By DIDI TANG, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump is talking with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Friday in a push to finalize a deal to allow the popular social media app TikTok to keep operating in the United States.

The call between the two leaders began around 8 a.m. Washington time, according to a White House official and China’s Xinhua News Agency.

The call may offer clues about whether the two leaders might meet in person to hash out a final agreement to end their trade war and provide clarity on where relations between the world’s two superpowers may be headed.

This would be the second call with Xi since Trump returned to the White House and launched sky-high tariffs on China, triggering back-and-forth trade restrictions that strained ties between the two largest economies. But Trump, a Republican, has expressed willingness to negotiate trade deals with Beijing, notably for the social video platform that faces a U.S. ban unless its Chinese parent company sells its controlling stake.

Another call for Trump and Xi over trade tensions

The two men also spoke in June to defuse tensions over China’s restrictions on the export of rare earth elements, used in everything from smartphones to fighter jets.

“I’m speaking with President Xi, as you know, on Friday, having to do with TikTok and also trade,” Trump said Thursday. “And we’re very close to deals on all of it.”

Related Articles

Following Kirk’s assassination, Republicans sour on direction of the country, new AP-NORC poll finds

Colleges face high stakes in responses to Republican outcry over staff comments on Charlie Kirk

Elected officials and dozens of protesters are arrested at Manhattan immigration holding facility

Senate confirms 48 of Trump’s nominees at once after changing the chamber’s rules

What are Nexstar and Sinclair, the ABC affiliate owners who issued statements against Jimmy Kimmel?

He said his relationship with China is “very good” but noted that Russia’s war in Ukraine could end if European countries put higher tariffs on China. Trump didn’t say if he planned to raise tariffs on Beijing over its purchase of Moscow’s oil, as he has done with India.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington on Thursday didn’t confirm any upcoming summit between the leaders, but spokesperson Liu Pengyu said “heads-of-state diplomacy plays an irreplaceable role in providing strategic guidance for China-U.S. relations.”

Sun Yun, director of the China program at the Washington-based think tank Stimson Center, predicted a positive discussion.

“Both sides have strong desire for the leadership summit to happen, while the details lie in the trade deal and what can be achieved for both sides from the summit,” Sun said.

Efforts to finalize the TikTok deal

Following a U.S.-China trade meeting earlier this week in Madrid, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the sides reached a framework deal on TikTok’s ownership but Trump and Xi likely would finalize it Friday.

Trump, who has credited the app with helping him win another term, has extended a deadline several times for the app to be spun off from its Chinese parent company ByteDance. It is a requirement to allow TikTok to keep operating in the U.S. under a law passed last year seeking to address data privacy and national security concerns.

Trump said TikTok “has tremendous value” and the U.S. “has that value in its hand because we’re the ones that have to approve it.”

U.S. officials have been concerned about ByteDance’s roots and ownership, pointing to laws in China that require Chinese companies to hand over data requested by the government. Another concern is the proprietary algorithm that populates what users see on TikTok.

Chinese officials said Monday that a consensus was reached on authorization of the “use of intellectual property rights,” including the algorithm, and that the two sides agreed on entrusting a partner with handling U.S. user data and content security.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, says TikTok’s data and algorithm must be “truly in American hands” to comply with the law.

More trade issues on the table

Top U.S. and Chinese officials have held four rounds of trade talks between May and September, with another likely in the coming weeks. Both sides have paused sky-high tariffs and pulled back from harsh export controls, but many issues remain unresolved.

Trump in the call “will likely seek to make it appear that the United States has the upper hand in trade negotiations,” said Ali Wyne, senior research and advocacy adviser on U.S.-China issues at the International Crisis Group.

Xi “will likely seek to underscore China’s economic leverage and warn that continued progress in bilateral relations will hinge on an easing of U.S. tariffs, sanctions and export controls,” Wyne said.

No deals have been announced on tech export restrictions, Chinese purchases of U.S. agricultural products or fentanyl. The Trump administration has imposed additional 20% tariffs on Chinese goods linked to allegations that Beijing has failed to stem the flow to the U.S. of the chemicals used to make opioids.

Trump’s second-term trade war with Beijing has cost U.S. farmers one of their top markets. From January through July, American farm exports to China fell 53% compared with the same period last year. The damage was even greater in some commodities: U.S. sorghum sales to China, for instance, were down 97%.

Josh Gackle, chairman of the American Soybean Association, said he would be following the outcome of Friday’s call because China, the biggest foreign buyer of U.S. beans, has paused purchases for this year’s new crop.

“There’s still time. It’s encouraging that the two countries continue to talk,” Gackle said. “I think there’s frustration growing at the farmer level that they haven’t been able to reach a deal yet.”

Associated Press writers Josh Boak and Paul Wiseman contributed to the report.

By THOMAS BEAUMONT and LINLEY SANDERS, Associated Press

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Republicans’ outlook on the direction of the country has soured dramatically, according to a new AP-NORC poll that was conducted shortly after last week’s assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

The share of Republicans who see the country headed in the right direction has fallen sharply in recent months, according to the September survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Today, only about half in the GOP see the nation on the right course, down from 70% in June. The shift is even more glaring among Republican women and the party’s under-45 crowd.

Overall, about one-quarter of Americans say things in the country are headed in the right direction, down from about 4 in 10 in June. Democrats and independents didn’t shift meaningfully.

Interviews with Republicans who took the poll suggest that political violence and nagging worries about social discord are playing a role in the notable shift in their mood after a summer scarred by killings of figures on both sides of the political spectrum, although they also mentioned another array of worries, including jobs, household costs and crime.

“I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about the worsening political discourse and, now, the disturbing assassinations,” said Chris Bahr, a 42-year-old Republican from suburban Houston.

“If you’d have talked to me two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have brought it up as a main concern but more of a gnawing feeling,” the software administrator said. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about. But now it’s violence, while before it was just this sense of animosity and division.”

An unusually sharp drop among Republicans

Views of the country’s direction tend to be fairly stable, but major events sometimes shake partisans’ feelings about the state of the country, even when their party is in power. Democrats, for example, were more likely to say the U.S. was headed the wrong way after the Supreme Court in June 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that established a federal right to abortion. Democrat Joe Biden was president.

Related Articles

Colleges face high stakes in responses to Republican outcry over staff comments on Charlie Kirk

Elected officials and dozens of protesters are arrested at Manhattan immigration holding facility

Senate confirms 48 of Trump’s nominees at once after changing the chamber’s rules

What are Nexstar and Sinclair, the ABC affiliate owners who issued statements against Jimmy Kimmel?

Ukrainian refugees in US face precarious future after losing legal right to work

But the GOP shift in optimism, especially among younger Republicans and GOP women, is noteworthy for its scale. The drop in Republicans who see the country headed in the right direction is bigger than the decline between October 2020 and December 2020, after President Donald Trump, a Republican, lost his reelection bid. It’s more similar in scope to the decline that occurred in the first two months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Among Republicans younger than 45, the decline is particularly glaring: 61% say the country is headed in the wrong direction, a spike of 30 percentage points since June, the last time the question was asked.

Mostly, 42-year-old truck driver Mustafa Robinson, a Republican, is troubled by the cost of living, but he has been increasingly bothered by what he wishes was a stronger sense of national unity.

“It’s like, you think you’re heading in the right direction with your career and your job, but everything around you is going up in price. It seems like you can’t catch a break,” said Robinson, a married father of three who lives in Delaware County just southwest of Philadelphia. “But we are also supposed to be united as a country and coming together. And we are not. I’m so perplexed how we’re not on the same page about anything, so bad that these people are being shot.”

Some express concern about political violence

Kirk, who started the Arizona-based political organization Turning Point USA and had been a leader rallying young conservatives for Trump, died Sept. 10 after he was shot during an outdoor event at Utah Valley University.

On June 14, Democrat Melissa Hortman, Minnesota’s state House speaker, and her husband were shot to death in their in their suburban Minneapolis home in what authorities called an act of targeted political violence.

In April, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, his family and guests fled the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg after a man broke into the home and set a fire that caused significant damage. It happened during the Jewish holiday of Passover, and Shapiro is Jewish.

Last year, Trump was the target of an assassination attempt during an election campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he was shot in the ear.

Worries about political violence aren’t new for many Americans. Last October, an AP-NORC poll found that 42% of U.S. adults were “extremely” or “very” concerned about the possibility of increased political violence directed at political figures or election officials in the aftermath of the presidential election.

Trump has blamed the “radical left” for Kirk’s killing and has discussed pursuing progressive groups in response. Without establishing any link to last week’s shooting, he and members of his administration have discussed classifying some groups as domestic terrorists, ordering racketeering investigations and revoking tax-exempt status for some.

The economy is also a factor for some

GOP women’s view of the nation’s course has shifted almost as much as younger Republicans’ view, according to the poll. About three-quarters of Republican women say the country is going in the wrong direction, up from 27% in June. By comparison, 56% of Republican men say the country is going the wrong way, up from 30% in June.

And not all of the people who think the U.S. is on a worrying trajectory have political violence at the top of their mind. Joclyn Yurchak, 55, from northeast Pennsylvania, ticked off a list of problems she feels have put the United States on a downward path.

Yurchak, a warehouse worker going back to school for business, says good jobs are harder to find and require longer commutes. She is bothered by illegal immigration, though she believes Trump has begun to make inroads, and worries about criminal drug activity in her area.

Asked about Kirk and other political targets, Yurchak attributed the episodes to a broader fraying of the nation’s social fabric.

“It’s all the violence, not just political. There’s just so much crime in the country. It’s disgusting,” said Yurchak. “Nobody has respect for anybody anymore. It’s sad.”

Like others, Minnesota Republican Jeremy Gieske first noted economic uncertainty as the chief reason for his wrong-track opinion, before circling back without prompting to what he called “all the political poison.”

“We’re at each other’s throats,” said the 47-year-old product manager from Rogers, just northwest of Minneapolis. “This viciousness on both sides. We have villainized others, like we’re on the brink of social collapse. Is Kirk the straw that breaks the camel’s back or sets off a powder keg? It’s on everyone’s mind.”

The AP-NORC poll of 1,183 adults was conducted Sept. 11-15, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

Sanders reported from Washington.

By COLLIN BINKLEY, Associated Press Education Writer

At first, Clemson University took a stand for free speech. It condemned employees’ remarks that made light of Charlie Kirk’s death on social media, but the school said it was committed to protecting the Constitution. Three days later, under pressure from conservatives in the Statehouse, it fired one of the employees. As an outcry grew and the White House took interest, it fired two more.

The swift developments at the public university in South Carolina reflect the intense pressure on college leaders nationwide to police insensitive comments about the conservative activist’s assassination, which leaves them with no easy choices.

Colleges can defy the Republican backlash and defend their employees’ speech rights, risking the kind of federal attention that has prompted billions of dollars in cuts at Harvard and other universities. Or they can bow to the pressure and risk what some scholars see as a historic erosion of campus speech rights.

Related Articles

Following Kirk’s assassination, Republicans sour on direction of the country, new AP-NORC poll finds

Elected officials and dozens of protesters are arrested at Manhattan immigration holding facility

Senate confirms 48 of Trump’s nominees at once after changing the chamber’s rules

What are Nexstar and Sinclair, the ABC affiliate owners who issued statements against Jimmy Kimmel?

Ukrainian refugees in US face precarious future after losing legal right to work

A campaign among the right to punish those disparaging Kirk has cut across industries, with some conservatives calling for the firing of private sector employees, journalists and others they judge as promoting violence. But the stakes are especially high for colleges, which are already under intense scrutiny from an administration that has sought to reshape campuses it describes as “woke” and overrun by leftist thinking.

The White House coordinated a call with federal agencies Monday to discuss “funding options” at Clemson and other universities, according to a person with knowledge of the call who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting. The White House did not provide details.

The federal government’s increasing appetite to dictate what can and can’t be said on campuses — from protests over the Israel-Hamas war to commentary on Kirk’s death — violates the First Amendment, said Lara Schwartz, an American University scholar on constitutional law and campus speech. Distasteful as they may be, she said, many comments provoking outrage are clearly protected speech.

“This could very much signal the end of free expression in the United States,” Schwartz said. “People should be reading this not as like a little social media battle, but as a full-on constitutional crisis.”

Conservatives across government targeted Clemson

Over the weekend, Clemson became the epicenter in a battle between those who revered and those who reviled Kirk. Republicans at all levels rushed to support a campus GOP club that shared social media posts from campus employees mocking Kirk’s death. State lawmakers showed up on campus with signs demanding the employees’ firing.

One screenshot circulated by college Republicans showed a professor of audio technology reposted a message on X the day of the killing that said: “According to Kirk, empathy is a made-up new-age term, so keep the jokes coming. It’s what he would have wanted.”

In Congress, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee responded to Clemson’s statement defending free speech with a two-word social media post: “Defund Clemson.” State lawmakers threatened to cut funding, including one whose post was circulated by President Donald Trump.

South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, who’s running for governor, sent a letter to the Education Department on Monday urging it to pull all federal funding from schools and universities that fail to swiftly terminate employees “who would celebrate or justify political violence.”

Ahead of an emergency meeting by Clemson’s governing board Monday, the state’s Republican attorney general sent a letter assuring leaders the firings would be permitted under state law. Alan Wilson said fired employees can challenge the dismissals in civil cases, but Clemson or other universities would not be prosecuted under a state law that forbids firings based on political opinions.

“Fear of criminal prosecution should not deter the President of a state university, such as Clemson, from taking the appropriate corrective action against university employees for such vile and incendiary comments on a public platform,” Wilson wrote.

One employee was fired prior to the meeting, and Clemson announced Tuesday it had dismissed two others, both faculty members.

Several colleges have fired staff over Kirk comments

Conservatives calling for the firings have said glorifying and celebrating violence also incites it, crossing into speech not protected by the Constitution. Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to go after those whose speech threatens violence in the wake of Kirk’s killing.

“For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations and cheer on political violence,” she said. “That era is over.”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Wednesday encouraged schools and colleges to crack down on anyone celebrating the killing. In a video statement, she said such comments are the product of universities and schools that breed “divisive ideologies.”

“I commend the institutions and leaders who have acted swiftly to condemn and hold accountable those who have crossed this ethical line,” she said.

Several colleges have fired or suspended employees over comments on Kirk, including the University of Miami, the University of Tennessee, Auburn University and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Others have warned they are investigating social media posts. Iowa’s Board of Regents, for one, empowered the state’s public universities to take immediate action, including termination. President Sherry Bates said posts made last week were “offensive, inappropriate, and above all, unacceptable.”

“We expect more from those who work at our institutions,” she said.

Some university leaders have sought find a balance, condemning callous comments while pledging commitment to First Amendment principles. In Georgia, Columbus State University’s president, Stuart Rayfield, said a professor’s post that received attention online was regrettable but faculty and students are “entitled to their own personal views under the First Amendment.”

University of Missouri leaders on Wednesday said they respect the rights of employees to speak as citizens, but they encouraged staff “to use those freedoms responsibly, especially when engaging on social media.”

Associated Press writer Alanna Durkin Richer contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Recently released state school ratings reveal that five Texas school districts are at risk of a takeover by the Texas Education Agency (TEA)—the most since a 2017 state law expanded the state’s takeover powers. The new ratings cover the 2022-23 school year, released in April following legal delays, and the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years, released last month. One Fort Worth ISD school received its fifth consecutive failing rating for 2022-23. Schools in Beaumont, Connally, Wichita Falls, and Lake Worth ISDs, which have a total of 32,000 students, all received a fifth consecutive failing grade for the 2024-25 school year.

Some parents in Fort Worth have already organized to fend off a takeover: Zach Leonard, a parent of three children in the district, told the Texas Observer he does not want Fort Worth to lose its elected leadership and staff the way Houston ISD has under its 2023 takeover and the state-appointed leadership of superintendent Mike Miles. “It’s not a sustainable model for the future. It’s not true education. It’s just test prep,” Leonard said. “Fort Worth ISD has room to improve, but we can do it our way, and we don’t have to do it the way that TEA is prescribing.” 

In the past decade and a half, 13 districts have been taken over and run by a state-appointed board of managers, under public school accountability laws which have empowered TEA to step in and depose an elected school board if its schools do not meet academic, governance, or financial accountability standards. In 2017, the state made it easier for TEA to intervene by allowing the agency to take over an entire school district if just one school receives failing ratings for five consecutive ratings. 

An Observer analysis of school ratings at those districts before and after TEA takeovers reveals that, while some districts have recently reduced their number of failing schools under state control, others racked up more failing schools and even ended their time under state control by being gobbled up by other districts.

“You’re getting people that they’re putting in there to sabotage everything that we were trying to do.” 

The state agency currently controls Houston ISD as well as four smaller school districts because of governance issues or consecutive failing ratings at one or more schools. Four of those districts have shown some progress in their state scores, 2024-25 data shows. After eight years of TEA control, Marlin ISD, near Waco, received no F or D ratings this past school year and will return to full local control in January 2026. In East Texas, Shepherd ISD’s three F-rated schools improved to D-rated schools in the five years under state takeover. And for the first time since the A-F system began in 2017, Houston ISD had no F ratings last school year. South San Antonio ISD, which TEA took over due to governance issues in February 2025, also had fewer failing schools in 2025 than 2024. 

But other school districts that were subject to TEA control in the past reported more problems following takeovers, based on the agency’s own metrics for academic performance, records show. Four out of eight districts where state takeovers have ended were dissolved entirely: North Forest, La Marque, Kendleton, and Wilmer Hutchins ISDs were all shut down and absorbed into other school districts. One of those districts, North Forest, was absorbed into Houston ISD, itself now taken over.

Two other districts returned to local control with more failing schools than before: Beaumont and Edgewood ISDs, which had been taken over for governance or financial accountability issues. In the case of Edgewood, taken over for failure to hire a superintendent, the number of failing schools increased from one to 10. In the two remaining cases, the results were better: Southside ISD, taken over for financial accountability reasons, had no failing schools pre- or post-TEA, and El Paso ISD, taken over for a state test cheating scandal, emerged with fewer failing schools.

When presented with the Observer’s findings, TEA spokesperson Jake Kobersky suggested TEA is not responsible for the outcome of state takeovers. “The agency does not ‘take control’ or manage the operations of school districts,” he said. “In the event a Board of Managers is appointed, the locally appointed board members and the district administration, consistent with the operating structure of districts statewide, make all operational and curricular decisions—not TEA,” Kobersky wrote, clarifying in a separate email that “locally appointed” referred to the state “appointing board members from the local community.” Kobersky continued: “Classifying the district as being under agency leadership is an incorrect characterization and would mislead your readers.”

Kobersky emphasized that TEA removed the elected boards at Edgewood and Beaumont ISDs mainly because of financial and governance issues, not academic issues. Though school ratings slipped, he noted that the percentage of all Beaumont ISD students who met overall standards at their grade level was only 30 percent when the takeover began, and it remained the same afterward. In Edgewood, a district in west San Antonio that was the center of a historic 1989 court ruling on school finance equity, the percentage of all district students who met grade level increased from 24 to 29 percent, Kobersky said. 

In the first year of the state takeover at Edgewood, TEA’s appointed board of managers named Emilio Castro as superintendent. But Castro resigned only two years later, after a district employee accused him of sexual harassment. Timothy Payne, who served as an appointed board manager from 2016 to 2019, told the Observer the board then selected TEA’s recommended replacement—Eduardo Hernández, a former Chief of Schools for Duncanville ISD, though Hernández had no prior experience as a superintendent.

By 2019, Hernández pushed for private operation of some campuses under a state law that allows school districts to hand over their schools to private charter operators or public university programs in exchange for extra funding and a break from state sanctions. The district inked private partnerships with four operators to run eight elementary, middle, or high schools. But only one of those schools, run by Ridgeline Education Corporation, received passing ratings in the 2024-25 school year. Winston Intermediate School of Excellence, which was operated by the Texas A&M San Antonio Institute for School and Community Partnerships, closed following the 2023-24 school year, after receiving a F rating. 

Payne blames TEA for the district’s declining ratings. “TEA is the problem,” he said.  “You’re getting people that they’re putting in there to sabotage everything that we were trying to do.” 

Kobersky, the TEA spokesman, reiterated that it was the state-appointed Board of Managers, not TEA, who hired Hernández as Edgewood ISD superintendent.

Edgewood ISD parents have now collected 200 signatures for a petition that demands a performance review for Hernández and more transparency on academic performance, school discipline, teacher vacancies, and district spending. Edgewood parent Jessica Martinez told the Observer that her sons’ school—Gus Garcia Middle School, another campus run by the Texas A&M program—has had a different principal each year her kids have attended and that substitute teachers are running classes “all year round.” 

Henrietta Muñoz, the CEO of the Texas A&M program, told the Observer via email that staffing shortages are a statewide concern and that the state ratings “highlight areas for continued improvement” but do “not fully reflect” the accomplishments made at the school.  A spokesman for Edgewood ISD did not respond to the Observer’s request for comment. 

Protesters against the Houston ISD takeover (Courtesy of Community Voices for Public Education)

During its TEA takeover, from 2014 to 2020, Beaumont ISD saw its number of failing schools increase from four to eight. Right before the takeover ended, the district contracted with nonprofit charter operators to run three schools. The district terminated these partnerships in 2023 after all three received F ratings, then turned them over to another charter operator—Third Future Schools, a school network founded by Miles, now the Houston superintendent—which in turn ended its partnership with the district last school year, reverting control to the Beaumont ISD. Only one of the former Third Future Schools partnership campuses in Beaumont ISD received a passing rating in 2024-25. One of those three campuses, Fehl-Price Elementary, received its fifth consecutive failing rating, putting the district at risk of yet another takeover.

Thomas Sigee, who joined the Beaumont ISD board as an elected trustee in 2019 and is now the board chair, previously told the Observer that TEA directed the board’s selection of private partners: “We chose charter schools based on what TEA told us we could use,” Sigee said. But Kobersky, the TEA spokesman, countered that districts have always been in charge of selecting operators: “The decision-making authority has always rested with the district.”

Sigee told the Observer the district has not yet received any information from TEA regarding whether Beaumont will face another takeover. He said the district would close Fehl-Price and transfer its students to another school if needed to avoid state control. Until then, he said, “We will continue to educate the students in BISD.” 

The post A Wave of School District Takeovers Could Be Coming. Some Past Interventions Ended with More Failing Schools. appeared first on The Texas Observer.