuits already filed against the Trump administration. So far, the efforts have had some success. Last night, a federal judge signed a temporary restraining order blocking the Justice Department from moving transgender women into men's prisons, which Trump had ordered. Still, some legal experts say Trump may welcome the legal challenges. Some of the cases might wind their way all the way up to the Supreme Court. That could give the conservative majority there the opportunity to expand presidential power.

The Way Many Americans shop online may have just hit a wall under President Trump's new trade rules for China. 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 long-standing exemption on low-value shipments. That's how online retailers like Shien and Tmoo have been able to send vast amounts of cheap clothes and products directly to American customers. But now, Trump's gotten rid of that exception, in part because of fears that that's how fentanyl was being smuggled into the country. And yesterday, the United States Postal Service stopped accepting all packages from China.

It's not clear how long the pause will last, and the Postal Service wouldn't confirm that it's connected to the new rules. But trade experts say that the policy change may have caught the USPS off guard and overwhelmed customs officials who suddenly have to screen millions more packages. At the same time, Trump's trade war with China is also starting to hit American businesses. My colleague Danielle Kay has been looking at the impact of the new 10% tariffs on all Chinese imports. When looking at these tariffs and the potential fallout,

economists really talk about how this is likely to ripple through the entire US economy, and especially hit small businesses pretty hard. 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. Can you tell me a little bit about the business

and what you sell? Yep, we're a family hardware store, and we sell everything from barbecue grills to traditional hardware, paint and lawn and garden. One woman I spoke with, her name is Sarah Pitkin. She and her sister own four hardware stores in Virginia. A lot of goods are made in China. Some of the specific ones that are really causing concern would be power tools because there's a very low margin in power tools and so we make just enough to actually bring them in and put them on the shelf that... And she said she could be forced to raise the price

for customers, and that includes power tools, barbecue grills, electronics parts, all those are things where she expects costs to rise because of these tariffs, and then because of that, she'll be forced to raise prices for her customers. So we have to figure out where that breakpoint is between people still wanting to buy it and still making sales or

If we raise the price too much people will shy away from buying it and then we make absolutely nothing And finally hey hey, game The Sims turned 25 this week. That's a quarter century of people basically playing God with their little 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. The Sims remember that you did that, by the way. When the game was first released back in 2000, most computer and video games were linear and goal-oriented. You played through the levels, saved a princess, beat the final boss.

But The Sims was different. It was about building a world. The unstructuredness was seen as a risk. The inventor of the game told the Times that when he first proposed it, everyone in the room hated the idea. The game proved them wrong. Over the years, 500 million people have played it. 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.

Everybody wants that, it seems. If you play the latest version of The Sims, The Sims can even play The Sims. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, a look at how Elon Musk has already started to reshape the federal government. That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.