Trump is set to meet with Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif at the White House later this afternoon after hosting a separate bilateral meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan this morning.

The meeting with Sharif comes after the U.S. and Pakistan announced in late July that they had reached a trade deal that Pakistan said would lead to lower tariffs on exports.

Trump said the agreement entailed both countries working together to develop the Asian nation’s oil reserves.

In June, Pakistan said that it would recommend Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, citing the president’s efforts to bring an end to the conflict between Pakistan and India.

When Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow decided in February that she wanted to run for an open U.S. Senate seat, she conveyed her intentions to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. But the committee asked her to hold off, according to three sources familiar with the conversations.

In that call and subsequent ones, some of which took place at the staff level, DSCC officials didn’t explicitly ask her not to run, but “they were slow-walking,” said one source who discussed the private conversations on condition of anonymity. “It was, ‘Can you wait a little longer, can you wait?’”

In early April, McMorrow defied their wishes and launched her campaign, inveighing against “the same old crap in Washington” and highlighting polls that showed the Democratic Party’s approval rating at an all-time low.

“We need new leaders,” she said in her launch video. “Because the same people in D.C. who got us into this mess are not going to be the ones to get us out of it.”

Whether she intended it or not, the 39-year-old McMorrow started a trend of Democratic outsiders end-running party leaders to launch their campaigns, sometimes in explicit opposition to them. The movement is fueled by a crisis of confidence among Democratic voters in their own party, which is giving encouragement to the types of nontraditional candidates who have been walloped by leadership-aligned rivals in the past.

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With a government shutdown looming, the Trump administration is threatening to fire federal employees if a deal isn’t reached in less than a week. Usually, if the government shuts down, some workers go on unpaid leave, but the White House is now raising the stakes, saying additional jobs will be lost. NBC’s Ryan Nobles reports for “TODAY.”

China led several countries in announcing new climate plans yesterday following a veiled rebuke of the U.S. president’s anti-climate rhetoric a day earlier at the U.N. General Assembly.

Addressing a climate leaders’ summit hosted by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, Chinese President Xi Jinping said in a live video message from Beijing that by 2035, his country would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 7% to 10% from their peak.

In addition, Xi said China planned to increase its wind and solar power capacity by six times its 2020 levels within the next 10 years — helping to increase its share of nonfossil fuels in domestic energy consumption to over 30%.

China‘s reduction target marked the first time the world’s biggest emitter pledged a cut in emissions, rather than just limiting their growth, though the reduction was less than many observers had expected.

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Trump will hold talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the White House this morning as the Republican leader has indicated that the U.S. government’s hold on sales of advanced fighter jets to Ankara may soon be lifted.

During Trump’s first term, the United States kicked out Turkey, a NATO ally, from its flagship F-35 fighter jet program after it purchased an air defense system from Russia. U.S. officials worried that Turkey’s use of Russia’s S-400 surface-to-air missile system could be used to gather data on the capabilities of the F-35 and that the information could end up in Russian hands.

But Trump last week gave Turkey hope that a resolution to the matter is near as he announced plans for Erdogan’s visit.

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Trump is expected to sign a deal today to facilitate the sale of TikTok from a Chinese-based company to a group of American investors, two senior White House officials told NBC News.

Members of the Trump administration have signaled for days that a deal was being finalized between Chinese and U.S. officials.

A senior White House official confirmed to NBC News on Wednesday that once the deal was implemented, TikTok’s U.S. operations would be run by a new joint-venture company. ByteDance, TikTok’s current China-based owner, will hold less than 20% of the stock of the new company, the official said.

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