President Donald Trump convened his Board of Peace on Thursday with representatives from more than 40 countries and observers from a dozen more. The inaugural meeting’s focus is reconstruction and building an international stabilization force for a war-battered Gaza, where a shaky ceasefire deal persists.
Trump says board members have pledged $5 billion for reconstruction, a fraction of the estimated $70 billion needed to rebuild the Palestinian territory. Members also are expected to commit thousands of personnel to international stabilization and police forces, amid fears that Trump is seeking to create a rival to the United Nations.
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A week after Trump blasted him as a RINO, short for Republican In Name Only, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt struck a conciliatory tone toward the White House.
“Politics is tough,” Stitt said Thursday at an event sponsored by Politico at the outset of the National Governors Association’s annual meeting. “Politics has a way of just beating you down over time so I can’t imagine being president of the United States. He’s got a tough job to do.”
Stitt is the president of the NGA this year. The group, made up of governors from both parties, is typically one of the few bipartisan organizations to convene in Washington each year.
But this year’s meeting has been defined by tensions as Trump has refused to invite two Democratic governors to a business meeting at the White House. Trump said Stitt mischaracterized his position.
Trump says Secretary of State Marco Rubio was the driving force behind renaming the U.S. Institute of Peace the “Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace,” in a move still being contested in courts.
“Marco named it after me,” Trump said Thursday at the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace at the former USIP building. Trump said it was a surprise. Rubio is not known to have played a significant role in the renaming, although the State Department is the current custodian.
The USIP was created as an independent entity by Congress in 1984, a status Trump sought to revoke last year when the building was seized from its leadership and nearly all of its employees fired. The changes remain subject to litigation.
In one of many tangents, Trump used his speech at the Board of Peace meeting to reinforce his support for various foreign leaders who are facing or were recently facing a contested election in their country. Many of the endorsements are part of Trump’s pattern of embracing autocratic leaders who are part of a global pushback against democratic traditions.
“I’m not supposed to be endorsing people, but I endorse, when I like people. You know, I’ve had a very good record of endorsing candidates within the United States, but now I endorse foreign leaders, including Viktor Orbán, who’s here,” Trump said, mentioning also Milei and the prime minister of Japan.
While Trump convenes his Board of Peace, the nation’s governors also are gathering in Washington. Their annual gathering has traditionally been a show of bipartisanship. Trump disrupted norms by not inviting all governors to meetings at the White House.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, joined Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, both Republicans, in opening this year’s National Governors Association on a panel where they emphasized bipartisanship, regardless of Trump’s actions.
The break with tradition reflects Trump’s broader approach in his second term. He has taken a confrontational stance toward some state leaders, withholding federal funds from states that draw his ire and deploying federal troops to cities over the objections of local officials.
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Despite the presence Thursday of dozens of world leaders, Trump noted that many countries — including the U.K., France and Canada — have chosen to not yet accept the invitation to the Board of Peace.
President Donald Trump speaks during a Board of Peace meeting at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
“Almost everybody’s accepted, and the ones that haven’t, will be. And some are playing a little cute — it doesn’t work. You can’t play cute with me,” Trump said. “But, this is the most prestigious board ever put together.”
In his opening remarks, Trump welcomes the dozens of world leaders in attendance and says many of them have become “incredible friends of mine.”
“Board of Peace is one of the most important and consequential things, I think, that I’ll be involved in,” the second-term president said.
Trump and other world leaders have arrived at the first meeting of the Board of Peace.
Flanked by Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump stood in front of leaders from Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Qatar, among others, to take a group photo before discussing the various parts of the president’s peace plan for Gaza.
A number of world leaders, including Argentina’s Javier Milei, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and others carried red hats with the emblem “USA” and an American flag on the side, and put them on the tables next to their country signs.
The new research tied to one of America’s leading banks provides more evidence that Trump ’s push to charge higher taxes on imports is causing economic disruption.
The additional taxes have meant that companies that employ a combined 48 million people in the U.S. — the kinds of businesses Trump had promised to revive — have had to absorb the new expense by passing it along to customers in the form of higher prices, employing fewer workers or accepting lower profits.
“That’s a big change in their cost of doing business,” said Chi Mac, business research director of the JPMorganChase Institute, which published the analysis on Thursday.
The research adds to a growing body of economic analyses that counter the administration’s claims that foreigners pay the tariffs.
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Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin told reporters earlier this week that “at the international level it should above all be the U.N. that manages these crisis situations.”
The Trump administration on Wednesday pushed back: “This president has a very bold and ambitious plan and vision to rebuild and reconstruct Gaza, which is well underway because of the Board of Peace,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “This is a legitimate organization where there are tens of member countries from around the world.”
And Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said board is “not talking, it is doing.”
“We are hearing the chattering class criticizing the structure of the board, that it’s unconventional, that it’s unprecedented,” Waltz said. “Again, the old ways were not working.”
Trump said this week he hopes the board would push the U.N. to “get on the ball.”
“The United Nations has great potential,” he said. “They haven’t lived up to the potential.”
The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts is one of two federal panels reviewing the president’s plans to build a ballroom twice the size of the White House itself on the site of the former East Wing.
The commission, now led by Trump’s appointees, is scheduled to further discuss the project at its monthly meeting on Thursday, held over Zoom.
At last month’s meeting, some of those commissioners questioned the architect about the “immense” design and scale of the project even as they broadly endorsed the president’s vision for the massive expansion.
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Members of the United Nations Security Council are calling for Gaza ceasefire deal to become permanent, and blasting Israeli efforts to expand control in the West Bank as a threat to prospects of a two-state solution. They met Wednesday on the eve of Trump’s first Board of Peace gathering to discuss the future of the Palestinian territories.
The high-level U.N. session in New York was originally scheduled for Thursday but was moved up after Trump announced the board’s meeting for the same day, complicating travel plans for diplomats. It is a sign of the potential for overlapping and conflicting agendas between the United Nations’ most powerful body and Trump’s broader ambitions to broker global conflicts, which have raised concerns in some countries that it may attempt to rival the U.N. Security Council.
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The U.S. trade deficit slipped modestly in 2025 as Trump upended global commerce by slapping double digit tariffs on imports from most countries.
The gap the between the goods and services the U.S. sells other countries and what it buys from them narrowed to just over $901 billion from $904 billion in 2024, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.
Exports rose 6% last year, and imports rose nearly 5%. The trade gap surged from January-March as U.S. companies tried to import foreign goods ahead of Trump’s taxes, then narrowed most of the rest of the year.
Trump’s tariffs are a tax paid by U.S. importers and often passed along to their customers as higher prices. But they haven’t had as much impact on inflation as economists originally expected. Trump argues that the tariffs will protect U.S. industries, bringing manufacturing back to America and raising money for the U.S. Treasury.
Include Argentina, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Egypt, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kosovo, Morocco, Mongolia, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
See the full list of countries that have joined, opted out or haven’t decided.
It has morphed since the group was initiated as part of the president’s 20-point peace plan to end the conflict in Gaza. Since the October ceasefire, Trump wants it to have an even more ambitious remit — one that will not only complete the Herculean task of bringing lasting peace between Israel and Hamas but will also help resolve conflicts around the globe.
These questions are central to the discussions. A key demand of Israel and a cornerstone of the ceasefire deal is the creation of an armed international stabilization force to keep security and ensure the disarmament of the militant Hamas group.
Thus far, only Indonesia has offered a firm commitment to Trump for the proposed force. And Hamas has provided little confidence that it is willing to move forward on disarmament.
President Donald Trump, center, with Vice President JD Vance to his left, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to his right, arrives for a Board of Peace meeting at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
President Donald Trump stands with other World leaders before a Board of Peace meeting at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
FILE - President Donald Trump's name is seen on the U.S. Institute of Peace building, Dec. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
