The Chinese are trolling the Trump administration.

A YouTuber who used to make parody music videos about the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, produced “The Song of MAGA,” a satire of President Trump’s vision for the United States.

A nationalistic TikToker who whitewashes China’s persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang made a video mocking Vice President JD Vance’s purported use of eyeliner in full drag fashion while demanding an apology for a comment Mr. Vance had made about “Chinese peasants.”

In a post on the social media platform RedNote, a video of Mr. Trump admiring a portrait of himself at the Justice Department is accompanied with a North Korean song, “The Whole World Envies Us,” likening him to the dictator Kim Il-sung.

United by their disdain for the Trump administration, Chinese internet users of different political views have created an impressive collection of work. The images, videos and music, mostly generated by artificial intelligence, mock the American leaders for what the Chinese believe are ridiculous and outrageous policies and remarks.

The trolling reflects shifting perceptions of the United States in China. The Trump administration has provided rich material for the Communist Party propagandists — it has never been easier for Beijing to stand on a moral high ground. The more liberal-minded Chinese, having overcome the initial shock at actions that reminded them of their own authoritarian government, are applying their creativity to Washington.

“I love the United States, but Trump has damaged American democracy and freedom, and harmed the country’s image on the international stage,” the creator of “The Song of MAGA” wrote in a text message.

The A.I.-generated music video, based on a famous 1960s revolutionary song, “We March on the Great Road,” opens with characters resembling Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elon Musk holding little red books in front of a large red banner that says, “SERVE THE PEOPLE.”

The lyric goes:

We march on the broad highway
High in spirit, strong in drive each day
Led by Chairman Trump, we shout “MAGA!”
Sworn to make America great again — hurrah!

In the video, the four men were depicted marching in the fashion of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. The characters assembled iPhones, rode in scooters like Chinese blue-collar workers and picked tomatoes like Chinese farmers under the scorching sun.

The video’s creator, who declined to disclose their identity to me for fear of retribution, assigned the four characters modest jobs that millions of Chinese have to scrape by. Mr. Trump’s character is a cobbler. Mr. Rubio’s is a street vendor selling steamed buns. Mr. Vance’s sells produce. Mr. Musk’s works on construction sites and, sitting on the curb, sells socks and toys.

Mr. Vance has attracted the most brutal trolling. His “peasants” comment offended many Chinese. In a widely shared A.I.-generated video, a character resembling Mr. Vance, in a pink jacket, pink nails and hot pink lipstick, applies eyeliner while saying in a promotional female tone, “Sis, hillbilly brand eyeliner, made in China, reliable quality.”

Another video shows a cartoon character saying: “Vice President Vance, I’m a Chinese peasant. Do you realize your tariff policy will lead to the soaring price of your eyeliner?”

There are so many posts about the topic that Mr. Vance is now known as “the eyeliner man” on the Chinese internet.

Mr. Trump is mocked for expecting a call from Mr. Xi, who’s ghosting him, to make a trade deal. In a widely shared A.I.-generated image, a character that looks like Mr. Trump lies on a pink bed in a pastel-colored children’s bedroom. With his face resting on his hands, he stares at a smartphone. Behind him on the wall is a large portrait of Mr. Xi, smiling.

“Hahahaha, who’s going to call after a breakup?” commented a Weibo user with an internet address in the northwestern province of Gansu. “Trump, do you think you’re filming a soap opera?”

There are reasons the Chinese are mocking the four men. President Trump imposed 145 percent tariffs on Chinese goods. Mr. Vance called the Chinese people “peasants.” Mr. Rubio is (or was) a well-known China hawk. Mr. Musk parlayed his influence with Mr. Trump into an official role leading budget cuts at Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, whose programs influenced generations of Chinese. (On Tuesday, a federal judge blocked the administration from dismantling the broadcast channels, and Mr. Musk said he would cut back his government work to spend more time with his electric car company, Tesla.)

The four men are prime for ridicule because people there face fewer censorship restrictions for mocking foreign leaders than their own. It reminds me of the Soviet joke that an American said he could stand in front of the White House and yell, “To hell with Ronald Reagan,” to which a Russian replied: “That’s nothing. I can stand in front of the Kremlin and yell, ‘To hell with Ronald Reagan,’ too.”

The censors seem to be reining in the trolling. When I tried to share with a small WeChat group an image of Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance and Mr. Musk working on a Nike assembly line, it failed to go through. Links to some of the images and videos I saved no longer work.

China’s strict censorship rules have helped the country’s internet users hone their trolling expertise. It takes skill to simultaneously express views the Communist Party forbids while evading the censors.

Mr. Xi has been a favorite target. His nicknames include Winnie the Pooh, for his physical resemblance to the plump cartoon character; “Baozi,” or bun, for his publicity stunt visit to a bun restaurant early in his rule; and “Mao II,” for his revival of some Maoist ideologies.

The national censor banned more than 35,000 sensitive words and combinations of words related to Mr. Xi in 2016, according to China Digital Times, a media outlet focusing on censorship. In less than three months in 2020, RedNote, the social media platform, compiled a list of 564 new sensitive words referring to Mr. Xi.

It’s a lot safer to mock Mr. Trump.

A video blogger named Chen Rui has become a national phenomenon for his spot-on Trump impersonations.

From his furrowed eyebrows, pursed lips and tilted head, to the way he opens and closes his arms while speaking, and his intonation and English accent, Mr. Chen is top rate. He is known as the Chinese Trump.

He gained some international fame after appearing in a recent livestreaming session with the YouTube influencer IShowSpeed from Chongqing, Mr. Chen’s hometown in southwestern China. He told IShowSpeed, whose name is Darren Watkins Jr., that he would love to visit America one day.

Mr. Chen, whose online alias is Rui Ge, has a wide following on social media platforms and doesn’t talk about Chinese politics in his videos — he likes to show off Chongqing and seems to enjoy making food videos. But he frequently incorporates well-known Trump expressions, such as “You have no cards” and “You haven’t said ‘thank you.’”

In one video, while speaking English, he told his mother after washing the dishes: “You’re not thanking me. You’d better be nice.” He continued: “Maybe tomorrow, I’m not going to wash the dishes. You have no cards.” Then he repeated it in Chinese.

His mother spanked him with a bamboo back scratcher and yelled: “Do I have the cards now?”

The title of the video is “Mom Has the Cards.”

Karen Durbin, a fierce feminist who championed sexual liberation and fulfillment as a journalist, served as the second female editor in chief of The Village Voice and then went on to become a virtuoso film critic for The New York Times and other publications, died on April 15 in Brooklyn. She was 80.

Her death, in a health care facility, was caused by complications of dementia, her friend and former colleague Cynthia Carr said.

Appointed in 1994 as The Voice’s editor in chief — she was only the second woman in that job in the paper’s history, and the first in nearly two decades — Ms. Durbin waged a fervent campaign to attract young readers. Part of that effort involved tilting toward often incendiary coverage of feminism, gay rights and avant-garde culture, and away from muckraking about corrupt and incompetent landlords, judges and politicians.

Not that she abandoned covering corruption and crime: In 1996, she overruled the paper’s lawyers and published an article that all but accused the nightclub promoter Michael Alig of “A Murder in Clubland,” as the headline proclaimed, after the reporter, Frank Owen, produced an on-the-record source. (Mr. Alig later pleaded guilty to manslaughter.)

But even before she was editor in chief, she had set a tone that outraged traditionalists, mostly the older, white male staffers — or “the boys club,” as she put it. When she was the senior arts editor, they took issue with some of her editorial choices, including an assignment she made in 1986: Ms. Carr’s profile of the performance artist Karen Finley, whose act included the sexually explicit use of canned yams as part of a sendup of female objectification.

“She convinced me that I could write,” Ms. Carr recalled in an interview. “She had the great editor’s gift of seeing what you were trying to do, then helping you do it. I sometimes ventured into terra incognita, and I knew she had my back. She was fearless.”

Ms. Durbin talked Ms. Carr’s article onto the cover of The Voice. Robert Friedman, who was then the editor in chief, said that cost him his job.

When she was first named editor, Ms. Durbin told The New York Times: “I think The Voice should reflect the whole lives of the people who put it out. And the reality of those people is that they work hard, they play with exuberance, they wear clothes that give them pleasure. They buy books and records and all that stuff. They live in the material world.”

The Voice had “retreated into a dark and angry corner,” Ms. Durbin concluded. Her goal, she said, was for the paper to remain true to its leftist roots, but to be less predictable and shrill: “There has to, on some level, be a joy in it and not just rage.”

Richard Goldstein, a former executive editor at the paper, recalled in an interview: “In the years before she arrived, The Voice was mired in an old-school sensibility that privileged straight white male attitudes — although that thinking was so pervasive in journalism back then that most of its adherents had no idea that they possessed those attitudes.”

During Ms. Durbin’s first week as editor, Wayne Barrett, an acclaimed investigative reporter, came to work wearing a dress to mock her stated intent of providing more coverage of feminist, gay and lesbian issues.

“Karen navigated those very stormy waters, and she ushered the paper into what can only be called modern times,” Mr. Goldstein said. “She was a brilliant line editor, a fearless writer and a pioneer of the diverse world that is journalism today.”

During much of The Voice’s existence, outsiders judged it by conventional journalistic standards of objectivity — and it often fell short. But Ms. Durbin likened the paper’s vibe to that of “a funky bar” in Greenwich Village and defended its liberal bias.

“Advocacy journalism is not biased,” she was quoted as saying in “The Freaks Came Out to Write” (2024), an oral history of The Voice by Tricia Romano. “It’s the most honest kind of journalism, because you know where the writer is coming from.”

Both before and after being appointed as editor, Ms. Durbin was an accomplished writer.

In 1975, after touring with the Rolling Stones, she began her cover article for The Voice this way: “Two a.m. in a motel room in Wisconsin. The room is thick with dope and cigarette smoke. People of various sexes crowd the room, among them the Stones. No one looks healthy. Keith Richard, as usual, looks mor­ibund, wasted, and vaguely dangerous.” (The Stones’ Keith Richards was calling himself Keith Richard in those days.)

The article ran with the cover line “Can the Stones Still Cut it?” (Fifty years later, the band is still performing.)

The next year, after the end of her relationship with her fellow journalist Hendrik Hertzberg, she wrote an anguished front-page essay titled “On Being a Woman Alone.”

“‘We’ had been the source of my gravity, the axis on which my universe turned,” she wrote.

Recalling a conversation with a friend, Ms. Durbin lamented: “In a sense we did give up men. No longer trusting them, we stopped depending on them and started depending on ourselves. We chose to become alone, literally, sometimes, and continually inside our heads.”

After leaving The Voice, Ms. Durbin covered movies and the arts for The New York Times, Mirabella, Mademoiselle and Elle, until about a decade ago.

Karen Lee Durbin was born on Aug. 28, 1944, in Cincinnati, to Charles and Violet (Lewis) Durbin. Her father ran a dry-cleaning service.

No immediate family members survive. Two brothers, Terry and Timothy, died earlier.

When Karen was 12, the family moved to Indianapolis, where she attended high school. She later attended Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania, while working summers as an intern at The Indianapolis Times.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1966, she was hired as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker and began attending meetings of the feminist collective Redstockings. She later served as a spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, but her interest in journalism remained.

“I remember standing at a newsstand and picking up one paper after another, because I just wanted to see what they were like,” she said in “The Pleasures of Being Out of Step,” David L. Lewis’s 2013 documentary about the longtime Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff.

In 1972, she showed some passages from her journal to a friend who recommended that she expand them into an article.

As the journalist Ellen Willis recalled in “The Freaks Came Out to Write,” Ms. Durbin asked, “But who would publish such a thing?”

The friend replied, “The Village Voice might.”

After a stint at Mademoiselle magazine, Ms. Durbin joined The Voice full time in 1974. She was a writer and assistant editor before being named senior arts editor in 1979; she held that position there until 1989, when she left again, to become the arts and entertainment editor at Mirabella.

In 1994, at age 49, she was hired by David Schneiderman, the publisher of The Voice, and Leonard N. Stern, the paper’s owner, as the editor in chief, replacing Jonathan Z. Larsen. She was the first woman to hold that position since Marianne Partridge in the late 1970s.

In her new role, Ms. Durbin not only attempted to rescue the paper from what she called a midlife crisis; she also scrapped the sports section and cut the staff, as Craigslist and other competitors eroded the paper’s classified advertising base. She quit in 1996 over differences with Mr. Schneiderman related to the paper’s budget and editorial strategy.

“She was blazingly intelligent, charming but unafraid to roll up her sleeves during the rolling succession of internal Voice dust-ups, and unswerving in her belief in the power of art to change lives,” said Martin Gottlieb, a former Times reporter and editor who was the editor of The Voice from 1986 to 1988.

Ms. Durbin’s very first article for The Voice, in 1972, was a critique of the certitude of feminism, “Casualties of the Sex War.”

As a professed pro-sex feminist, she never shied away from writing about sex in any publication, even (or perhaps especially) in Mademoiselle, where she wrote a column called “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Sex.”

Once, asked how she viewed the phenomenon of increasing nudity at public beaches, she replied, “Avidly, with binoculars.”

In 2023, the Winooski River in Vermont spilled its banks, kissing the green truss bridge that spanned it. River water poured onto the marble floors of the State House. Up to nine inches of rain fell within 48 hours, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.

A year later, Vermont enacted the Climate Change Superfund Act, which holds oil and gas companies financially responsible for climate damage in the state. Similar legislation passed in New York in 2024 and is pending in California, Maryland, and Massachusetts.

Underpinning the laws is attribution science, which models huge numbers of scenarios using global temperature data to determine the likelihood that extreme weather events like floods or heat waves are related to emissions from burning oil, gas and coal.

A new paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature expands this type of work to link the emissions from specific emitters to the economic burden of extreme events.

“The oil industry is alarmed by state climate superfund laws and their growing popularity because they are the first policies adopted anywhere in the world that make climate polluters pay a fair share of the enormous damage their products have caused,” said Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, the New York-based charitable foundation that helped created the climate superfund law.

Reaction to the laws was swift. In February, West Virginia and other Republican-led states sued to block New York’s law, saying that only the federal government could regulate emissions. President Trump signed an executive order this month calling the state laws “burdensome and ideologically motivated” and asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to block their enforcement.

For decades, environmental lawyers have been considering how to attribute the harm from greenhouse gas emissions, according to Martin Lockman, a climate law fellow at Columbia University’s Sabin Center.

“Attribution science is incredibly important because it draws a link between specific activities from a company profiting from fossil fuels and specific harms to states and communities,” Mr. Lockman said. “If you cause harm you should be responsible for cleaning it up, it’s as simple as that.”

The new study refines an approach known as “end-to-end” attribution, which links one particular emitter (a company, for instance) to one particular climate-related impact (extreme heat, for example) to a specific damage (a downturn in the global economy).

The study found that Chevron’s emissions had caused up to $3.6 trillion in heat-related losses to global gross domestic product. Christopher Callahan, a postdoctoral earth scientist at Stanford University and an author of the study, said such a high cost was still a gross underestimate of the global impact of burning fossil fuels, especially in poorer, tropical regions that are least responsible for emissions.

“That staggering figure represents damages from just one climate impact,” said Delta Merner, associate director of the Science Hub for Climate Litigation at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The total harm attributable to major emitters is undoubtedly far greater when the full range of climate hazards is taken into account.”

In a statement, Chevron said the Nature article “ignores the scientific impossibility of attributing particular climate and weather events to any specific country, company, or energy user.”

Overall, the paper found that the world would be $28 trillion richer were it not for the extreme heat caused by the emissions from 111 major carbon producers between 1991 and 2020.

Since 2017, more than 100 climate-related lawsuits have been filed each year, according to the new study. But the attribution studies those cases relied on often failed to link emissions to estimated economic damages.

This new framework could provide a function similar to other big damage and loss cases, like holding tobacco companies responsible for lung cancer cases or pharmaceutical companies for opiate addiction.

“Legal scholars have called this kind of attribution the holy grail of climate liability,” said Justin Mankin, a geography professor focused on climate science at Dartmouth College and an author of the Nature paper.

World Weather Attribution, a group run out of Imperial College London, has regularly issued attribution reports over the past decade.

“Sadly we’re still the only ones who really do this, and we’re not an institution, it’s basically a project I do as a university professor working with a team of people,” said Friederike Otto, a physicist who helps to lead World Weather Attribution.

Dr. Callahan and Dr. Mankin used open source tools for their models, and they have made the code and data sources they used to compile the global costs of climate change publicly available on their websites.

“We believe in openly transparent science, especially since the work was paid for by U.S. taxpayers,” said Dr. Mankin, noting that much of the support for the research was financed by the National Science Foundation and NOAA, two of the nation’s largest climate science agencies that have been targeted for funding cuts under the Trump administration.

Extreme weather events continue disrupt communities and strain finances. The 2023 flooding cost Vermont hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Anne Watson, a Vermont state senator who sponsored the bill quantifying the state’s damages between 1995 and 2024. It passed the Legislature last year and the state’s Republican governor allowed it to become law without his signature.

Julie Moore, secretary for the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, helped organize the request for more information to help the state better understand different approaches to attribution science and how to allocate damages caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

“The charge to us is to adopt rules of how we’ll apply attribution science and ultimately send out cost recovery letters,” Ms. Moore said. The state law says oil and gas corporations will receive letters at the start of 2027.

“The hope is that it’ll result in a significant amount of money coming into Vermont to help both pay for the damage and help us adapt to a hotter, wetter climate that’s a result of this carbon in the atmosphere,” Ms. Watson said. “We need to go to the source of who’s responsible for this.”

The deadly crash of a sightseeing helicopter in New York City on April 10 has left many people wondering how safe such tours are.

Commercial sightseeing helicopters take visitors places other tours can’t: deep into the Grand Canyon, to a hidden waterfall in the mountains of Oahu, high above New York, serving up breathtaking views with a dose of adrenaline.

The tours are popular; sightseeing helicopters are part of a multimillion-dollar industry in the United States. In New York alone, the city’s heliports generate a “total economic impact” of $78 million a year, according to the Economic Development Corporation.

But sightseeing helicopters can operate under less rigorous safety requirements than other commercial aircraft such as airliners, charter planes and some private jets.

The latest accident, which killed the pilot and a family of five visiting from Spain, comes after years of scrutiny about how the Federal Aviation Administration should regulate these types of sightseeing tours and an attempt by Congress to tighten the rules.

How safe is flying in a helicopter compared with other forms of air travel?

Flying on a commercial airliner is by far the safest form of air travel, with an average rate of fewer than 0.01 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours from 2019 to 2023, according to data from the National Transportation Safety Board, the primary federal agency that investigates civil aviation accidents.

By contrast, the average fatal accident rate for all U.S. helicopters during this period was 0.69 per 100,000 flight hours, according to the U.S. Helicopter Safety Team, a nonprofit group dedicated to civil helicopter safety.

Helicopters were also less safe than commuter and on-demand aircraft, a category that includes private charter flights (as well as a small number of helicopters), which had an average of 0.20 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours, according to the N.T.S.B. data.

But helicopters were more safe than the overall general aviation category, which includes privately owned noncommercial airplanes as well as recreational helicopters and had a rate of about 0.95 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours.

Helicopters are “complex mechanisms” that require a lot of care when it comes to maintenance and operations, said Jeff Guzzetti, a former accident investigator for the F.A.A. and the N.T.S.B. They are also “more dependent on proper pilot action due to the complex aerodynamics, complex control systems and complex environment than fixed-wing aircraft,” said John Cox, a former airline pilot who runs a safety consulting firm.

Pilots striving to give tourists an adventure, Mr. Guzzetti added, might attempt risky maneuvers. “They fly close to the ground and in proximity to things they’re touring over, whether it’s buildings or the cliffs of the Grand Canyon,” he said. “All of that combines to make it a more hazardous endeavor than riding an airliner from one city to another.”

Where else have helicopter tours crashed?

Since 2008, there have been 80 commercial sightseeing helicopter accidents, with 72 deaths, in the United States, according to the N.T.S.B. Hawaii has had the most, with 20 accidents and 19 fatalities, followed by Florida, Nevada, Texas and Alaska. In New York, there have been two accidents and 11 deaths, including the April 10 crash.

Sightseeing helicopters represented a small fraction of the more than 2,200 civil aviation helicopter accidents in the United States in that same period.

How are sightseeing helicopters regulated?

The F.A.A. has specific rules for different flight operations, based on factors like the type of aircraft and purpose of the flight. Regulations differ for aircraft maintenance, pilot qualifications and rest time, and acceptable conditions to fly.

Commercial airlines are authorized to operate under Part 121, the most rigorous set of rules. Sightseeing helicopter operations can operate under the less demanding Part 135, which applies to unscheduled commuter and charter services, or they can fly under Part 91, the least restrictive, which covers general aviation.

With F.A.A. approval, helicopter operators can be certified under Part 135 but still operate flights under Part 91 rules if the helicopter departs from and lands at the same location and stays within a 25-mile radius, as many sightseeing tours do.

New York Helicopter Charter, the company that operated the aircraft involved in the New York crash this month, had a Part 135 certificate, according to the F.A.A. But the doomed helicopter was operating under Part 91 rules, according to the N.T.S.B.

How important are the different rules?

Since 2008, most helicopter accidents have involved flights operating under Part 91, according to N.T.S.B. data.

Part 91 flights operate under “much less stringent requirements than their 135 charter brethren,” Mr. Guzzetti said. Part 91 operations do not have flight time limits or rest requirements for pilots. By comparison, Part 135 limits their flight time to eight hours for every 24-hour period, and requires scheduled rest time. It also has stricter training mandates for pilots.

Pilot fatigue may have contributed to a deadly 2004 sightseeing helicopter accident on the island of Kauai, according to the N.T.S.B. That flight, operating under Part 91, crashed into a mountain, killing the pilot and all four passengers. The N.T.S.B. cited the pilot’s inexperience with local weather conditions and a lack of scheduled breaks, among other factors, in its report.

Existing federal rules don’t “adequately address the pilot fatigue issues associated with the continuous, repetitive, high-frequency flight operations that are unique to commercial air tour helicopter operations,” the N.T.S.B. said in the report.

John Goglia, a former N.T.S.B. board member and an independent safety consultant, said pilots for these types of tours are “on the clock for a long time,” possibly making more than a dozen flights a day. “They just fly them all day long,” he added.

Christopher Young, the executive director of TOPS, an independent helicopter tour safety organization, said in a statement that the group advocated higher standards in the air tour and sightseeing industry and encouraged all helicopter operators to adopt safety processes that go beyond federal requirements.

Four commercial helicopter tour operators did not return emails and phone calls requesting comment.

What has been done to make these flights safer?

Notable accidents over the years have prompted the F.A.A. to tighten the rules for sightseeing helicopters.

After two accidents in Hawaii on the same day in July 1994, the N.T.S.B. called for “improvements in F.A.A. oversight and new regulations” for the industry, including placing all commercial helicopter flights under Part 135. After the 2004 crash on Kauai, the N.T.S.B. again cited the “the lack of F.A.A. oversight of Part 91 air tour operators” and pushed the F.A.A. to require more training and establish rest breaks for helicopter pilots. The F.A.A. did not follow these recommendations.

In 2018, a sightseeing helicopter conducting a doorless tour crashed into the East River in New York. Five passengers drowned when they were unable to escape from their safety harnesses. Several months after the accident, the F.A.A. banned doors-off flights unless passenger restraints could be quickly released during an emergency.

The F.A.A. has also enacted location-specific rules. At the Grand Canyon, the agency limits the number of tours and where they can fly. In Hawaii, where poor visibility has been a factor in previous crashes, tour operators must fly at least 1,500 feet above the surface. Flying below that level requires F.A.A. approval.

Mr. Guzzetti, the safety expert, said he thought there was enough supervision of Part 135 operations but that Part 91 oversight was “lacking.”

Legislation called the Safe and Quiet Skies Act, introduced in Congress in 2023, would have required all helicopter tours to fly under Part 135 rules. It did not receive a vote.

The F.A.A. recently formed a rule-making committee to improve the safety of commercial air tours, including helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, with plans to submit its recommendations by late September. This committee was a requirement of last year’s F.A.A. reauthorization act, which also directs the committee to consider pilot training and maintenance standards, in addition to flight data monitoring.

How do you know if a helicopter tour is safe?

Before you book, Mr. Guzzetti recommends asking the tour company how many aircraft it has, which regulations (Part 91 or 135) your sightseeing flight would be operating under, and how it trains its pilots. You can also look up the company’s accident history on the N.T.S.B. database. Finally, check to see if the operator is affiliated with a safety organization like TOPS, whose members must adhere to rules that exceed F.A.A. requirements as well as pass an annual independent audit.

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For a president who advertises himself as a paramount deal maker, the next 11 weeks will be a pivotal test, as his advisers race to accomplish what no other administration has done before and reach dozens of individual trade deals with other governments.

President Trump has promised big gains for American trade, and officials from Japan, South Korea, India and elsewhere have been pushing for agreements as they look to forestall punishing tariffs. But trade experts say the administration has set up a seemingly impossible task, given that traditional trade deals typically take months or years to negotiate.

Mr. Trump has tried to use tariffs as leverage to notch quick agreements, and his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, has promised “90 deals in 90 days.” But the levies are creating chaos and financial pain for many businesses, and they have not brought some of America’s largest trading partners, including China, to the table.

Some U.S. trade with China has ground to a halt after the countries imposed triple-digit tariffs on each others’ products, and a wave of bankruptcies, especially among small U.S. businesses that rely on Chinese imports, appears to be looming if the trade barriers are maintained.

Some Trump officials recognize that the situation with China is not sustainable and have been strategizing how to reduce the tariffs between the countries, two people familiar with the discussions said. Another person familiar with the discussions said administration officials were concerned about the hit to the stock market, which has experienced intense volatility and some of its worst trading days in years. The S&P 500 is down 10 percent since Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump signaled that the 145 percent tariff he put on Chinese imports could drop. “It won’t be anywhere near that high,” he said. “It’ll come down substantially. But it won’t be zero.”

So far, officials from the United States and China do not appear to have engaged in substantive talks over the trade spat. Trump officials believe the Chinese economy is vulnerable, given its dependence on exports to the United States.

“President Trump has been clear: China needs to make a deal with the United States of America,” said Kush Desai, a White House spokesman.

Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, on Wednesday dismissed speculation that the president was considering unilaterally lowering the tariffs that he had imposed on China ahead of any negotiations with Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader. He emphasized that any moves to de-escalate trade tensions would need to be mutual.

“I don’t think either side believes that the current tariff levels are sustainable,” Mr. Bessent told reporters. “This is the equivalent of an embargo, and a break between the two countries on trade does not suit anyone’s interest.”

On Wednesday, Guo Jiakun, the spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, reiterated that China would not be bullied by U.S. tariff threats.

“If the U.S. truly wants to resolve issues through dialogue and negotiation, it should stop threatening and coercing, and engage in dialogue with China on the basis of equality, respect and mutual benefit,” he said. “Talking about reaching an agreement with China while constantly pressuring China to the maximum is not the correct way to deal with China and will not work.”

Mr. Trump’s tariff threats have created urgency for other governments, motivating them to begin talks with the United States about removing tariffs and other trade barriers. On April 9, just hours after the president imposed stiff tariffs on nearly 60 countries, he paused them for 90 days, saying he would give governments a chance to negotiate trade deals instead.

This week, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that the Trump administration had received 18 proposals on paper and that the trade team was “meeting with 34 countries this week alone.”

“There is a lot of progress being made,” she said. “We are moving at Trump speed to ensure these deals are made on behalf of the American worker and the American people.”

Asked if the tariffs have actually worked, she responded, “Have some patience and you will see.”

But negotiating so many deals at the same time poses significant challenges. Many of Mr. Trump’s departments are still understaffed, with midlevel officials not yet confirmed. Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Apollo Global Management, an investment firm, wrote on the firm’s website that on average, trade deals signed by the United States had taken 18 months to negotiate and 45 months to implement.

“While markets wait for trade negotiations with 90 countries at the same time,” he wrote, “global trade is grinding to a standstill with problems similar to what we saw during Covid: growing supply chain challenges with potential shortages in U.S. stores within a few weeks, higher U.S. inflation and lower tourism to the U.S.”

Another hurdle, people familiar with the negotiations say, is that foreign governments say they do not know exactly what the Trump administration wants. And given Mr. Trump’s unpredictable demands, they are not sure that his deputies are empowered to close a deal with them.

Greta Peisch, a former trade official who is now a partner at the law firm Wiley Rein, said the tight timeline raised questions about whether any deals concluded in the next few months would be “more tentative or aspirational” rather than actual trade agreements. She also said the economic benefits could be limited.

“When you look at some of these trade relationships, simply removing trade barriers likely won’t move the needle much in terms of changing trade flows in the near term,” she said.

South Korean finance and trade ministers were set to meet with Mr. Bessent and Jamieson Greer, the United States trade representative, on Thursday. Officials from Thailand, Japan, India and other countries were also scheduled to hold talks in Washington this week.

In a visit to New Delhi on Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance announced the outlines for a potential trade agreement with India, which would ramp up trade between the countries, reduce Indian barriers to U.S. exports and fold in discussions of defense, energy and strategic technologies.

While the Trump administration has said some deals could be concluded quickly, initial meetings have suggested that talks could be more complicated, particularly with major trading partners like Japan.

The two nations have trade disputes extending back decades over industries like steel and auto parts. And some agreements under discussion — for example, a project that could see Japan, South Korea and Taiwan invest in a pipeline to export liquefied natural gas from Alaska — could take at least five years to come to fruition.

“Tokyo wants to preserve the alliance and keep peace with Trump, but without surrendering Japan’s interests,” Daniel Russel, the vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, wrote in a recent analysis. “The Japanese government is willing to increase investments in the U.S. and buy more American goods, but will resist being rushed and pressured into lopsided deals.”

South Korean officials also appear willing to discuss trade imbalances, as well as buying more natural gas and investing to revitalize the U.S. shipbuilding industry. But it is not clear the Korean government is in a position to aggressively negotiate a deal, given that the country’s president has been impeached and an election will not be held until June 3.

Speaking from Washington on Wednesday, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, also said there was no plan to rush into a trade deal with the United States.

Ms. Reeves, who was set to meet with Mr. Bessent, said she wanted to reduce trade barriers between Britain and other countries, but there were firm lines her government would not cross, like changing food or car safety standards.

With larger trading partners, like the European Union, discussions appear more difficult. European officials have expressed frustration about a lack of clear goals from the Trump administration.

“One would wish for more clarity on expectations,” Valdis Dombrovskis, the European commissioner responsible for the economy, said on Wednesday at the Semafor World Economy Summit. He said that European officials had put forward “concrete proposals,” such as buying more liquefied natural gas and zero-for-zero tariffs on industrial goods, but that the United States needed to provide more clarity on what it wanted.

“We are trying to find a solution and a way forward,” he said. “But we have also indicated in absence of solution we are also ready to defend our companies.”

E.U. officials have drawn up lists of American products they can put their own tariffs on in retaliation, and are working to diversify their trading relationships.

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, told a German newspaper last week that she was having “countless talks with heads of state and government around the world who want to work together with us on the new order,” including Iceland, New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Mexico.

“The West as we knew it no longer exists,” she said.

Choe Sang-Hun, Eshe Nelson and Alan Rappeport contributed reporting. Siyi Zhao contributed research.