It is not enough anymore.

The waters where Tad shrimps are the same waters through which liquefied natural gas tankers now move, massive ships loaded with American energy bound for buyers in Berlin and Beijing. The shrimp catch in Cameron Parish is roughly half what it was before the plants arrived. The energy bills are rising, the federal government’s own projections link LNG exports directly to higher domestic energy prices, simple supply and demand, American households forced to compete with foreign buyers for access to American gas. A dredging incident by Venture Global, the company that operates the Calcasieu Pass export terminal, spilled hundreds of acres of mud into the bayou and killed roughly half of Tad’s oyster crop. The company offered some affected residents $20,000 on the condition that they could never sue or speak negatively about Venture Global again.

Tad did not take the offer.

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The administration says the repeal “restores balance,” prioritizes access, empowers local decision-making, and aligns BLM regulations with national energy policy, but that language hides a profound moral choice. The final rule explicitly says conservation should not restrict “productive use” of public lands, and it eliminates tools such as restoration and mitigation leasing, which would have allowed land to be leased for healing in the same way it has long been leased for extraction.

That is the hinge of the story, because this decision does not immediately approve a single oil well, mine, road, grazing permit, or timber sale, and BLM itself says any direct environmental impacts will happen later through separate land-use decisions. Yet the absence of an immediate bulldozer does not mean the absence of harm, because rules like this are where the future is quietly arranged, where one value is given leverage and another is told to wait outside the room.

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The most accidentally honest sentence of the week came not from a rambling Trump press gaggle, not from a Fox News host discovering international fast food like Magellan in a quarter-zip, and not even Pete Hegseth accidentally revolutionizing classified military communications by treating a group chat like a Venmo notification. It came from a government webpage.

“This page does not reflect reality, and therefore, the administration and this department reject it.”

That line appeared on the page for the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a public health data program created in the 1980s to help scientists understand why the United States had one of the highest infant mortality rates among developed countries. The data helped shape policies and practices that cut infant mortality nearly in half. Then the Trump administration ended new data collection, suspended access to historic data, put the program staff on leave, and left behind a disclaimer that sounds like it was drafted by the Ministry of Truth after a three-day Heritage Foundation retreat and a bad edible.

“This page does not reflect reality” may be the governing philosophy of Trump’s second term. If the data says babies are dying, reject the data. If the jobs report disappoints, fire the statistician. If Federal Reserve researchers find that American firms and consumers are paying nearly 90 percent of the cost of Trump’s tariffs, threaten the researchers. If the election numbers say you lost, demand someone find 11,780 votes.

The authoritarian trick in its purest form: first lie about reality, then delete the data that proves you are lying. Trump claims millions have been lifted off food stamps while scrapping the hunger report that would show whether those people are thriving or simply hungrier. He says prices are down while Americans stare at grocery receipts like they are reading ransom notes. And when the numbers refuse to behave, he does not change the policy. He attacks the numbers. Think of it as epistemic vandalism with a government letterhead.

While Trump’s government was busy rejecting reality at home, the rest of the world spent the week conducting what can only be described as a live-fire stress test of American credibility.

The main event was Trump’s trip to Beijing, where the reviews from abroad were less “historic triumph” and more “oh no, they sent the mark into the casino again.”

Simon Marks, watching from across the pond, was merciless. China offered Trump exactly what he craves: pomp, ceremony, flag-waving children, enthusiastic pageantry, and the full authoritarian Disney treatment. Trump lapped it up. He arrived with an entourage that included cabinet officials, tech royalty, Wall Street power, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Apple’s Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and, because we apparently now do foreign policy as a bring-your-oligarch-to-work day, Musk’s six-year-old son. What the delegation did not include, according to Marks, was a single American official steeped in Chinese history or policy. Not one.

So, to recap: the United States showed up to one of the most consequential meetings on Earth with billionaires, CEOs, and a child wandering through the Great Hall of the People, while China showed up with a strategy.

President Xi opened with the kind of sweeping geopolitical language that signals a state thinking in centuries. He spoke of global transformation, turbulence, and a “new crossroads,” invoking the Thucydides trap — the danger of conflict between a rising power and the established power it seeks to supplant. Marks dryly suggested Trump may have wondered whether the Thucydides trap was “a new kind of mouse catcher” China hoped to export to the American market. Cruel, yes. Unfair? I refer you to the entire transcript of the Trump presidency.

Then Trump responded in the only dialect he truly speaks: flattery of strongmen and flattery of himself for flattering strongmen. Xi was a “great leader.” Their relationship was “fantastic.” It was an “honor” to be Xi’s friend. People were supposedly saying this might be “the biggest summit ever.” America, according to Trump, was talking about nothing else, which must have come as a surprise to the millions of Americans mostly talking about gas prices, groceries, war, layoffs, and whether the government still measures infant mortality or has decided that too is woke.

Marks’ read of Xi’s reaction was devastating: the Chinese leader appeared to realize that Trump had come not to negotiate from strength, but to prostrate himself before the Chinese leadership and beg for business deals. That is when Xi moved in on the real issue: Taiwan.

This is where the foreign autopsies all converged.

Marks said China saw Trump coming and forced him onto the subject he least wanted to talk about. In previous meetings, U.S. officials had claimed Taiwan did not come up, which always sounded a bit like saying you met with the Pope and nobody mentioned Catholicism. This time, Taiwan not only came up; Trump’s own evolving account suggested it may have been the central issue. The Chinese readout emphasized Taiwan. The American readout tried to pretend it was not the flashing red light on the dashboard.

Bill Hayton of Chatham House reached the same grim conclusion from another angle. Trump declared the trip a “great success,” and Hayton agreed — with one small clarification: it was a great success for China. Beijing got Trump to frame Taiwan in precisely the way China wants it framed: Taiwan is very close to China, very far from America, and perhaps not worth the trouble. Hayton noted that Trump came home describing himself as neutral on additional arms sales to Taiwan, even though a $14 billion package had already been greenlit by Congress. Meanwhile, the supposed Boeing wins Trump touted can be canceled at any moment. In other words, Trump got talking points. Xi got leverage.

Professor Scott Lucas was even more direct. “China played Trump like a fiddle,” he said, and honestly, that may be the cleanest headline of the whole diplomatic catastrophe. Lucas framed the summit as a clash between Trump the transactional politician and China the strategic one. Trump got the things Trump likes: a photo-op, flattery, military ceremony, children singing, and the emotional experience of feeling like “the big man in town.” Xi got the thing Xi wanted: control of the narrative.

Lucas’ most important point was the asymmetry. China made its position unmistakable. Beijing put Taiwan at the center of the relationship and then reinforced that message through its foreign ministry and state-controlled media. The Americans, meanwhile, produced fog. Trump avoided saying Taiwan’s name. Scott Bessent suggested Trump would “re-evaluate” things when he got home. Marco Rubio insisted nothing had changed. So China left with clarity, and Washington left with a group project where every student wrote a different answer and nobody studied.

This is the problem with sending a transactional politician into a room with a strategic one. Trump thinks the win is being praised. Xi knows the win is changing the terms.

Taiwan heard the wobble. Asked aboard Air Force One whether the United States would defend Taiwan if it came to that, Trump refused to say. Asked about arms sales, he said he would be “making decisions.” Then came the sentence that probably landed in Taipei like a brick through a window: In a clear case of strategic indigestion, Trump said the last thing America needs is a war “9,500 miles away.”

The whole purpose of deterrence is that the other side believes you might act. Trump, in one airborne interview, seemed to invite Beijing to wonder whether the United States would rather sell jets, preserve the photo-op, and let Taiwan become another item in the “we’ll see what happens” drawer. When American commitments start sounding like they depend on who complimented Trump most recently, the world notices.

China certainly noticed. Hayton pointed out that Beijing had years to prepare for a second Trump administration. It stockpiled minerals and oil. It mapped out U.S. vulnerabilities, and it weaponized rare earths and processing capacity. Trump brought tariffs; China brought counterpressure. Trump brought CEOs; China brought choke points.

Reality has been busy elsewhere. In the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz crisis is no longer a hypothetical. Al Jazeera reported from Bandar Abbas, Iran’s key port city near the Strait, where maritime traffic maps showed oil tankers stalled in the water. Before Trump’s Iran war, nearly one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas moved through the Strait, with up to 140 commercial ships and tankers crossing its lanes each day. Now only a fraction are getting through.

Iran is trying to impose what it calls a new management regime over the Strait. Tehran’s message is not exactly that Hormuz is open, and not exactly that it is closed. It is open to friends and neutral countries, closed to enemies, subject to coordination with the IRGC, potentially subject to transit charges, and apparently off-limits to military vessels. So, terrific news: one of the world’s most important energy chokepoints is now operating on a vibes-based permission system run by the Revolutionary Guard.

Trump has turned Hormuz into a toll booth with missiles. The U.S. and Iran remain deadlocked not only over the Strait, but over the nuclear file, highly enriched uranium stockpiles, war reparations, Iran’s regional relationships, ballistic missiles, and security assurances. Iran says it wants guarantees that any settlement will not simply become a loop of war, ceasefire, temporary peace, and renewed confrontation. Trump has refused to rule out resuming the war. Families around the world are already paying the price in higher fuel costs, shipping disruption, and the lovely little global economic migraine that comes when a president treats war like a branding exercise.

And China? According to Hayton and Lucas, China does not appear to be rushing to bail Trump out. Hayton said Beijing does not want the Iranian regime to collapse, does not want America to prevail, and is content to watch the United States get bogged down, waste energy, and feel the economic pain first. Lucas punctured Trump’s claim that China had agreed not to provide military weapons to Iran, noting that this is not how China operates; Chinese companies can provide support while Beijing preserves deniability. Trump also claimed China wants to help reopen Hormuz. Lucas’ translation was essentially: no, it does not. China is not coming to rescue Trump from the mess he helped create.

Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake. China appears to have read that memo. Trump seems to have laminated it and used it as a coaster.

Then there is Belarus. Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Russia is trying to draw Belarus deeper into the war and may be considering operations either toward Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv-Kyiv direction or directly against a NATO country from Belarusian territory. Belarus borders Ukraine, but it also borders NATO members Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. It already served as a launchpad for Russia’s February 2022 invasion, and Minsk has since agreed to host Russian tactical nuclear weapons and Oreshnik hypersonic missiles.

Xi is testing Taiwan. Iran is testing Hormuz. Putin may be testing NATO’s flank through Belarus. Everywhere, the same question is being asked in different languages: does American deterrence still mean anything?

Colorado Governor Jared Polis commuted the sentence of Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk convicted in a scheme to copy her county’s election computer system after becoming a hero of the election-denial movement. Peters had been sentenced to nine years. Trump could not pardon her because she was convicted of state crimes, not federal ones. So he did what he could do: turned her into a MAGA martyr, screamed “FREE TINA!,” attacked Colorado officials, called Polis a “scumbag governor,” and applied political pressure until the system bent.

Peters was no innocent bystander who accidentally tripped over a Dominion server and landed in a MyPillow symposium. She may have been a willing victim of Douglas Frank, the self-styled election fraud expert whose phony algorithm claims convinced true believers across the country that their local election results had been mathematically manipulated. Frank’s roadshow reached into communities everywhere, including, full disclosure, Coos County, Oregon, where a local commissioner once brought him in to make his case, and where the antidote required importing an actual Stanford political scientist to explain why the math was nonsense. Peters absorbed Frank’s worldview and then acted on it, which is where sympathy for the deceived runs into accountability for the deeds. She snuck in an outside computer expert associated with Mike Lindell to make a copy of Mesa County’s Dominion Voting Systems election server during a state software update, after which video and photos of the upgrade, including passwords, were posted online. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold called the commutation “a dark day for democracy” and said it sent a clear message to those willing to break the law and attack democracy for Trump: they may not face consequences after all. Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, warned that the commutation signals open season on elections and election officials.

Polis argued that Peters’ sentence was unusually harsh for a first-time nonviolent offender. That may be a defensible argument in a vacuum, but politics does not happen in a vacuum; it happens in the middle of a pressure campaign by a president who has made election sabotage part of his loyalty program.

That is the whole Saturday morning picture.

At home, Trump rejects the data when it proves him wrong. Abroad, authoritarians test the lines when they sense he is weak. In Beijing, Xi gave Trump flattery and walked away with leverage. In Hormuz, Iran is trying to turn a global shipping lane into an IRGC checkpoint. In Belarus, Zelensky warns Putin may be probing the NATO frontier. And in Colorado, a woman convicted in an election-system breach gets her sentence commuted after Trump turns her into a cause.

The page does not reflect reality, says the administration.

The sentence does not reflect the crime, says the governor.

The election does not reflect the votes, says Trump.

And little by little, the institutions start bending around the lie.

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Every July, for two weeks, the members of the Bohemian Club and their guests gather here. Presidents. CEOs. Bankers. Defense contractors. Supreme Court justices. CIA directors. Cabinet secretaries. The full membership list is meant to be completely private. The proceedings are meant to be completely private. The club’s motto, carved above the entrance, is a line from Shakespeare: Weaving spiders, come not here. The implication being that business is not conducted at the Grove. That this is simply a place for powerful men to relax among their peers.

The documents say otherwise.

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The encrypted app was Signal. It is used by journalists, lawyers, congressional staffers, national security officials, and human rights workers worldwide. The prosecution’s own expert witness acknowledged he uses it himself. The dark clothing was black. The political views were anti-fascist, opposition to fascism, a position so uncontroversial for most of the last century that it required no particular courage to hold, let alone a label.

Eight people now face between ten and sixty years in federal prison for holding them.

Anti-fascism is a tactic, not an organization. Like protesting, like civil disobedience, like terrorism itself, it describes a method, in this case, the method of opposing fascism, not a membership structure with dues, hierarchy, and a mailing address. There is no antifa cell to join, no antifa leadership to surveil, no antifa headquarters to raid. This is not a legal technicality or a defense attorney’s sleight of hand. It is simply true, and the government knows it. The Trump administration’s own prosecution in Fort Worth did not require the jury to find that the “North Texas Antifa Cell”, the organization named in the indictment, actually existed. Prosecutors didn’t have to prove it because, as a matter of constitutional law, organizations operating within the United States are protected by First Amendment rights that make domestic terrorist designation a legally treacherous process. So instead, the administration designated antifa by executive order, bypassing the statutory process entirely, and then prosecuted eight people under a legal theory that required only that they be associated with a violent act, not that they committed it, planned it, or even knew it was coming.

The significance of that maneuver is difficult to overstate. “Antifa” is now whatever the executive branch needs it to be. It is a vessel, not a definition. And the Prairieland verdict is the precedent that fills it.

While eight protesters faced decades in prison for wearing black and using Signal, the President of the United States was executing roughly sixty stock trades per trading day.

The details emerged last week through mandatory ethics disclosures that the administration filed late, incurring fees for missing the reporting window. Between January and March of this year, Donald Trump’s portfolio recorded 3,642 securities transactions valued at between $220 million and $750 million, the imprecision is itself a feature of the disclosure system, which requires broad valuation bands rather than exact figures and operates on a thirty to forty-five day delay, meaning the public learns what the president traded only after the moment for accountability has passed.

The trades overlapped, with a precision that strains coincidence, with administration policy. Trump purchased significant positions in Nvidia and Boeing before their CEOs joined him on a diplomatic trip to China where deals involving both companies were announced. He bought into Coinbase, Robinhood, and SoFi during a period when his administration was issuing executive orders favorable to cryptocurrency, establishing a federal Bitcoin reserve, and launching a retirement program with Robinhood as its initial trustee. Most visibly, he built a multi-million dollar position in Dell Technologies beginning February 10th, then stood at a White House podium on May 8th and told the American public to go out and buy Dell. The stock rose twelve percent that day. The Dell family had donated $6.25 billion to the president’s signature program three months earlier. The White House has not said whether the endorsement was connected to the donation.

None of this is currently illegal. The president is exempt from the conflict of interest statutes that apply to every other federal official. The disclosure system that made these trades visible was designed for transparency, not accountability, and even that system, the administration managed to file late.

The Prairieland case did not begin as a terrorism prosecution. It began as a protest.

On the night of July 4th, 2025, a group of demonstrators gathered outside the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, a facility that at the time held nearly 900 people, the majority of whom had not been charged with any crime. They brought a megaphone. They brought sparklers and small fireworks. They spray-painted cars in the parking lot. One of them, Benjamin Song, a former Marine Corps reservist, brought an AR-15 with a modified trigger and shot a police officer in the neck. The officer survived.

Song was convicted of attempted murder. That conviction is not the story.

The story is what happened to the eight people who did not shoot anyone. Their conviction for providing material support to terrorism rested on a legal theory of guilt by association, that by being present in a group where violence was foreseeable, they had materially supported a terrorist act. The terrorist act in question was Song’s shooting. The terrorist organization in question was the “North Texas Antifa Cell,” an entity the government named in its indictment but was not required to prove existed. The evidence presented against the eight included their clothing, their use of Signal, anti-government internet memes, drawings, content from radical zines, and in at least one case, retweets of anti-fascist content on social media.

The trial itself was not without irregularity. The presiding judge, Trump appointee Mark Pittman, declared a mistrial during the first jury selection after deciding the initial jury pool showed insufficient sympathy for ICE. He then took personal charge of jury selection when the trial restarted, a highly unusual intervention. He also barred Song from presenting a self-defense argument.

Then Attorney General Pam Bondi called the verdict a landmark. The Justice Department pledged it was just the beginning.

That promise deserves to be taken seriously. The legal architecture the administration has constructed, executive order designation bypassing statutory process, material support charges requiring no proof of organizational membership, evidentiary standards that treat clothing and messaging apps as proof of criminal conspiracy, does not require another shooting to operate. It requires only a demonstration, a group of people in dark clothing, and a prosecutor willing to call them a cell.

These two stories, a president trading stocks at sixty transactions per day while exempt from the conflict of interest laws that govern everyone around him, and eight protesters facing decades in prison for standing outside a detention facility in dark clothing, are the same story told from two ends.

What the Prairieland verdict authorizes, and what the administration’s new counterterrorism strategy makes explicit, is a legal regime in which the definition of terrorism expands precisely as far as the executive needs it to. Anti-fascists today. Environmental activists tomorrow. Journalists who obtain and publish documents the administration would prefer to keep secret the day after that. The counterterrorism strategy released this month includes the line “We will find you and we will kill you.” It also targets, by name, adherents to what it calls “radical pro-transgender ideology.” It places antifa on the same threat level as ISIS and Al-Qaeda. For the record, it was written by Sebastian Gorka.

The disclosure system designed to let the public see what the president is trading was filed late. A legal opinion authorizing the extrajudicial killing of suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean is classified. The list of domestic organizations designated as terrorist is secret. The evidentiary standard required to kill someone in international waters is lower than the standard required to detain them.

Consider what it means to live inside that architecture as an ordinary person. You have worn black. You use an encrypted messaging app, or you should. You have retweeted something the government might characterize as anti-government. You have perhaps stood outside a building and said, loudly, that something happening inside it was wrong. Under the legal theory that convicted eight people in Fort Worth in March, whether any of that makes you a terrorist is not a question a jury has to answer. It is a question the executive branch answers alone, in secret, with a list no one is allowed to see.

The warning embedded in the Prairieland verdict is not that the government will come for everyone who has ever worn black to a demonstration. The warning is that it can. The precedent is set. The architecture is built. The attorney general has promised more cases are coming. And the president, who is exempt from the laws that would prevent him from profiting from his own policy decisions, filed his trading disclosures late.

Democracy is lost in the accumulation of precedents, each one normalized before the next arrives. Prairieland is a precedent. The counterterrorism strategy is a precedent. Sixty trades a day, filed late, with a system designed to tell you only after it matters, that too is a precedent.

The question is not whether you and I are on a list, but whether enough people understand what the list is for before it’s too late to say so out loud.

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Today’s story is really one giant foreign-policy casserole: Trump went to China looking for a win, because his Iran war has metastasized into an energy crisis, Republicans are starting to sweat the midterms, Congress is still refusing to reclaim its war powers, and Xi Jinping appears to understand leverage in a way that Trump mostly understands chandeliers.

The official White House version of Trump’s Beijing summit is that everything was historic, fantastic, beautiful, amazing, and probably available soon in commemorative gold-plated ballroom form. Trump emerged from two days with Xi Jinping declaring that China would buy 200 Boeing planes, maybe 750 if Boeing behaves itself, plus billions in soybeans, plus unspecified “fantastic trade deals,” plus some vague sense that Xi had become “really a friend.” As always, the deals were huge, the details were tiny, and the confirmation from the other side was largely missing in action. Neither Boeing nor Chinese officials confirmed the big plane order, and China’s public statements were notably more restrained than Trump’s traveling sales pitch from 30,000 feet.

The Guardian put it plainly: Trump left China without breakthroughs on Iran, Taiwan, or AI. The summit was heavy on pageantry and promises of stability, but light on tangible progress. There were state dinners, garden tours, ancient trees, rose seeds, business executives, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Trump’s son Eric, and all the ceremonial trappings of a superpower summit. What there was not, apparently, was a clear resolution to the major crises Trump needed solved.

That is the real story. Trump did not go to Beijing from a position of strength. He went there weakened by the prolonged war in Iran, a war he keeps insisting is either won, paused, terminated, ongoing, legally irrelevant, or about to resume depending on which reporter has annoyed him most recently. The Strait of Hormuz remains at the center of the crisis. Oil supplies have been disrupted, global energy markets are tightening, and the economic blowback is becoming a serious political problem for Republicans heading into the midterms. The Financial Times reports that Trump’s allies are openly pinning hopes on Xi Jinping to help defuse the Hormuz crisis, because China is the world’s largest oil importer and has close ties to Tehran.

Pause here to appreciate the majesty of America First: Trump starts a war with Iran, oil prices spike, Republicans panic about voters blaming them for gas and diesel prices, and now the plan is apparently to ask the Chinese Communist Party to save the GOP’s midterm prospects.

FT reports that Republicans such as Steve Daines, Kevin Cramer, and Lindsey Graham are hoping Beijing will lean on Tehran because China depends on energy flowing through the Strait. The White House claimed Trump and Xi agreed that Hormuz should remain open and that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon. But China’s own readout was much thinner, saying only that the two sides exchanged views on the Middle East. That gap is not a detail. It is the Grand Canyon wearing a diplomatic nametag.

The Guardian added a quote that may deserve its own tiny brass plaque in the Museum of Consequences. Zhou Bo, a retired Chinese army colonel and senior fellow at Tsinghua University, described the Chinese attitude toward being asked to fix the Iran mess this way: “Why should I clean your shit?”

Elegant? No. Accurate? Tragically, yes.

Trump told reporters he and Xi felt “very similar” about Iran and that both wanted the strait open. But wanting something open and persuading Iran to open it are not the same thing, especially when China has its own interests, its own relationship with Tehran, and very little incentive to rescue Trump from a crisis that drains American power and credibility. FT reported that China has given no clear indication it will help the U.S. reopen the Strait, and analysts warned Beijing may only cooperate if it is “paid handsomely,” potentially with concessions elsewhere.

Which brings us to Taiwan, where the air gets very cold very fast. Xi made Taiwan a central issue at the summit. Chinese state media said he warned Trump that mishandling Taiwan could lead to conflict and an “extremely dangerous situation.” FT reports that Trump is now undecided on a $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan after the summit, even though the package had already been authorized by his own administration. Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he would “make a determination.” That is a phrase that sounds normal until you remember he is talking about a democratic partner facing pressure from Beijing, not choosing between ketchup brands.

Even more alarming, Trump admitted that he discussed Taiwan arms sales with Xi “in great detail.” That matters because directly consulting Beijing on U.S. weapons exports to Taiwan would break decades of precedent going back to Reagan-era assurances that the U.S. would not do exactly that. When a reporter pointed this out, Trump brushed it off by saying the 1980s were a long time ago. Strategic commitments expire like yogurt when they become inconvenient to the man who thinks history began the day he descended an escalator.

Then came the most dangerous little performance of the gaggle. Asked whether the United States would defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion, Trump refused to say. “There’s only one person that knows that,” he said. “You know who it is? Me.” He also confirmed that Xi asked him directly whether he would defend Taiwan, and Trump told him he does not talk about those things.

Strategic ambiguity has long been part of U.S. policy toward Taiwan. But Trump’s version does not sound like disciplined ambiguity. It sounds like a man hiding the answer in his jacket pocket because he thinks foreign policy is more powerful when it comes with a cliffhanger.

The concern is not simply that Trump is weak. It is that he is transactional. He needs Xi’s help on Hormuz. Xi wants space on Taiwan. And suddenly Trump is undecided on a $14 billion arms package for Taipei. Far from any grand strategy, it is more like foreign policy as a pawn shop.

There was also the minor matter of Marco Rubio being sanctioned by China. Since 2020, Beijing has had Rubio on its sanctions list for his outspoken criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. The solution the two governments arrived at was simple, elegant, and deeply unserious: the sanctions applied to Senator Rubio, not Secretary of State Rubio. Same man, different hat. China’s foreign ministry confirmed the distinction with a straight face. Rubio, for his part, wandered around the Great Hall of the People marveling at the ceiling. Everyone proceeded as if this was normal.

Trump’s actual gaggle on Air Force One did not reassure anyone unless they were hoping the commander-in-chief would recreate international relations as a late-night infomercial hosted by a malfunctioning casino owner. He opened by praising Xi as “an incredible guy” and claiming they made great trade deals. Then he moved to Iran, where he said he had thrown away Tehran’s latest proposal because he did not like “the first sentence,” which he described with constitutional precision as “an unacceptable sentence.”

He went on at length about “nuclear dust,” a phrase he proudly claimed to have coined, and insisted that only the United States and maybe China had the equipment to remove it after what he called the “complete obliteration” caused by U.S. B-2 bombers. He said Iran had agreed to terms, then took them back, but would agree eventually. He sounds like a man trying to manifest compliance through repetition and aircraft trivia.

Challenged on whether the bombing campaign had produced political change in Iran, Trump erupted. He called the reporter fake, accused outlets like The New York Times and CNN of writing “sort of treasonous” coverage, and insisted the U.S. had achieved a “total military victory.” He claimed the U.S. had knocked out Iran’s navy, air force, anti-aircraft systems, radar, top leaders, second-tier leaders, third-tier leaders, and 85 percent of missile manufacturing. If there had been a fourth-tier assistant regional deputy missile-adjacent intern, Trump would have claimed we got him too.

He also threatened that the U.S. could knock out Iran’s bridges and electrical capacity within two days. So while his administration argues the war is somehow over enough to avoid congressional authorization, Trump is on Air Force One casually describing additional targets like he is browsing a demolition catalog.

That body we call Congress had another chance this week to act like the branch of government that actually has the constitutional power to authorize war. Naturally, it blinked.

The House narrowly blocked an effort to force Trump to seek congressional approval to continue the Iran conflict. The vote tied 212 to 212, which meant the measure failed. Nearly all Republicans opposed advancing it, and one Democrat, Jared Golden of Maine, joined them, casting the deciding vote while his colleagues chanted “one more” on the floor, which is either poignant or farcical depending on your remaining reserves of optimism. The 60-day War Powers deadline passed on May 1, but Trump has continued to insist that the conflict is either terminated or not subject to Congress at all, a legal theory best summarized as “because I said so and also please ignore the explosions.”

There were cracks, though. Republican Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Tom Barrett of Michigan, both in challenging re-election races, joined Thomas Massie and Democrats in supporting the effort. Barrett said plainly that Congress has the authority to authorize the use of force and that the 60-day point had already passed. Massie pointed to the economic pressure from the war, saying diesel is six dollars, gas is five, and people cannot afford fertilizer because of this conflict.

That is the kind of thing that tends to focus the mind. Constitutional principles are lovely, but nothing says “maybe we should revisit Article I” like a constituent screaming at you from a gas pump.

The administration’s legal argument is as convenient as it is absurd. Senior officials claim the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional, and also that the ceasefire pauses the withdrawal clock. Legal scholars across the ideological spectrum reject that view. Also, bombing has continued, and Trump himself said the ceasefire was on “life support.” So the ceasefire is apparently alive enough to suspend the law, but dead enough to keep bombing. Congratulations to the administration on inventing Schrödinger’s War.

Republicans defending Trump argued that forcing a vote now would send the wrong message while Trump is supposedly negotiating. Representative Rick Crawford called the effort political gamesmanship while Trump and his administration were trying to bring Iran’s “tyrannical reign” to an end. Which is a very elegant way to say: please do not interrupt the president while he asks Xi Jinping to help clean up a war he says he already won.

Back in Beijing, the summit’s symbolism was unmistakable. Xi hosted Trump at Zhongnanhai, the secretive Communist Party leadership compound near Tiananmen Square. He gave Trump a garden tour, showed him ancient trees, talked about roses, and promised to send seeds for the White House rose garden. At the state banquet the night before, Elon Musk sat alone at a long table while a parade of executives rotated through the empty seat beside him for photos. When Lei Jun, the billionaire founder of Xiaomi, one of Tesla’s fastest-growing Chinese rivals, approached and gestured for a selfie, Musk grimaced, pulled a few faces, hammed it up for the camera, then turned ostentatiously back to his phone. The clip went viral within hours. By Friday afternoon the hashtag had 75 million views on Weibo. A Chinese influencer rendered his verdict: “No matter how high you climb, as soon as you look up, you see a butt.” The diplomacy was going great.

Trump was dazzled by all of it. He later posted that “China has a Ballroom, and so should the U.S.A.!” and called Xi one of the world’s great leaders. This may be the purest distillation of Trump’s foreign policy yet: Taiwan is under pressure, Iran is burning, Hormuz is unstable, rare earths remain unresolved, AI guardrails are vague, human rights are sidelined, and the President of the United States is thinking, “Nice ballroom.”

Human rights barely made it into the discussion. Trump said Xi was giving “serious consideration” to releasing jailed pastors, likely including Pastor Ezra Jin, but that Jimmy Lai’s case was “a tough one.” After Trump left, China’s foreign ministry described Lai as an “instigator” and reiterated that Hong Kong affairs are China’s internal matters. Translation: Trump got roses. Jimmy Lai got the boot heel with paperwork.

The AI portion was similarly thin. U.S. officials floated possible guardrails and protocols around powerful AI models, but there were few concrete details and no major breakthrough. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was in the delegation, but export controls on high-end chips apparently were not a major topic, leaving Nvidia’s future in China unclear. Trump gave one of his classic answers on the subject: first suggesting the chips did not come up, then saying they did, then saying something could happen. No, yes, maybe, very strongly.

Rare earths also remained unresolved. Trump’s visit ended without visible progress on China’s restrictions on exports of critical rare earth metals, despite their importance to global supply chains. Beijing made the usual soothing noises about stability and security, but there was no sign of a major concession. Xi, in other words, kept the choke point and the garden path.

The whole summit appears to have been designed around “constructive strategic stability,” Xi’s preferred framework for keeping U.S.-China competition within limits while Beijing consolidates its own position. Analysts noted that Xi has been preparing for this moment for years: bringing an American president to Beijing as a peer, widely acknowledged as such around the world. One Chinese government adviser said the balance of power is shifting toward greater parity. That is the key. Xi did not need to humiliate Trump. He needed to host him, flatter him, press him on Taiwan, offer vague stability, and let Trump leave bragging about unconfirmed deals and ballroom architecture. It was pageantry as power politics.

Trump, bless his gold-plated little weather vane, seemed delighted. The president came home from Beijing with rose seeds, ballroom envy, and a foreign policy posture best described as: please clap, but in Mandarin.

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Donald Trump said this at a White House press gaggle on May 13, 2025, when a reporter asked directly whether the financial suffering of Americans factored into his thinking about the Iran war he had launched. He wasn’t caught off guard. He wasn’t misquoted. He was asked a simple question and gave a simple answer. The only thing that motivates him, he explained, is preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon. Everything else, the inflation, the food prices, the families choosing between electricity and groceries, doesn’t register. Not even a little bit.

He was, for once, being completely honest.

It would be easy to dismiss this as characteristic bluster, the kind of thing that gets clipped, shared, and forgotten by the next news cycle. But Trump has a habit of revealing himself most clearly when he thinks he’s making a different point entirely. What he described in that gaggle, a hierarchy in which the financial suffering of ordinary Americans doesn’t even register as a variable worth considering, is not an aberration. It is the operating system. And it is older than Trump by several centuries. The medieval term for it was feudalism. The people at the bottom were called serfs. The countries that existed to serve the lord’s interests were called vassal states. Trump, who once openly threatened to reduce Canada to exactly that status, appears to have built his entire worldview around a system he would have felt entirely at home in, provided, of course, that he was the one holding the title.

Start with the serfs.

In Arizona, food bank usage is up 42 percent. Nationally, SNAP enrollment has fallen below 40 million for the first time since 2020, not because hunger has declined, but because the administration has made the program harder to access and is now cutting $187 billion from it. The vehicle for those cuts is a piece of legislation called the One Big Beautiful Bill, which adds $4.5 trillion to the deficit while stripping food assistance from tens of millions of the poorest Americans. The Kraft Heinz CFO, on an earnings call, described the reduction in SNAP transactions as “down in line with expectations, if not even a little more than expected.” A corporation modeling the hunger of its customer base as a revenue line item, calmly, in front of investors.

In Cameron Parish, Louisiana, shrimpers who once put their children through college on a single boat now watch liquefied natural gas tankers move through waters where shrimp used to run. Their catch is roughly half what it was. Their energy bills are rising. The federal government’s own projections link LNG exports directly to higher domestic energy prices, simple supply and demand, American households competing with buyers in Berlin and Beijing for access to American gas. The profits load onto ships and leave. The costs stay.

In Lexington, Nebraska, 3,200 meatpacking workers are losing their jobs at a Tyson Foods plant while beef prices hit all-time highs. Four companies control roughly 90 percent of the American beef market. Economists and trade lawyers who have studied the industry describe a documented pattern of strategic plant closures used to suppress cattle prices while keeping beef prices elevated, a market so concentrated that the normal relationship between supply and demand has been severed. The town will not easily recover. There are no comparable employers within reach.

In New Mexico, the private equity firm Blackstone has applied to acquire PNM, the state’s largest public utility, in an $11.5 billion deal. Forty percent of PNM’s current customers already live below the poverty line. Nearly 40,000 households are behind on their utility bills. Former state regulators and energy lawyers who have reviewed the application describe a structure designed to pass the costs of Blackstone’s data center expansion onto ratepayers who cannot afford their current bills. More than 50 documents in the application have been designated confidential. The Public Regulation Commission that will decide the deal was converted from an elected body to a gubernatorial appointment two years ago.

These are not separate stories. They are the same story, told in different zip codes. In each case the mechanism is identical: common resources extracted, profits privatized, costs socialized, communities left to absorb consequences they had no voice in creating. The people at the bottom of the hierarchy pay. The people at the top collect. And the man at the top of the political hierarchy told us plainly, when asked, that he doesn’t think about any of it.

While this was happening, the President of the United States boarded Air Force One bound for Beijing. He brought no China experts, according to Brett Bruen, a former U.S. diplomat who noted the absence publicly. He brought CEOs. He brought his family. He posted on Truth Social during the flight about a tech executive’s invitation to the summit, reputation management at 30,000 feet, en route to a bilateral meeting with the second largest economy on earth. When Air Force One landed, Xi Jinping was not there. No senior Chinese officials were there. The American president was greeted by schoolchildren with flags. Earlier that same week, Xi had received Iran’s foreign minister with full ceremonial honors. Former ambassadors and protocol experts noted the downgrade immediately and without ambiguity; this was a message deliberately calibrated. Xi had read the situation correctly: this was not a head of state arriving to conduct geopolitics. This was a trade delegation, arriving to ask for things, and it was welcomed accordingly.

Ordinary Chinese citizens read it the same way. A taxi driver in Jinan, speaking to the New York Times, put it plainly: “The fact that he’s taking the initiative to visit China means that China can control him, right? It means that this trade war isn’t just unsuccessful for China, it means that the U.S. is also struggling.” A 74-year-old retiree in the same city offered a quieter observation: “Everyone wants a good life. Which ordinary person wants to fight? When you’re constantly at war, it’s the ordinary people who suffer.”

He had never heard of Cameron Parish. He understood the arithmetic perfectly.

The economics of empire are one thing. The enforcement mechanisms are another. Both begin with the same answer to the same question: who matters enough to protect, and who exists merely to be managed. At home, the answer comes through a budget. Abroad, it comes through a different kind of pressure entirely.

In Mexico, American intelligence and military operations have been conducted on sovereign territory in ways that have created a significant and documented diplomatic rupture. The factual record here is layered and requires some care, because official denials exist and are on the record. What is not in dispute: in Chihuahua, CIA operatives were present during a counter-cartel operation conducted without authorization from Mexico’s federal government. Mexico’s own attorney general confirmed the incident. President Claudia Sheinbaum acknowledged it was a violation of law. The Los Angeles Times, reporting a month before CNN picked up the story, documented that this was at least the third such operation this year, and that CIA operatives had been dressed in Chihuahua state police uniforms, not advising from a joint command center, but actively concealing their identity during operations on foreign soil.

When CNN reported the CIA had been involved in a car bombing that killed a cartel figure on a major highway outside Mexico City, the CIA called the reporting false and salacious. The New York Times offered a narrower counter-narrative: that the CIA had provided intelligence and planning support but was not physically present at the moment of the killing. A distinction involved in planning an assassination on foreign soil but not present at detonation makes for a fine line on which to rest a denial.

What requires no anonymous sources, no interpretive judgment, and no disputed claims is what happened next. Pete Hegseth sat before Congress in an open hearing and accepted congratulations from a colleague for having American military forces inside Mexico “for the first time.” He did not correct the premise, he elaborated on it, describing an “unprecedented amount of partnership” and adding: “We would encourage Defensa and Marina to continue where they can to partner and do more. That’s the expectation of the United States government, step up so that we don’t have to.” The gap between what Mexico’s government was saying publicly and what America’s Defense Secretary was saying on the record, in open session, before Congress, was not a gap at all. It was a demonstration of the hierarchy in practice. The vassal state doesn’t get to set the terms of the denial.

Austria recently scrambled Eurofighters on two consecutive days to intercept American special operations aircraft, likely U-28As operated by Air Force Special Operations Command, according to reporting in The War Zone, had entered its airspace without authorization. Not once, but twice. Austria is a NATO-adjacent neutral nation, not an adversary. These are not the habits of a power that considers its allies’ sovereignty a meaningful constraint. They are the habits of a power that has decided the rules apply to others.

Canada was supposed to be the vassal state. Trump said as much, openly, before his inauguration and repeatedly since. His National Security Strategy codified it; Canada lumped into the Western Hemisphere alongside Mexico and Latin America, subject to the same coercive economic nationalism, the same pressure to align strictly with American interests or face consequences. Kerry Buck, Canada’s former NATO ambassador, used the term without hesitation in a December 2025 analysis: vassal state, offering military protection only if Canada helps further American interests. Artur Wilczynski, a former intelligence officer, read the same document and saw a justification for political interference, the strategy’s explicit language about rewarding “government, political policies and movements broadly aligned with our principles” is, as he noted, a description of meddling in allied nations’ internal affairs. The tools of the feudal lord, updated for the 21st century.

It didn’t work. Mark Carney’s government has spent the intervening months doing what Canada’s former ambassador said was essential: diversifying, building new alliances, finding partners who don’t treat the relationship as tribute. When Carney told a room of business leaders that every country in the world, with one exception, is desperate to do more business with Canada, he wasn’t boasting. He was describing a strategy. The vassal refused the title. The lord is still waiting for the tribute that isn’t coming.

Which brings us back to the serfs.

Trump’s feudal worldview is not subtle. He has told us, in plain language, who he thinks about, and it is not Americans struggling with food prices, and not shrimpers watching their coastline industrialized for foreign profit, not meatpackers losing jobs in towns that will become ghost towns, and not utility customers who cannot keep their lights on. He thinks about the lords. The CEOs on Air Force One, billionaires whose tax cuts are financed by cutting food assistance to tens of millions of people. The investors whose returns are protected by a government that calls itself the people’s champion while modeling their hunger as a revenue line item.

The countries he calls vassals are the ones that haven’t yet submitted. The ones that have are called partners. Mexico tolerates CIA operations on its soil and receives partnership language from a Defense Secretary taking congressional bows. Canada refused and is building a future without him. The difference between a vassal and an ally, in this framework, is simply the degree of submission.

Here is what history records, reliably and without exception: feudalism ends.

In 1381, English peasants marched on London. They had been taxed to fund wars they had no stake in, watched their lords demand more while delivering less, and finally named what was being done to them. Wat Tyler led perhaps 100,000 people to the capital. The revolt was suppressed. Tyler was killed. The young king made promises he immediately broke. And yet the poll tax was abandoned, serfdom in England began its terminal decline, and the lords who believed they had won discovered over the following century that they had only postponed the inevitable. They won the battle. They lost the system.

In the 13th century, a collection of Swiss cantons found themselves effectively vassals of the Habsburg empire, required to pay tribute, required to defer, required to accept the terms the empire set. They did not storm Vienna. They did something quieter and more durable. They organized laterally, building obligations to each other rather than petitioning upward for better treatment from the lord. They created parallel structures of mutual support that made the Habsburg extractive relationship progressively less relevant. When the empire eventually sent an army, at Morgarten in 1315, it met people who had already decided they were no longer vassals and were willing to defend that decision. The Swiss Confederation that emerged was not built on a single dramatic uprising. It was built on the prior decision to stop waiting for the empire to become fair.

In 1776, a group of men who thought of themselves as freeborn English subjects sat down and wrote a document explaining why they would no longer pay tribute to a king who taxed them without their consent, quartered soldiers in their homes, and treated their complaints as sedition. They did not write that the king was unkind. They wrote a 27-count indictment, specific charge by specific charge, each grievance documented, each remedy implied. Thomas Jefferson understood that a vague complaint is easily absorbed and forgotten. A specific indictment creates a standard. It names what is owed. It records what was refused. It makes the refusal visible to everyone who comes after.

In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi walked 240 miles to the sea and made salt. The British Empire had made it illegal for Indians to produce or sell salt without paying a tax to the Crown, one of the clearer examples in history of a lord extracting tribute from a basic resource the people needed to survive. Gandhi’s march was nonviolent by strategy, not by naivety. He understood that the empire’s violence was its vulnerability. When colonial police beat unarmed marchers at Dharasana, the world watched. The empire discredited itself. The vassal did not need to match the lord’s force. The vassal needed the lord to reveal what it actually was.

None of these people were waiting for the system to fix itself. None of them were asking the lord to become more generous. They were doing something both simpler and more difficult: naming the system, counting themselves, and deciding that the arithmetic entitled them to something different. The arithmetic has not changed.

The most durable of these transformations did not come through violence. They came through something the Swiss understood instinctively and Gandhi understood strategically: that the most powerful thing a vassal can do is stop organizing their life around the lord’s terms. Build lateral and build local. Build relationships of mutual obligation that make the extractive relationship progressively irrelevant. Not a single dramatic confrontation, but a sustained, deliberate construction of something the lord cannot easily tax, cannot easily seize, and cannot easily destroy, because it belongs to everyone and to no one in particular.

In the parts of this series that follow, that is the tradition we intend to explore. Not the romance of uprising, but the harder and more lasting work of building structures that distribute power rather than concentrate it. The Swiss cantons did not petition the Habsburgs for better terms. They made the Habsburg terms irrelevant. That is the model. That is our work.

Trump told us he doesn’t think about anybody.

The question the rest of us need to sit with is whether we are thinking about each other.

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Donald Trump arrived in China this week for his first presidential visit there in nine years, and Beijing delivered exactly the kind of pageantry his brain treats as a love language: red carpets, military formations, cheering children, ornate halls, gold detailing, and enough theatrical symbolism to keep the whole thing feeling historic rather than desperate. But there was a tell in the staging. Trump was not greeted on arrival by Xi Jinping or even by senior ministers. He was greeted by children waving American and Chinese flags, which Trump praised as “happy,” “beautiful,” and “amazing.” It was spectacle calibrated for his ego, not status calibrated for American power. Beijing gave him the visuals. It did not give him deference.

And in an otherwise dirty Beijing sky, that felt like a signal. The Guardian noted that this visit did not come with the “blue sky” treatment Beijing rolled out in 2017, when factories were reportedly ordered to halt production and polluting cars were restricted ahead of Trump’s first state visit. This time no such effort appeared to have been made. The air quality index was over 150, shrouding the city in gray smog. So Trump came looking for a triumph and got a welcome ceremony under a warning label.

Speaking at the Great Hall of the People, Xi opened with a reference to the Thucydides Trap, the idea that conflict becomes more likely when an established power feels threatened by a rising one, and framed the summit as a civilizational inflection point. “The world has come to a new crossroads,” he said. “Can China and the United States overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major country relations?” He cast the two countries as co-equal great powers facing questions “vital to history, to the world, and to the people.” He congratulated the United States on the 250th anniversary of its independence and said the two nations have “more common interests than differences.” His key message was disciplined and strategic: China and the United States should be “partners, not rivals.”

That sounds warm, but it is not just warm. It is Beijing’s preferred operating system. “Partners, not rivals” is not merely an olive branch; it is a demand that Washington stop treating China’s ambitions as something to resist and start treating them as something to accommodate. In Xi’s version, stability means accepting a “new paradigm” for relations between major powers. Translation: China wants to be treated not as a challenger to the U.S.-led order, but as a power entitled to rewrite the rules of that order.

Then Trump spoke, and the register dropped from great-power theory to Yelp review of the parade. He praised the children, “they were happy, they were beautiful, they were amazing.” He praised the military display. He praised Xi personally. He praised China. He praised his own relationship with Xi. He praised the business executives he had brought with him. He called Xi a “great leader,” then noted that some people do not like when he says that, but he says it anyway because “it’s true.” As always, any time Trump says he only tells the truth, somewhere a fact-checker’s printer catches fire.

Trump appeared eager throughout, not just friendly, but visibly seeking approval. He did not sound like a president arriving to negotiate from strength. He sounded like a man trying very hard not to disappoint the host. Xi sat inside the language of state power: history, destiny, stability, the future of humanity. Trump offered adjectives: fantastic relationship, amazing children, greatest businessmen in the world. And then, in one sentence, he turned an American delegation into tribute. “They are here today,” Trump told Xi, “to pay respect to you, to China.”

What a delegation it was. The cast of players standing behind Trump at the Great Hall of the People was basically the summit agenda wearing name tags. At the front were the officials: Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller — men who have spent years denouncing Beijing across every available frequency. Rubio was sanctioned by China in 2020 over his criticism of human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Bessent has called Beijing an unreliable trade partner. Hegseth has criticized China’s actions in the South China Sea. Miller has accused China of distorting the global trading system through theft. There they all were, taking their places in the receiving line, shaking Xi’s hand beneath the gold ceilings. The anti-China chorus had arrived for its protocol rehearsal.

Behind them came the money. The full apparatus of American financial services: Citi, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, Mastercard, each with obvious interests in market access and financial openings. Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg, hoping for aircraft orders. Cargill’s Brian Sikes, seeking restored Chinese purchases of U.S. beef, sorghum, and soybeans. And then the semiconductor bloc: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Micron’s Sanjay Mehrotra, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon, and Apple’s Tim Cook. If you want to understand the real U.S.-China rivalry, follow the chips. Washington wants to block Beijing from advanced technologies. American companies want to keep selling into the Chinese market. The summit becomes a geopolitical group therapy session, and the conclusion was predictable: Washington wants leverage, Wall Street wants access, Silicon Valley wants sales, and Trump wants everyone to clap when he says “deal.”

Because subtlety was detained at customs, Eric Trump and Lara Trump were also there. The Trump Organization says Eric attended in a personal capacity to support his father, and that he has no business ventures in China and no plans to pursue any. Fine. Wonderful. Completely reassuring. But when the president’s son, who runs the family business while his father is in office, stands in the Great Hall of the People and shakes hands during a summit packed with corporate executives seeking Chinese market access, the optics are not subtle. They are not even optics anymore. They are a Times Square billboard blinking: conflicts of interest, now with state banquet. It is worth pausing to imagine the Republican response had Joe Biden brought Hunter to Beijing under equivalent circumstances. The hearings alone would have required their own C-SPAN channel.

The Chinese side, by contrast, looked like the state. Xi’s lineup included loyalists and technocrats: Cai Qi, his right-hand man; He Lifeng, the vice premier overseeing economic policy; Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat; Wang Wentao, the minister of commerce; finance, foreign affairs, defense, and planning officials. Beijing sent the machinery of the party-state. Trump brought the machinery of American capitalism, the machinery of American government, his campaign operation, and the family brand. It was not a delegation. It was a lobbying bundle with Secret Service protection.

Xi used the summit to tell Trump that Taiwan is not a side issue. It is, in his words, “the most important issue in China-U.S. relations.” If mishandled, Xi said, the two countries could face “confrontation or even conflict,” pushing the entire relationship into “a highly dangerous situation.” The warning was stark, deliberate, and public, delivered not in a private message but in the official Xinhua readout, meaning it was intended for every audience simultaneously: Trump, Taiwan, Tokyo, Manila, and the world.

Xi wrapped the summit in the language of partnership, but Taiwan was the demand inside the packaging. China claims sovereignty over the self-governing island and has threatened to take it by force if Taipei resists indefinitely. Taiwan’s foreign ministry responded by saying Beijing is “the sole risk to regional peace and stability” and that Taiwan would continue cooperating with the United States and other countries that uphold freedom and democracy.

The danger is not simply that Xi is applying pressure. The danger is that Trump may see Taiwan less as a democratic partner than as a bargaining chip. Officials and analysts fear Xi could try to extract concessions from Trump on Taiwan in exchange for cooperation elsewhere, perhaps help pressuring Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, progress on trade, or shiny business deals Trump can wave around as proof that he alone can make the world obey. There is concern that Trump might reduce arms sales to Taipei, or shift U.S. diplomatic language from the current stance of not supporting Taiwanese independence to Beijing’s preferred wording that Washington actively “opposes” it. That may sound like diplomatic hairsplitting, but in this context words are weapons, and Beijing knows exactly how to use them.

The timing matters. The Trump administration approved a record $11.1 billion arms package for Taiwan late last year, air defense systems, missiles, the infrastructure of deterrence, and is reportedly preparing another package worth at least $14 billion. Xi’s warning was not philosophical. It was directional. It was aimed at the next move.

When reporters asked Trump about Taiwan afterward, he was quiet. That silence is its own headline. He can gush about Xi, the children, the military precision, the welcome, the CEOs, the dinner, and the “magnificent” hospitality. But when asked about the democratic island Beijing is threatening, suddenly the man who cannot stop talking discovers restraint.

The trade talks are being dressed up in the language of “strategic stability,” which is what great powers call transactional horse-trading when the tablecloth is expensive. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the two sides were discussing a possible “Board of Trade” and “Board of Investment.” The trade board would reportedly identify about $30 billion in non-sensitive or low-value Chinese goods that the U.S. does not want to produce and could earmark for lower tariffs. Fireworks were cited as an example. China, in turn, might buy more U.S. fuel to diversify its energy sources, while both sides explore non-sensitive areas for investment.

China also granted permission for hundreds of American slaughterhouses to resume beef shipments before the talks began. It is exactly the kind of concrete deliverable Trump can sell as a win: beef, Boeing orders, soybeans, market access. The trade truce the two sides are hoping to extend came after a tariff war in which both sides hit each other with duties of more than 100 percent, which is the economic equivalent of two people setting fire to their own houses to warm their hands.

Xi said there are “no winners” in a trade war, which is true, although Trump has spent years trying to prove there can be many losers if one man is sufficiently committed.

Then there is the technology fight. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was reportedly expected to try to revive talks over Chinese orders for advanced H200 chips, a conversation that matters because whoever controls the infrastructure layer of artificial intelligence effectively controls the commanding heights of the next economy. The presence of Nvidia, Micron, and Qualcomm underscores the central contradiction of the entire summit. The United States wants to limit China’s access to advanced semiconductors and AI capabilities. U.S. companies want to sell. China wants access, leverage, and relief from the export controls that have been throttling its technology sector. Trump wants to declare victory before anyone reads the fine print.

The contradictions extend beyond chips. Meta’s Dina Powell McCormick was also in the delegation at a moment when Beijing has forced the company to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of Chinese AI startup Manus, intervening after the deal was done, leaving Meta weighing whether to sell to a new buyer, return the business to existing investors, or find new backers. It is a reminder that market access in China is not a negotiation you win once. It is a toll road with variable pricing and a gatekeeper who changes the rules mid-journey.

The Iran war hangs over everything. Trump told reporters he wanted “a long talk” with Xi about Iran, while also insisting he did not need any help. A diplomatic equivalent of texting “I’m fine” from inside a burning building. China is the largest buyer of Iranian oil, and the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively blocked since the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran began in late February, sending energy markets into crisis and driving U.S. inflation to a three-year high in April. Rubio said on the way to Beijing that the United States hoped to convince China to play a more active role in getting Iran to back down in the Persian Gulf, which is a polite way of saying Washington flew to Beijing to ask for help with a war it started.

The White House said both sides agreed that the strait must remain open and that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. Chinese state media’s summary was more restrained, saying only that the Middle East was discussed. The gap between those two readouts is itself a measure of how much was actually resolved. Xi expressed “interest” in increasing China’s purchases of U.S. oil, which is the geopolitical equivalent of offering to think about it.

Trump arrived in Beijing needing Xi’s help while performing as if needing help were dominance.

What’s missing from the agenda is as revealing as what is on it. Human rights are not expected to feature meaningfully, if at all. Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch noted that Trump has been hostile to the concept itself, making it difficult to imagine the issue surviving contact with a Trump-Xi meeting. Jimmy Lai, the imprisoned Hong Kong media mogul, was mentioned as a possible agenda item, Trump said he would raise the case, but the broader architecture of repression, Xinjiang, the dismantling of Hong Kong’s freedoms, the surveillance state, is not on the table.

Climate cooperation is also absent, despite the United States and China together accounting for nearly half of global emissions. In 2017, Beijing cleared its skies for Trump’s arrival, factories idled, polluting vehicles banned, the air scrubbed clean for the occasion. This time, no such effort was made. The air quality index sat above 150, the city wrapped in gray smog. So the world’s two largest powers met under polluted skies to discuss markets, military risk, technology, oil, and trade, while the climate crisis waited outside without a badge.

The New York Times added another useful layer by talking to ordinary people in China. For everyday Chinese residents, Trump is not an abstraction, but a market volatility with hair. A steel trader in Fuzhou said tense U.S.-China relations were hurting his business. A taxi driver in northern China complained that rising global gas prices amid the Iran war were costing him more at the pump. An investor in Beijing said Trump’s words can “stir up things globally” because he says one thing today and another tomorrow. She was watching her portfolio, because apparently one man’s impulse control problem is now an asset class.

Others were blunter. One woman said some of Trump’s words and actions seem like “stand-up comedy” to people in China. A nail salon worker said he was “not friendly to China” and questioned why the United States could not simply change presidents. An 18-year-old hairdresser called him “quite brutal.” A taxi driver in Jinan argued that Trump’s decision to come to China proved the United States was struggling too, that China, in effect, had won the staring contest.

Not all of it was grounded in reality. Some negative views had clearly been shaped by misinformation circulating on Chinese social media, including a claim that beggars in the United States eat human flesh, and another that the U.S. dumped bodies in the sea during the pandemic. But the more grounded voices were consistent: Trump is erratic, transactional, and dangerous. Almost everyone hoped the summit might reduce tensions. One retiree put it plainly: “Everyone wants a good life. Which ordinary person wants to fight?”

Chinese state media, meanwhile, was selling a different story, not to the world, but to itself. Trump’s visit was framed as a diplomatic victory for Beijing, a sign of China’s rising parity with the United States, and an opportunity for Washington to accept the “right way” for the two countries to coexist. State media avoided attacking Trump by name, preserving the fragile trade truce. But the message underneath was clear enough: China arrived at this summit feeling like the stronger hand. Whether that is true will depend entirely on what Trump agrees to once he is back on Air Force One and the pageantry has worn off.

The most revealing moment came not during the bilateral talks but at the state dinner, when Xi raised his glass and told Trump that the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and “making America great again” could go hand in hand. Not casual flattery; that was message discipline. Xi folded Trump’s own slogan into the Chinese Communist Party’s civilizational project, telling Trump, in effect, that his personal brand and Beijing’s national destiny are compatible, as long as Washington stops treating China as an adversary and starts accepting Beijing’s preferred terms. Trump thanked Xi for a “magnificent welcome like none other” and invited him to the White House in September.

Trump thinks he is being honored. Beijing thinks he is being handled. Xi came to define the century. Trump came to be liked. Somewhere in the gap between those two ambitions, Taiwan is waiting to find out what was actually said in that room.

More to follow.

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As Trump left for Beijing, a reporter asked whether Americans’ financial pain was motivating him to make a deal with Iran. Inflation is back. The war bill is exploding. Oil markets are twitching like a cat in a thunderstorm. And Trump’s answer was: “Not even a little bit.” Then, just to make sure nobody mistook cruelty for concision, he added, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

There it is. No need for a think tank panel. No need for a 900-page Project 2025 appendix. No need for a New York Times “five people familiar with the president’s thinking” reconstruction. The man just told us. He does not think about Americans. He does not think about anybody. He thinks about domination, revenge, personal enrichment, television lighting, and whether the new ballroom is big enough for the next autocracy cosplay gala.

Because subtlety is dead and buried somewhere under the East Wing rubble, Trump paired that declaration with another revealing performance: sneering at a Black woman reporter who dared ask about his White House ballroom project. “You dumb person,” he said. “You are not a smart person.” Then, because racism and misogyny apparently needed a cameo in the same scene, he added, “I know you don’t mind dirt.” The question was about cost, accountability, and hypocrisy. Trump answered by making it personal, which is what he does whenever the public money trail gets too close to his gold-plated comfort zone.

The timing would be stunning if we were still capable of being stunned. Trump made these remarks while threatening to restart the war with Iran if Tehran does not accept his terms. He insisted Iran is “very much under control” and said the U.S. would either make a deal or Iran would be “decimated.” This would be a little more reassuring if the administration’s own intelligence picture did not appear to be screaming into a pillow.

According to the New York Times, classified U.S. intelligence assessments say Iran still has operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, retains roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile, still has about 70 percent of its mobile launchers, and has regained access to about 90 percent of its underground missile storage and launch facilities nationwide. Trump keeps saying Iran’s military is gone, while U.S. intelligence is apparently saying Iran still has missiles, launchers, underground facilities, and access to the oil chokepoint that helps determine what families pay to drive to work.

The sales pitch now goes like this: Iran is “decimated,” except not really. The war is “under control,” except the ceasefire is fraying. The enemy is finished, except it still has substantial missile capability. The president is protecting Americans, except he just said their financial situation does not matter to him. The intelligence community apparently missed the memo. Or read it, classified it, and watched it get ignored anyway in a White House press gaggle.

Alas, the bill is already here, and it is not written in invisible ink. The Pentagon now estimates the Iran war has cost about $29 billion, up $4 billion in two weeks. The Pentagon’s acting comptroller told lawmakers that the new figure includes updated repair and replacement costs and operational costs for keeping forces in the conflict zone. And that is before we even get to the fact that the administration’s record-setting defense budget request does not include the Iran war.

Pete Hegseth went to Congress to defend the budget and somehow managed to make “trust me, bro” sound like official Pentagon doctrine. Lawmakers pressed him on the supplemental funding request, the condition of U.S. munitions stockpiles, and how the administration plans to pay for more war. Hegseth refused to give clear answers on timing and objected to questions about depleted munitions, saying the issue had been “foolishly and unhelpfully overstated.”

This is the part where we are supposed to feel comforted, because the Pentagon has plenty of everything it needs, except answers, money, a strategy, a timeline, and maybe several years’ worth of critical munitions.

The Washington Post’s rundown of the hearings made clear that frustration is no longer confined to Democrats. Republicans joined in pressing Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine about the war’s costs, the administration’s plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and what exactly the endgame is supposed to be. Susan Collins said it seemed as though there had been “a different plan, almost daily.” Lindsey Graham complained, “No wonder this damn thing is going nowhere.” Rep. Ken Calvert asked for the supplemental request sooner rather than later. Rep. Harold Rogers warned that Iran does not need to be a peer military to cause serious problems, especially if the United States is burning through munitions and air defenses.

That last point should be engraved over the entrance to every hearing room in Washington: Iran does not need to defeat the United States to damage it. It only needs to make the war expensive, make the strait unsafe, make oil markets panic, and make the administration choose between escalation and humiliation. Not a glorious victory, but a trap with a Pentagon invoice attached.

The $29 billion estimate may still be understating the real cost. That figure does not include damage Iran has caused to American bases. A prior Washington Post analysis found Iranian forces had damaged or destroyed at least 228 U.S. structures or pieces of equipment since the war began, including aircraft, hangars, barracks, fuel depots, radar, and air-defense equipment. The invoice, in other words, has a second page.

Trump calls this “under control.” Congress, oil markets, U.S. intelligence, and basic arithmetic appear to disagree.

The regional picture is deteriorating in ways that make the domestic cost argument look almost quaint. A war fought over oil is now threatening to ignite the entire basin that produces it. The Guardian reports that the UAE secretly launched a major attack on Iran during the conflict, including a strike on Lazan Island shortly before the April 7 ceasefire, meaning one of the Gulf’s most consequential players may already be a retaliatory target if the ceasefire collapses. Kuwait has accused members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of attempting attacks on Bubiyan Island, a strategically positioned piece of territory at the mouth of the waterway connecting Kuwait to the Gulf.

Saudi figures are now warning that a broader war could threaten oil facilities, desalination plants, the hajj, and the Vision 2030 projects that represent the kingdom’s entire bet on a post-oil future. That last detail deserves a moment’s pause. Threatening the hajj is not a diplomatic abstraction, it is potentially destabilizing to every majority-Muslim government in the world simultaneously.

The war Trump describes as clean, controlled, and basically won is metastasizing. The Strait remains closed. The Gulf states are being pulled in. And the ceasefire holding it all together was described by Trump himself as being on life support.

Now, because history has a sick sense of humor, Trump has arrived in Beijing. The Financial Times reports that he landed in China demanding that Xi Jinping “open up” China to American business. That, he said, would be his “very first request.” De-escalating Iran could wait. Stabilizing oil markets could wait. Reassuring Taiwan, untangling rare earths, managing AI chip competition, addressing the global economic fallout from his own trade chaos, all of it could wait. The first ask was for China to become more hospitable to corporate America.

Naturally, he brought along a billionaire sampler platter: Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg, Meta’s Dina Powell McCormick, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, among others. The summit is clouded by Iran, Taiwan, trade, tech, rare earths, and AI competition, but Trump’s public posture is basically: “President Xi, please open the market so these brilliant people can work their magic.”

Trump says he does not think about Americans’ financial situation. But he does think about Larry Fink’s, Stephen Schwarzman’s, Elon Musk’s, Tim Cook’s, Boeing’s, Meta’s, and Nvidia’s. Those financial situations made it all the way onto Air Force One.

The Nvidia detail is especially instructive. Jensen Huang was reportedly not on the original list of business leaders traveling to China. Then Trump saw reports that Huang was not coming, called him, and invited him personally. Huang flew to Alaska and boarded Air Force One during a refueling stop because the presidential aircraft now offers emergency pickup service for semiconductor executives with China-market dreams.

This is not just weird optics. Nvidia’s chips are central to the global AI race, and sales to China have been a major national-security flashpoint. Huang has spent nearly a year lobbying officials in Washington and Beijing to allow Nvidia to sell AI chips to China. Trump previously approved sales of an older generation of Nvidia chips and even planned for the U.S. government to take a cut of those sales, though Beijing has not approved the purchases. Some Republicans and administration officials have pushed back against more advanced chip sales for national-security reasons.

Air Force One apparently had time for a midair pickup of the Nvidia CEO, but Trump had “not even a little bit” of time to think about Americans paying war-inflated gas prices.

Then there is Hegseth’s presence in Beijing, which already felt unusual because the Financial Times notes he is the first U.S. defense secretary to accompany a president on a China trip. Under a different administration, that would be a significant diplomatic signal. Under this one, it arrives with a large side order of crusader cosplay.

The Guardian reports that Hegseth is scheduled to headline a National Mall faith rally this weekend alongside far-right and Christian nationalist figures, including speakers who have called the Democratic platform “demonic,” defended torture, promoted election-denial rhetoric, and said they would die in the fight to overturn the 2020 election. The lineup reportedly includes no Muslims, no representatives of historically Black churches, no Indigenous faith leaders, and no mainline Protestants.

The same reporting notes Hegseth’s own writings foreground anti-Muslim rhetoric, crusader imagery, and the idea of a U.S. military “taking sides” in a coming American civil war. He has hosted monthly Christian prayer services at the Pentagon, and during one service after the Iran war began, he prayed that God would “break the teeth” of U.S. enemies.

So the man Trump brought to Beijing to project credibility is also widely regarded as the least qualified person ever to hold the office, a defense secretary who spent Tuesday stonewalling his own party’s appropriators about war costs and munitions levels, and whose weekend calendar involves headlining a Christian nationalist rally on the National Mall. The same administration is threatening to restart bombing Iran, insisting the enemy is “decimated” despite intelligence suggesting otherwise, and asking Congress to fund a conflict it still cannot explain.

Trump brought CEOs to Beijing to sell access. He brought Hegseth to sell strength. But Hegseth’s weekend schedule suggests something else entirely: this administration is not just militarizing foreign policy. It is consecrating it.

Trump’s own financial situation, meanwhile, appears to be receiving very careful attention. The New York Times reports that Justice Department officials are discussing a potential settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS, which could involve the government providing taxpayer funds or another public benefit to the president. One possible term under review: the IRS dropping audits of Trump, his family members, and his businesses.

Read that again slowly, preferably away from sharp objects. Trump sued the IRS, an agency he now oversees. His own Justice Department is reportedly exploring whether to settle the suit. One option under discussion could protect Trump and his family businesses from audits. IRS procedures call for mandatory audits of the president and vice president’s annual tax returns, and federal law prohibits a president from ordering the start or conclusion of an audit of a specific taxpayer.

The judge overseeing the case has not been passive about any of this. She has already questioned whether a genuine legal controversy can exist when Trump controls the agency he is suing, appointed six independent lawyers to investigate the conflict of interest, and set a hard deadline requiring both sides to explain whether they are genuinely in conflict. According to the Times, officials have been exploring a settlement before that deadline arrives, which would allow the arrangement to take effect before she can rule on whether the lawsuit is even legitimate.

Trump does not think about Americans’ financial situation. He does, however, appear deeply invested in Trump’s financial situation. Funny how that works.

Because no Trump-era news day is complete without a senior official turning congressional oversight into community theater for grievance addicts, we also have Kash Patel. We have not picked on Kash in a while, and thankfully Congress remembered to check whether the FBI director was still out there doing FBI-director-adjacent things.

Patel was pressed at a hearing over allegations about excessive drinking, unexplained absences, and his conduct at the bureau. Rather than projecting calm institutional leadership, he denied the allegations, pointed to his lawsuit against The Atlantic, and turned the exchange into another MAGA grievance scrum. This is apparently what passes for reassuring the public that the FBI is in steady hands: less J. Edgar Hoover, more podcast host who just found out the green room ran out of Celsius.

Kash deserves his own section today because he is not merely comic relief. He is part of the larger pattern. These people treat oversight as a personal insult. Hegseth cannot explain the war bill. Trump insults reporters who ask about public spending. The Justice Department may settle Trump’s personal IRS suit. Kash Patel gets questioned by Congress and responds as if accountability is a form of targeted harassment. The FBI director was there to justify his budget. He left reminding everyone why oversight exists.

Which brings us, mercifully, to Heather Cox Richardson, who has been saying out loud what a lot of us have been watching with increasing alarm: Trump is not okay. She pointed to his overnight posting patterns, the AI slop, the obsessive demands for arrests, the fixation on the Russia investigation, and the way he keeps circling back to the people who exposed or investigated his ties to Russian operatives.

That observation matters because this is not gossip. Whether the person threatening to restart a war with Iran, flying to Beijing with billionaires, and brushing off Americans’ financial pain is operating from anything resembling stability is not a parlor game. War powers depend on it. Markets respond to it. And the people of Tehran, sleeping in parks because they cannot distinguish earthquakes from airstrikes, are living inside the answer.

HCR’s broader question is even more important: why are Republicans still going along with this? Her answer cuts past the usual excuses about primaries and mean tweets. She argues that Republicans still clinging to Trump have accepted the idea that Democratic governance itself is illegitimate, that if majorities elect Democrats, that outcome must be blocked, undermined, or structurally prevented.

That is the connective tissue between Trump’s redistricting brag, his openness to sending National Guard or ICE to voting locations, his terror of a Democratic House with subpoena power, and the GOP’s willingness to keep funding the whole circus. They are not waiting for Trump to become normal. They are trying to preserve power long enough to make normal voters irrelevant.

HCR also ties the economic story together: the Iran war, Trump’s ballroom, tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, the rising debt, and the larger question of what Republicans are doing with public money. That question may define the summer. Americans are being asked to pay for the war, pay for higher gas prices, pay for the debt from tax cuts for the rich, brace for cuts to programs they rely on, and somehow also pay for Trump’s vanity projects and personal legal escape hatches.

Trump said he does not think about Americans. Today’s news is the receipt.

Fuel prices are up and the war bill is climbing, but Americans are not on his mind. The Pentagon dodges questions about munitions and costs, but Americans are not on his mind. Iran retains most of its missiles and the Strait stays closed, but Americans are not on his mind. He boards Air Force One with billionaires and flies to Beijing to open markets for corporate America, but Americans are not on his mind. His Justice Department quietly explores a settlement that could immunize him from financial scrutiny, but Americans are not on his mind. His party rigs maps, dodges oversight, and works methodically to make democratic accountability harder to enforce, but Americans are not on his mind.

Trump finally told the truth. He does not think about Americans’ financial situation. The only surprise is that anyone in his party still thinks Americans will not eventually notice who keeps getting the plane rides, the settlements, the ballroom, the market access, and the protection, and who keeps getting the bill.

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Trump declared himself the “father of fertility,” which is a sentence that should have caused every woman in the room to stare silently into the middle distance until the Secret Service got nervous. Instead, Senator Katie Britt all but pulled out a lighter and swayed in the front row like Donald Trump was closing the encore with “Free Bird.” She praised him for stepping in on IVF, creating a “comprehensive culture of life,” and making moms the “heartbeat” of the country, while the whole performance unfolded like a fan club meeting with federal letterhead.

It was, in a word, devotional, typical of someone suffering from Trump Devotional Syndrome. It was especially so, because Britt is not just a senator performing gratitude for the boss. She is a mother; she knows, or should know, that supporting mothers is not the same thing as using motherhood as decorative bunting for a political agenda that excludes huge numbers of actual women raising actual children under actual pressure.

The central contradiction is simple. They talked about “mothers” as if they meant all mothers, but the policies tell a much narrower story. This agenda supports the right kind of mother, in the right kind of family, using the right kind of care, making the right kind of reproductive choices, preferably with an employer, a husband, a tax liability, and a deep appreciation for being sent to a government website.

The fertility announcement is a perfect example. The administration is proposing a new category of “limited excepted benefits” so employers can voluntarily offer fertility benefits outside regular health insurance, much like dental or vision coverage. That may help some workers whose employers choose to offer it, but it’s not universal IVF coverage, it’s not a guarantee, and it does very little for the woman working part-time, freelancing, uninsured, underinsured, or employed by a company that decides fertility benefits are not its problem. The proposed rule itself says these fertility benefits would be excepted from many of the federal requirements that apply to regular health coverage.

Then there is TrumpRx, which was presented as if the heavens had opened and affordable medicine floated down on a golden escalator. Yes, the White House has announced discounts on some fertility drugs, including Cetrotide and Ovidrel, and those discounts may matter for some people paying cash. But KFF points out the catch that somehow did not make it into the pom-pom routine: TrumpRx coupons are generally for self-pay customers, they do not count toward insurance deductibles or out-of-pocket maximums, and the advertised “savings” are based on list prices that often do not reflect what insured consumers actually pay.

So, when they say this is for “moms,” what they often mean is this may help a subset of people trying to become parents, under certain employment and payment conditions, if the right employer participates, if the right medication is included, and if the discount beats whatever their insurance would have done. Which reads less like a social safety net, and more like a coupon book wearing a tiny flag pin.

Moms.gov is another beautiful piece of branding wrapped around a much thinner reality. HHS says the site features pregnancy centers, Federally Qualified Health Centers, nutritional guidance, Trump Accounts, and other resources for new and expecting parents. Fine, information can be useful. But a website isn’t paid leave, it’s not affordable childcare, it’s not postpartum care, and it is not a safe ride to a rural hospital three counties away.

A website can tell you where the resources are, assuming they exist, assuming you qualify, assuming the clinic is open, assuming you have transportation, assuming you can get off work, assuming the baby doesn’t need something right now while the government congratulates itself for having “invented” tabs.

The childcare section was where the Heritage Foundation’s fingerprints were easiest to see. Project 2025 says families made up of a married mother, father, and children are the foundation of a healthy society, and it calls for replacing policies it claims subsidize single motherhood or penalize marriage. Heritage’s newer family report calls for making the value of paid childcare benefits available for at-home parental child raising, which sounds neutral until you notice how neatly it pushes policy away from universal care and toward a particular family model.

Which is why the “choice” language is so slippery. The administration says it’s restoring parental choice by rolling back Biden-era childcare rules, including rules on paying providers based on enrollment and paying in advance. But for many families, “choice” without funding is just vibes. You can “choose” a faith-based provider that has no openings, “choose” a relative who can’t afford to quit work, “choose” to stay home when rent is due, or “choose” a childcare center that costs more than your paycheck. Congratulations, Mom, you have options in the same way a person on a sinking ship has waterfront views.

And then there is Planned Parenthood, the little policy detail that tells the truth about the whole production. The 2025 budget reconciliation law blocked Medicaid payments for one year to certain reproductive health providers that provide abortion care, and KFF reports that the ban includes all services at those entities, including contraceptive care, preventive care, and other services, not just abortion. It affects Planned Parenthood affiliates and other providers across 39 states.

That isn’t supporting all mothers. That’s not even supporting all women who might become mothers. That’s taking health care away from low-income patients and then standing in front of a Moms.gov logo to announce how much you cherish women.

The rural health money is real, and it may help if states use it well. CMS announced $50 billion for the Rural Health Transformation Program, with first-year awards to all 50 states for rural facilities, workforce, technology, and access to care. But even there, the motherhood branding outruns the facts. Rural health money is not automatically maternal health care, and maternal health care is not solved by saying “telehealth” three times into a microphone while women are still driving hours for OB care.

The Trump Accounts and family tax changes have the same problem. They make for lovely talking points, especially if the goal is to tell young parents that the government is giving their baby a head start in life. But Urban Institute found that the child-related tax changes in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” including Trump Accounts and child tax changes, primarily benefit middle- and high-income families. That means the family with the least breathing room may once again get the smallest cushion, while the people onstage applaud themselves for loving babies.

This is the difference between a pro-mother policy and a pro-birth press conference. A pro-mother policy would care about the mother who miscarries and needs emergency care. It would care about the mother who needs contraception because another pregnancy would wreck her health or her household. It would care about the mother who works nights, the mother who is single, the mother who is poor, the mother who uses Medicaid, the mother who doesn’t want to be married, the mother who can’t find childcare, and the mother who is already drowning while politicians serenade the fetus.

What we saw instead was a pageant of selective compassion. They adore mothers as symbols, but they get much pickier when mothers become people. They love the pregnant woman as long as she’s on the correct ideological path, love the stay-at-home mother as long as she fits their family postcard, love IVF when it polls well and when they can rename the discount counter after Trump, and they love babies so much that they will open a savings account for one, then make sure the mother can’t necessarily get preventive reproductive care from the clinic she already trusts.

And Katie Britt stood there beaming through it all, praising him with the misty-eyed devotion of someone who had just caught a sweaty scarf from Elvis at the International Hotel. It would’ve been embarrassing from anyone, but from a mother it was harder to stomach, because she knows the difference between motherhood as a lived condition and motherhood as a campaign prop.

Mothers don’t need another website named after them. Mothers need child care, paid leave, safe pregnancies, affordable housing, reproductive autonomy, and enough money to keep everyone fed without turning life into an obstacle course designed by a committee of Heritage interns.

The performance was loud, sentimental, and sticky with praise. The policy underneath was much colder. It didn’t say, “We support mothers.” It said, “We support mothers as long as they arrive pre-approved by our ideology, and everyone else can take a number at Moms.gov.”

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The Kakistrophic Collection

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He spent last night posting conspiracy theories from an account called “Cat Turd.”

Between the hours of 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. on the eve of his departure for China, Donald Trump published somewhere between 75 and 100 posts to Truth Social. If you are the kind of person who believes that a president’s pre-flight preparation the night before a nuclear-adjacent diplomatic summit should involve, say, reviewing briefing materials or sleeping, you are going to find the contents of those posts challenging.

He began at 10:15 p.m. with a post accusing Barack Obama of orchestrating a CIA coup to steal the 2016 election. This was followed with a repost from an account called “Cat Turd” demanding Obama’s arrest. By 10:22 p.m. he had pivoted to 2020 election fraud, citing as his source an account called “Real Robert” and a publication that generously might be described as post-journalistic. At 10:23 he was demanding that Rudy Giuliani’s $150 million defamation judgment be refunded. At 10:24 he was reposting a fake John F. Kennedy Jr. account calling for Obama’s arrest as a “renegade.” At 10:30 he was calling for the arrest of Jack Smith and Merrick Garland. At 10:40 he was expressing dissatisfaction with his own Attorney General for insufficient arresting of Hillary Clinton. By 10:47 he had endorsed the characterization of Obama as “the most demonic force in politics.” Somewhere in there he posted random TikTok videos, including what appears to be a skit about a DoorDash driver.

At 1:12 in the morning, he closed the evening with a post about the reflecting pool and the failing New York Times. He boards the plane today.

The clinical term for the compulsive return to the same themes regardless of context or relevance is perseveration. The 2020 election, Obama, Hillary, Comey, the media, the reflecting pool — they cycle back with the regularity of a skipping record, indifferent to what else is happening in the world or what is scheduled for the following morning. Neurologists who study frontotemporal dementia will recognize the pattern. So will the thirty-six medical professionals who signed a letter to Congress last month alerting lawmakers that the president is unwell. Congress received that letter and, in the great tradition of institutions prioritizing short-term comfort over long-term consequence, did nothing.

The posts are timestamped. They are archived. They are public. Future historians will not have to reconstruct this picture from secondhand accounts. The subject assembled it himself.

Yesterday’s daytime posting, for context, was the companion piece to the midnight material, not paranoid, but grandiose, which neurologically is the other face of the same coin.

He reposted an AI-generated image of workers appearing to carve his face into Mount Rushmore, captioned “Things are moving along nicely for America’s 250th birthday in July!” with a sunglasses emoji. He reposted a graphic declaring him ranked among the top three presidents in American history, without specifying who did the ranking. He reposted a car bumper banner reading “Trump is without a doubt the greatest president we have ever known.” Then a split image of himself and Joe Biden labeled “The Greatest vs. The Worst.” He posted a golden-script image reading “The Greatest of All Time” against a sunset White House backdrop that has fully completed the transition from political content to devotional iconography. A saint’s card. Available at the gift shop.

This is not vanity in the ordinary political sense. The grandiosity dial and the paranoia dial do not operate independently. They are both symptoms of the same underlying process, and both were fully operational within twelve hours of each other on the day before the Beijing departure.

The daytime public schedule was its own document. At a White House maternal healthcare event, attended by Katie Britt, Dr. Oz, RFK Jr., and a pharmaceutical executive who goes unnamed because the president jovially described him as “a very fat slob” but a “brilliant man,” Trump informed the assembled medical professionals that he had become “the father of fertility” after a thirty-four-minute learning curve. He explained that drug prices were down by 500%, or 600%, or 80%, or 75%, depending on “the way you phrase the question,” and that he preferred the 500. He mused at length that junk food might actually be the secret to longevity, while surrounded by the nation’s foremost health officials. Then he riffed about renaming ICE to NICE so that news coverage would be confused. He polled the room on the 2028 presidential ticket at a maternal health event, before clarifying that the polling “does not mean you have my endorsement under any circumstance.”

At the Rose Garden police appreciation event, he described the ceasefire with Iran as being on “massive life support” with a “1% chance of living,” solicited Dr. Oz’s concurrence on the prognosis, announced he would “set aside the Iranians for an evening,” and delivered an extended meditation on how the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was refinished with industrial-grade pool coating, not paint, he is emphatic on this point, in American flag blue, selected personally from among 70 color options, at a cost of $3 million rather than the $350 million the deep state had apparently planned to spend. The coating will last fifty years.

This is the cognitive register the president is bringing to Xi Jinping: impulse, grievance, and whatever sentence fragment happened to survive the walk from the television to the Resolute Desk.

Let us be precise about what awaits him. Xi Jinping has been preparing for this meeting for months. His team has read every American court filing. They have war-gamed every leverage point. They know the tariff authority has been judicially neutered; the Supreme Court’s February ruling invalidating the president’s “liberation day” emergency powers was immediately visible to every counterparty in the world, and the global response was swift. Where Trump’s January threat of tariffs against NATO allies over Greenland rattled European capitals into emergency meetings, his April announcement of 50% duties on countries selling arms to Iran was, according to the Financial Times, “quickly brushed aside.” The world recalibrated in real time. The ability to threaten tariffs on a Friday and impose them on a Monday, Trump’s signature move, his superpower, is gone, at least for now.

China knows the 10% replacement tariffs expire in 150 days, landing squarely in the heat of midterm election season. They know congressional Republicans are quietly restive, and the midterm math, Democrats hold a five-point generic ballot advantage. They know that only 30% of American voters approve of Trump’s economic management. Very importantly, they know, as a Shanghai professor put it publicly at a late-2025 media event, that “only China can save Trump,” and that the president needs visible wins in the form of Chinese agricultural purchases that play well in the swing states he needs.

They know the ceasefire is fragile and the Strait of Hormuz situation has elevated oil prices by more than 50% from pre-war levels, driving American inflation to 3.8%, its highest in three years, reported this morning. Gas nationally averaged $4.50 a gallon today. Diesel is approaching its all-time high at $5.64. Airfares are up 20.7%. Fruit and vegetables are up 6.1%. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas projects that if Hormuz remains closed through September, crude could hit $167 a barrel and gas $5 a gallon, with recession risk. Consumer sentiment in May fell to its lowest level on record. Fifty-eight percent of voters disapprove of the president’s handling of inflation.

Xi holds agricultural purchases, Boeing aircraft orders, and Hormuz mediation as simultaneous levers over a president who needs all three before November.

And sitting unsigned on the president’s desk is a $14 billion arms package for Taiwan. It has been sitting there for months. Xi urged Trump in February to handle Taiwan arms sales with “extreme caution.” A bipartisan Senate letter went out Friday urging approval. Xi’s ask in Beijing will not be dramatic — he does not need it to be. He simply needs Trump to continue not signing what he has not signed. Inaction is the easiest concession in the world to extract. It looks like nothing happened.

The New York Times reports this morning that use of the phrase “American decline” in official Chinese sources nearly doubled in 2025. A Beijing think tank published a triumphant report titled “Thank Trump,” arguing that his tariffs, attacks on allies and assault on American institutions had “inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States,” calling him “an accelerator of American political decay.” The report described what it called “the heavy and haunting toll of an empire’s evening bell.”

Such language, the Times notes, once confined to nationalist corners of the Chinese internet, has entered mainstream political discourse. Xi is not meeting Trump as a nervous supplicant seeking accommodation. He is meeting him as a man who believes, with measurable statistical support, that history is moving in his direction and that the man across the table is evidence of it.

Accompanying the president are sixteen chief executives representing a combined market capitalization that dwarfs the GDP of most nations. Tim Cook of Apple, whose entire manufacturing supply chain runs through China. Elon Musk of Tesla, whose Gigashanghai facility depends on Chinese goodwill and whose company is being systematically out-competed globally by BYD, the one Chinese EV manufacturer that cannot enter the American market because of the 100% tariff wall that is the sole reason a BYD does not sit in American driveways at half the price of a Tesla. Larry Fink of BlackRock and David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, whose Chinese market access depends on the outcome of these talks. Kelly Ortberg of Boeing, which desperately needs Chinese aircraft orders. Brian Sikes of Cargill, which needs Chinese agricultural purchases.

Jensen Huang of Nvidia was not invited. His absence is loud. The world’s most valuable company awaits approval from both governments to ship AI chips to China. That negotiation is apparently too live, too sensitive, too valuable to have its CEO in the room. Whatever is being offered or withheld on the chip question, it is not being offered or withheld by Huang.

These sixteen men and women are not disinterested advisors. They are the most powerful corporate lobby ever assembled for a bilateral summit, each with billions of dollars of Chinese market access to gain or lose from whatever is agreed behind closed doors. They have direct access to a president who has always genuflected to concentrated wealth, who will process whatever they want as patriotism because they are rich and they are telling him it serves America.

The government officials nominally providing guardrails are: a Secretary of State who was initially reluctant to come because the agenda is trade, not his domain; a Treasury Secretary who ran a hedge fund that significantly underperformed before his political elevation and whose primary demonstrable skill as Treasury Secretary has been going on television and sounding calm; and a Chief of Staff whose job is managing the principal, not the negotiation. Against Xi’s unified, disciplined, meticulously prepared team.

The president will be told by the men on the plane that what is good for Apple’s supply chain is good for America. He will believe it, because he always has, because the logic of trickle-down is the universal justification that requires no evidence and survives no scrutiny but remains perpetually available to anyone with enough money to deliver it with conviction in a private setting.

The average American, the Uber driver in Charleston whose fill-up went from $25 to $40, the working poor woman in New Jersey who cannot avoid driving to her medical appointments, the lower-income households the New York Fed describes as cutting back on gasoline while higher-income households drive unchanged, is not on the manifest.

This morning, while the inflation numbers were landing, Pete Hegseth was testifying before the House Appropriations defense subcommittee. The war on Iran, he confirmed, has now cost $29 billion, up from the $25 billion cited two weeks ago, because of “updated repair and replacement of equipment costs.” Democratic Senator Mark Kelly said on Sunday that American inventories of Tomahawk cruise missiles, Army Tactical Missile Systems, SM-3 interceptors, THAAD rounds and Patriot missiles had been severely drawn down during the conflict, and that replenishment could take years. As in years.

Hegseth described the munitions concern as “foolishly and unhelpfully overstated,” which is what you say when the concern is accurate and you do not want to say so in public. He described the mission as “sacred.” He said the Pentagon has “a plan to escalate if necessary.”

Xi’s team reads congressional testimony. The president who arrives in Beijing Thursday does so with drawn-down munitions stocks, a judicially constrained tariff regime, 3.8% inflation, a fragile ceasefire, an unsigned arms package for Taiwan, and a delegation of CEOs whose interests are not America’s interests. He arrives in Xi’s physical environment, in a schedule that puts the state banquet at what his body will register as 6 in the morning after crossing thirteen time zones. He arrives having spent the night before departure posting Obama coup theories from an account called Cat Turd.

Polymarket this morning puts the probability of the visit happening at 99%. The market has priced in the visit. Nobody can price in what happens inside it.

What is remarkable about this particular moment in American history is how thoroughly it is documenting itself. The Truth Social posts are timestamped and archived. The Rose Garden transcript is public. The fertility event transcript is public. The Hegseth testimony, inflation data, the delegation list is public. The Beijing schedule, with its revealing time zone annotations, is public. The FT on the tariff superpower. The NYT on Chinese perceptions of American decline. The letter from thirty-six medical professionals to Congress. All of it is public, permanent, and searchable.

Future historians will not struggle to reconstruct what was happening in May of 2026 or what condition the president was in or what interests were represented on Air Force One or what awaited him in Beijing. The record is complete. The subject assembled much of it himself, voluntarily, on a platform he created specifically so that no one could stop him.

At 1:12 in the morning, on the eve of the most important diplomatic trip of his presidency, he posted about the reflecting pool.

At some point today, he boards the plane.

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As a child, that sounded straightforward. Do not attempt a piledriver in the backyard. Do not whack your cousin with a folding chair unless you are prepared for your mother to enter the room like an avenging regulatory agency. The warning was about bodies. Bones. Gravity. The ordinary physics of why human beings should not model their domestic lives on WrestleMania.

Perhaps we misunderstood the warning. Maybe the most dangerous thing professional wrestling ever taught anyone was not how to jump from the top rope, but how to live inside a storyline.

For newer readers: kayfabe is the wrestling term for the shared fiction that makes the whole enterprise work. It is not simply “fake.” Wrestling fans are not necessarily dupes. They are participants. They agree to suspend disbelief because the performance gives them something real: release, belonging, rage, enemies, heroes, catharsis. The match may be scripted, but the emotion is not. That distinction turns out to matter enormously outside the arena.

Donald Trump did not import wrestling’s aesthetics into politics. He imported its operating system. The nicknames. “Crooked Hillary.” “Sleepy Joe.” “Too Late Powell.” “Lyin’ Ted.” “Little Marco.” “Crazy Nancy.” “Radical Left Lunatics.” The chants. The foreign villains. The stable of loyalists. The ritual humiliation. The strongman who is always betrayed, always winning, always persecuted, always moments away from the greatest comeback in history. Trump did not merely learn that politics could be entertaining. He learned that entertainment could replace politics.

In kayfabe, contradiction is not a liability. When the performer says something outrageous and it happens, he is a prophet. When it fails, you were an idiot for taking him literally. He can threaten, retreat, escalate, deny, and declare victory in the same breath because coherence is not the point. The point is dominance. The point is keeping the crowd inside the story. In wrestling, kayfabe makes a great story. In politics, it becomes Kevlar.

Which brings us to this week, and the Strait of Hormuz, and a ceasefire described by the President of the United States as being on “life support.” Asked whether the ceasefire remained in effect, Trump dismissed Tehran’s latest proposal as “a piece of garbage” and noted he had not even finished reading it. There it is: the promo voice, the insult, the dominance posture, the refusal to treat diplomacy as anything other than a humiliation contest. A nuclear crisis becomes crowd work. A ceasefire becomes a catchphrase.

The Strait of Hormuz, however, is not a folding chair. You cannot smash it over an opponent’s head and reset after the commercial break. The strait remains effectively closed. A vital passage for global oil and gas shipments sits under Iranian control. Fuel prices have surged past $4.50 a gallon. And Trump’s response is to float a suspension of the federal gas tax, a measure requiring congressional approval, draining more than $23 billion annually, offering a momentary illusion of relief while preserving the spectacle that caused the pain.

In wrestling, a cheap pop is when a performer gets easy applause by shouting the name of the city. Hello, Cleveland! The crowd cheered even though nothing had happened.

Suspending the gas tax while the Strait of Hormuz remains closed is the policy equivalent of shouting Hello, Cleveland while the building is on fire.

Kayfabe politics is proving dangerous. It trains people to experience catastrophe as spectacle. The ceasefire is not a ceasefire; it’s a ratings beat. Diplomacy is not diplomacy; it’s a toughness test. A blockade, a closed strait, a regional war, rising fuel prices, and nuclear brinkmanship become props in a dominance narrative. The performer does not have to solve the crisis. He only has to narrate it like the main event.

The audience knows its role. Calling Trump’s supporters willing victims is too gentle. It lets them settle into the moral recliner of passivity, as if all of this simply happened to them. But kayfabe does not happen to an audience. It happens with one.

The wrestling crowd is not decorative, or mere background noise. It is literally one of the instruments. The boos, the chants, the signs, the ritual hatred, these are not incidental to the show, they are its power source. Trump understood that, perhaps from standing inside a WrestleMania roar and feeling what a crowd that size could do to reality. In that space, humiliation became entertainment, cruelty became comedy. The wrong thing, performed with enough confidence, became the right thing.

Enabler is the more honest word. Every chant, every rally ovation, every gleeful share of a dehumanizing clip helps sustain the fiction. The crowd does not write the script, but it keeps the script alive. A script kept alive long enough becomes policy. Becomes a closed strait and a gas tax stunt and a ceasefire described in the language of a pay-per-view promo.

The audience did not close the Strait of Hormuz. But it helped build the political universe in which a president can treat that closing as a prop. That is a share of authorship.

Authorship is what people want to avoid. It is easier to say they were fooled. Victims can be pitied without being held responsible. But the kayfabe frame denies that comfort. The crowd is part of the act. The chants, the permission, the thrill matters.

In wrestling, everyone eventually goes home.

In politics, people have to live inside the aftermath.

The warning was always there. Don’t try this at home. Do not confuse smack talk with strategy; treat humiliation as justice, or turn nuclear diplomacy into a pay-per-view feud.

In wrestling, kayfabe ends when the lights come up. In politics, the lights do not come up on their own. Someone has to break character.

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You know. Monday.

Let’s begin with the Iran war, where Donald Trump has once again demonstrated that the Situation Room is apparently just whatever room he happens to be in when he opens Truth Social. Iran sent its latest response to a U.S. peace proposal through Pakistani mediators, as the United States and Iran were reportedly discussing a short-term arrangement that could extend the cease-fire for another thirty days and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. That strait, you may recall, is not just a picturesque ribbon of water on a map. It is the gateway for roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply, which makes it a fairly inconvenient place for the world’s most emotionally dysregulated man to conduct foreign policy via tantrum.

Trump’s response to Iran’s counterproposal was not a speech, not a strategy, not a carefully calibrated diplomatic statement. It was: “I don’t like it — TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!” followed by “Thank you for your attention to this matter,” because the president is now rejecting wartime peace proposals with the tone of a county zoning board denying a permit for a shed.

One would think that after rejecting an offer in the middle of a war, the President of the United States might call in his national security team, convene his foreign policy advisers, review escalation scenarios, coordinate with allies, calm markets, and explain what comes next. That would be the normal-president option. Instead, Trump vented online, rambled about Obama, cash, Iranian “thugs,” and how “they will be laughing no longer” — a 2 a.m. grievance collage with warheads in the margins. Nothing says steady hand in a nuclear crisis like rage-posting yourself into a corner while the cease-fire frays.

This is where the story gets more dangerous than merely ridiculous. Iran does not appear to be negotiating like a country that believes it lost. It appears to be negotiating like a country that believes it survived the U.S.-Israeli attempt to break it, kept its regime intact, retained leverage over Hormuz, and now gets to name a price for turning the global oil valve back on.

According to New York Times reporting, Iran’s demands included U.S. war reparations, recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, and an end to American sanctions. Those are not surrender terms. Those are “you hit us, failed to topple us, and now we still control the choke point” terms.

The Financial Times version of the standoff sharpened the same point. Iran’s response reportedly focused on sanctions relief, an end to the war “on all fronts,” an end to the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports, a thirty-day suspension of oil sanctions, the release of frozen assets, and “Iran’s management” of the Strait of Hormuz. Nuclear concessions were not the headline. Tehran’s message was essentially: first stop the war, stop strangling our economy, accept that we have leverage over the shipping lane, and then maybe we can talk about the nuclear file after a confidence-building period.

That is exactly the opposite of what Trump and Netanyahu want. The Trump administration has reportedly demanded a long moratorium on Iranian enrichment, the transfer of Iran’s near-weapons-grade uranium stockpile out of the country, and the dismantling of Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. Iran may be open to some negotiations over enrichment and the uranium stockpile, but a twenty-year ban with no clear sunset clause is not something Tehran is rushing to cosign for Donald Trump’s Mission Accomplished moment.

Benjamin Netanyahu continues doing what Benjamin Netanyahu does: making sure every off-ramp has a spike strip across it. Netanyahu told 60 Minutes that the war is “not over” because Iran still has highly enriched uranium, and when asked how that material should be removed, he said: “You go in and you take it out.”

To recap: Iran is saying stop the war first. Trump is saying hand over the “nuclear dust.” Netanyahu is saying go in and take it. The oil market is saying please, for the love of Brent crude, somebody put an adult in the room. Unfortunately, the adult in the room appears to have been replaced by a man posting AI ballroom images at 11 p.m.

Israel is not helping on the Lebanon front either. The Guardian reported more deadly Israeli attacks in Lebanon despite a cease-fire, including strikes that Lebanese state media said killed two people and injured five others in the southern town of Abba. Israel and Hezbollah continue accusing each other of violations, but the broader picture is that the so-called cease-fire is beginning to look less like a cease-fire and more like a suggestion box with explosions attached.

The Strait of Hormuz is now the central pressure point. Iran has warned that it will retaliate against any new U.S. strikes and will not permit more foreign warships into the strait. The United Kingdom and France are attempting to organize a multinational defense ministers’ meeting involving forty countries to discuss restoring trade flows through the waterway. The UK has already dispatched HMS Dragon to the region so it is ready to act the moment conditions allow, which is a very specific kind of optimism given current conditions. France’s Emmanuel Macron, having read the room, subsequently clarified that France had “never envisaged” a military deployment, which is a very French way of saying we announced something and then immediately announced we didn’t. Iran, for its part, warned both countries not to get dragged into what it calls U.S. and Israeli aggression, and suggested that any intervention in the strait would only deepen the crisis. The Europeans are thus caught between wanting to look useful and not wanting to get shot at, which is a diplomatic position with a long and distinguished history on the continent.

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei used a press briefing to frame Iran’s position as defensive, sovereign, and entirely the fault of everyone else. Strip away the propaganda lacquer and the message is still important: Iran says it will negotiate when there is room for diplomacy, but if forced to fight, it will fight. Baghaei also warned that any foreign intervention in the Strait of Hormuz or Persian Gulf would bring “further complications.”

Markets are already reacting. Brent crude promptly jumped to around $105 a barrel, because oil markets, unlike the President, read the room immediately. The New York Times noted that stock futures dipped alongside the oil surge as investors absorbed the fact that peace talks were not producing peace, which tends to be the kind of thing that moves markets when a major oil artery is still effectively strangled.

This is the part where foreign policy becomes domestic policy, because Trump’s war is no longer some abstract cable-news graphic with missiles arcing across a map. It is showing up at gas pumps, in grocery bills, in mortgage rates, in supply chains, and in the Federal Reserve’s calculations.

The Financial Times has a brutal breakdown of the war’s toll on the U.S. economy. The Pentagon’s direct estimate is $25 billion, but economists say that is just the tip of the iceberg. Trump’s Iran war is ripping through the economy through higher fuel prices, rising borrowing costs, supply-chain disruptions, and the next wave of food inflation.

Gas prices are up more than half to about $4.55 a gallon. Diesel is up similarly, to around $5.66. American consumers have already paid an estimated $35 billion extra in petrol and diesel costs since the war began, which works out to about $268 per household — roughly the cost of a week’s groceries. So yes, Trump’s foreign policy is now quite literally eating into the grocery budget.

And because diesel is the bloodstream of the American industrial and food system, the pain does not stop at the pump. Economists expect a lag of roughly six months before higher diesel costs fully show up in grocery prices, with perishables like fruits, vegetables, meat, and seafood likely to lead the way. Fertilizer prices are already up more than 30 percent since the war began, which could hit harvests and push food costs higher still.

This is what happens when a president who promised cheap groceries turns the global energy system into a hostage negotiation.

Then there is the Fed trap. Before the war, investors expected the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates twice this year. Now, with fuel prices pushing inflation back up to around 3.5 percent, that relief appears to be off the table. Justin Wolfers estimates that the Fed’s inability to cut rates by half a percentage point could cost the economy about $200 billion in lost output. Mortgage rates have also risen from 5.98 percent before the war to 6.37 percent.

So when Trump screams for lower rates, the answer from reality is: perhaps you should not have set the oil market on fire.

Pimco and Franklin Templeton are warning the same thing from the bond-market side. Pimco’s Dan Ivascyn told the Financial Times that rate cuts could be “counter-productive” in the current inflation environment and that tightening should not be completely ruled out for the United States if inflation pressures persist. Franklin Templeton’s Jenny Johnson warned that inflation will be harder to control and that it will be difficult for the Fed to cut.

This will absolutely frost Trump’s cookies if it happens. He wants the Fed to bail him out with cheap money, but his own war is making rate cuts harder. He wants lower mortgage rates, but oil shocks and inflation pressure are pushing the Fed in the other direction. He wants a victory lap, but he may get higher gas, higher groceries, higher borrowing costs, and Jerome Powell staring at the data like, “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Meanwhile, someone adjacent to the Pentagon apparently had other priorities.

According to Financial Times reporting, a broker for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth contacted BlackRock about a multimillion-dollar investment in major defense companies shortly before the U.S. strikes on Iran. The investment reportedly did not go through, but the timing alone is a flashing red light.

Americans get higher gas, higher diesel, higher mortgage rates, higher grocery prices, and a giant supplemental Pentagon bill. Defense contractors get new orders, and people adjacent to the defense secretary were reportedly sniffing around major defense investments before the bombs fell. Maybe everything was innocent. Maybe it was just a coincidence, and maybe I am the Queen of Denmark and my crown is in the dishwasher. At minimum, this deserves scrutiny, because chaos may be catastrophic for the country, but it can be extremely convenient for the right portfolio.

Which brings us back to Trump’s mental state, because this is no longer a question of style, tone, or whether he is “being Trump.” That phrase has become one of the most dangerous euphemisms in American politics. “Being Trump” now means making war threats online, rejecting peace offers without explanation, wobbling between “combat is over” and “we’ll blow them up,” and processing nuclear diplomacy through the same emotional machinery he uses to complain about poll numbers.

Former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb is now saying the quiet part out loud. Cobb said it is not surprising the country is in this much trouble given that the Cabinet will not invoke the 25th Amendment for a man he described as “clearly insane.” He specifically tied that assessment to the Iran war and Trump’s nightly social media screeds, saying the war highlights Trump’s “insanity and depravity.”

That is not coming from some random liberal with a resistance mug and a blood pressure cuff. That is Trump’s former White House lawyer.

The transcript also cites Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour making a point that cuts to the heart of the strategic failure: the defining deliberation of this war may not be between the United States and Iran, but between Trump and himself. Trump has vacillated between walking away and threatening to bomb Iran into oblivion, while Iran’s regime has remained consistent: resistance, chaos, survival. That consistency is not weakness or rigidity — it is the strategic advantage of a party that knows exactly what it wants, facing a party that changes its mind between interviews.

That is the problem. Trump thinks every crisis is a negotiation in which he can posture, bluff, threaten, insult, flatter himself, and then declare victory. But Iran’s regime is not a Florida contractor waiting to be stiffed on an invoice. It is an entrenched theocratic state that has always been willing to let the country burn rather than compromise its own survival.

Now Trump is taking that same impulse-driven operating system to Beijing. The New York Times reports that China is “locked and loaded” for a prolonged economic confrontation with the United States. Beijing has been building a legal arsenal to retaliate against U.S. sanctions, punish companies that comply with Western efforts to pull supply chains out of China, and force businesses into an impossible choice: break Chinese law or break American law.

China has blocked Meta’s acquisition of a promising Chinese-founded AI start-up, codified rules aimed at punishing foreign businesses that comply with Western pullback efforts, and begun using legal mechanisms to counter U.S. sanctions. Beijing is signaling that it no longer fears escalation; it is preparing for it.

This is not a meeting where Trump can just wander in, compliment Xi’s strength, demand a headline, and come home pretending he solved trade. China has spent years studying U.S. vulnerabilities, building countermeasures, and preparing to turn global supply chains into an instrument of punishment. That requires a president with discipline, preparation, and strategic clarity.

Instead, America is sending a man who just responded to an Iranian peace proposal with “I don’t like it” and then posted through the night like a raccoon trapped in a golf cart.

Then there is Taiwan. Taiwan’s legislature just approved a $25 billion special defense budget for urgent deterrence measures, including American defensive systems, counter-drone technology, and medium-range munitions. But the Trump administration has reportedly been sitting for months on a $14 billion U.S. arms package, with officials saying the White House wanted to hold it so Trump could have a “successful” meeting with Xi. Think moral rot dressed up as summit choreography.

Taiwan is preparing for the possibility of war. China is intensifying pressure around the island. Senators from both parties are warning Trump not to treat support for Taiwan as a bargaining chip. And Trump is reportedly delaying weapons because he wants the vibes to be nice when he meets Xi.

Meanwhile, Taiwanese civilians are spending their weekends learning to handle weapons. They are not waiting for the diplomatic calendar to sort itself out. They are not holding their breath for a successful summit. They appear to have made their own assessment of how much the vibes matter, and they are preparing accordingly, because when the most powerful country in the world is run by someone posting AI self-portraits at 11 p.m., sometimes you decide to stop outsourcing your survival.

Let’s pull the camera back. Iran is negotiating like it survived the war. Netanyahu is pushing to keep the war open until Iran’s uranium is physically removed. Hormuz remains the global choke point. Oil is back around crisis levels. Gas and diesel are hammering American households. Food inflation may be next. The Fed cannot cut rates because Trump’s war is feeding inflation. Defense-stock ethics questions are hovering over the Pentagon. China is preparing for economic war. Taiwan is preparing for actual war. And the president of the United States is posting like the comments section became commander in chief.

Trump’s instability is now the connective tissue between foreign policy, domestic inflation, corruption risk, alliance fracture, and global insecurity. The war drives oil prices. Oil prices drive inflation. Inflation traps the Fed. Higher rates hurt households. Supply-chain shocks hit food. Defense spending rises. Contractors benefit. Ethics alarms flash. China watches. Taiwan waits. Netanyahu pushes. Iran digs in. And Trump posts.

The throughline today is not simply Iran, oil, China, Taiwan, or Trump’s latest social media unraveling. It is what happens when foreign policy becomes impulse, war becomes branding, allies become bargaining chips, and people close to power appear to understand one thing very clearly: chaos may be catastrophic for the country, but it can be very good for the right portfolio.

And somewhere in all of this, Americans are supposed to feel reassured that the man who cannot manage his own late-night posting habits is managing a nuclear standoff, a global oil shock, a superpower summit, and the fate of Taiwan.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

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The mountain bongo moves through the misted highlands with a kind of impossible beauty, all chestnut fur and white stripes, an animal that looks like it was painted by someone who had just learned about both tigers and deer and decided, quite reasonably, to improve upon both. For decades, these animals have been vanishing from the wild, pushed toward the edge by habitat loss, hunting, disease, and all the other ways the human world sometimes forgets to leave room for anyone else.

But this week, I kept thinking about the mountain bongo because the story is not only that it disappeared, but that people noticed.

The story is that conservationists, communities, scientists, caretakers, and people who could have shrugged and said, “Well, that is sad,” instead began the long, unglamorous, deeply holy work of bringing the ghost home.

They bred them carefully, protected forest, taught animals born under human care how to become wild again, and made plans not for next week or next quarter, but for 2050, which is the kind of faith that makes me want to lie down on the floor for a moment and recover from the audacity of hope. There are still fewer than 100 mountain bongos left in the wild, but there are calves now, living proof that a species can be so close to becoming memory and still not be finished.

That’s the part I can’t stop carrying around with me. They aren’t gone, aren’t finished, and they aren’t beyond the reach of love organized into action.

And maybe that’s why this story found me so hard this week, because my own family has been living in one of those thin places between fear and possibility, where everything feels fragile, every phone call matters, and hope is not some gauzy abstract thing but a list of repairs, deadlines, signatures, documents, and people showing up with their sleeves already rolled. So, I’m pleased to tell you all, while admittedly out of breath, that our landlady accepted our offer.

I still almost don’t know how to type those words without wanting to laugh, cry, nap for three business days, and then wake up to ask whether anyone has seen my coffee, my sanity, or the tape measure. We aren’t at the finish line just yet, because the final step is making the house financeable, and there is real work ahead. We’ve already been hard at work, which is why I have been less active and less responsive than usual, and by “hard at work” I mean the kind of work where your body is tired, your brain is soup, and your browser history makes it look like you are either buying a home or preparing to become a very anxious general contractor.

But something else has been happening too, people have stepped in. Some amazing people, family and friends and readers and helpers in the truest sense of the word, have jumped in to help us carry what had started to feel too heavy to carry alone. Among them is a particularly special couple we had never met except through my writing, and yet somehow, in the kind of cosmic coincidence that makes a person look suspiciously at the ceiling, one of them grew up nearly sixty years ago with my husband’s grandparents. Nearly sixty years ago.

A childhood connection, a family thread, a stranger who was not really a stranger, a candle passed through time and somehow still lit when it reached our doorstep. The one in a million chances of all these things coming together to help my family are truly out of this world, and I don’t mean that in the casual way people say something is unbelievable when what they mean is “mildly surprising.” I mean I’ve had moments this week where I have looked around at the kindness gathering near us and thought, with my whole chest, that there are forces of goodness moving through this life that we just don’t usually have the pleasure of seeing so clearly.

Maybe that’s what hope looks like most of the time. Not a lightning bolt, or a miracle descending fully assembled from the clouds, more often, hope is a network. A habitat, a bridge, and a community of beings deciding that someone, or something, is worth saving.

Which brings me to the otters, because of course it does, and because it’s Mother’s Day and the universe apparently knew we needed a story with whiskers.

Sunny is an orphaned southern sea otter pup who was found alone on a California beach when she was only a couple of weeks old. She was too young to survive by herself, and too small to know how to be an otter without someone showing her the way. After she was rescued and stabilized, she was paired with Rey, another rescued sea otter, who is now helping care for her. There is something just so precious about that.

Rey was once an orphan too, and now she is helping Sunny learn how to be alive in the world. One rescued creature becoming refuge for another; one life, saved by care, becoming part of the care that saves the next life.

That is motherhood in one of its oldest forms, not only biology, but shelter; not only one person, but everyone who has ever bent down and said, “Come here, little one, I know you are scared, but I will help you learn the water.”

And what makes it even more beautiful is that sea otters are not just adorable little floating commas in the great sentence of the ocean, although they are absolutely that and I will be taking no further questions. They are also essential to the health of kelp forests, which means helping an orphaned otter is also helping an ecosystem breathe. Care moves outward, a rescued pup becomes a stronger otter community, a stronger otter community helps protect kelp, and healthy kelp shelters fish, stores carbon, steadies shorelines, and gives life room to keep making more life.

Which is the secret all these stories keep telling us. Nothing is saved alone, not the ghost of the forest, the orphaned otter, a family trying to hold onto a home, or a planet full of beings who keep needing each other in ways both practical and mysterious. When our family needs help, people rise, when our friends need help, people rise.

And when our planetary roommates need help, people rise too, sometimes with science, sometimes with money, sometimes with hammers, sometimes with expertise, sometimes with a spare bedroom, sometimes with a wildlife corridor, sometimes with a baby bottle, sometimes with a ridiculous amount of paperwork, and sometimes with the simple, sacred willingness to not look away. That may be the most hopeful thing I know about humanity.

We don’t always rise, and I would never pretend otherwise, because the world is too wounded for easy declarations and too many people are still waiting for someone to come back for them. But again and again, in the middle of all our mess and noise and exhaustion, someone sees a need and steps toward it. Someone builds the bridge, protects the forest, and takes in the pup. Someone says, “We can help.” And then, somehow, the ghost begins to come home.

So, this Mother’s Day, I am thinking about all the forms love takes when it refuses to remain only a feeling. I am thinking about mothers and grandmothers, aunties and neighbors, nurses and teachers, rescuers and conservationists, friends and strangers, readers and relatives, all the people who make shelter out of their lives. I am thinking about those who mother children, those who mother animals, those who mother communities, those who mother the future by doing work whose fruits they may never personally hold.

I’m thinking about Rey and Sunny, floating together in the water, one orphan teaching another that she has not been abandoned. I’m thinking about the mountain bongo, stepping back through the forest. And I am thinking about my own family, humbled beyond language by the people who have gathered around us at exactly the moment we needed reminding that the world is not only cruel, not only hard, not only expensive, although for the record it is being extremely committed to that last one.

The work ahead is real, the gratitude is real too. And if there is one thing I want to say this week, it is this: hope is not passive. Hope is what happens when love gets organized, when kindness meets need, when the community rises, when the living world says, in a thousand different voices, “Not yet, not alone, and not while we’re here.”

May we be that kind of hope for one another. May we be that kind of hope for every small, striped, whiskered, frightened, stubborn, beautiful life trying to make its way home.

Happy Mother’s Day!

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Today’s roundup is going to be brief because I’m spending the day with my kids, which feels like the correct and morally superior use of my time. The news will still be terrible tomorrow. Democracy’s group project will still be on fire. The usual suspects will still be lying into microphones like it’s cardio. So today: a shorter cup of coffee, a few things worth noting, and then I’m logging off to be with the people who made me a mother in the first place.

Unfortunately, before I can go enjoy pancakes and familial affection, we do need to check in on the President of the United States, whose brain continues to be available in real time through Truth Social, like a national security briefing written by a haunted slot machine.

NPR analyzed Trump’s first four months of Truth Social posts this year and found that he posted 2,249 times, averaging just under 19 posts a day. His most common topic was the 2026 elections, followed by Iran and the economy, but the real story is the scattershot obsession. Trump posted 71 times about the 2020 election lie, more often than he posted about tariffs. He posted 68 times about his various Washington, D.C. building projects, including his White House ballroom and proposed arch, more often than he posted about Venezuela, the SAVE Act, or the Minneapolis protests and federal agents. And he posted more than six times as often about his legal grievances as he did about health care policy. Sort of a live feed from the presidential id.

On March 1, the day after U.S. forces bombed Iran and launched a war now dragging into its tenth week, Trump posted 30 times. He did post about Iran, including a threat warning Tehran not to retaliate. But then, because the man has the attention span of a firework in a microwave, he also posted a video portraying Mitch McConnell as the dead guy from Weekend at Bernie’s, praise for his State of the Union, Trump-friendly news coverage, months-old celebrity-adjacent approval fluff, screenshots of people praising him online, and a video about San Francisco from an account called “truthaboutfluoride.”

Again: this was the day after he bombed Iran. It matters because the rest of the world is not treating Trump’s posts as harmless uncle-at-Thanksgiving nonsense. Adversaries, allies, markets, militaries, and diplomats all have to parse the difference between policy, impulse, threat, delusion, performance, and whatever category includes reposting pet videos next to war updates. Former national security adviser John Bolton told NPR that Trump’s ferocious posting about Iran may actually signal weakness to Tehran: if Iran waits him out, Bolton suggested, Trump may “flip right out entirely” and start offering concessions. Bolton’s verdict was concise: “Just being generically crazy does not give you an advantage.”

Regional reporting from Tehran suggests Iran is trying to send two messages at once: it is still leaving the door open to diplomacy, but it wants everyone to understand that its military is prepared for another round of confrontation. According to Al Jazeera’s reporting from Tehran, Iranian military officials are describing the country as fully prepared after attacks on coastal areas and oil tankers, warning that Iran’s “strategic patience” is over and that its forces have “fingers on the trigger.” Military spokesmen are also threatening “surprises” involving new weapons, new methods of warfare, and new arenas of conflict if Iran is attacked again. It feels like the diplomatic equivalent of saying, “We are open to talking, but please note that the flamethrower is plugged in.”

The Strait of Hormuz remains the pressure point, and the rhetoric surrounding it is increasingly dangerous. Tehran is insisting that negotiations are not surrender; Washington is still pressing for a deal, and both sides are behaving like people standing in a room full of leaking gas while debating whether sparks are technically part of the negotiation process. Iran’s president is saying the Iranian nation will not bow before its enemies, while military officials are emphasizing readiness for “hostile action” and “confrontational scenarios.”

No “war or diplomacy.” This is war and diplomacy walking down the same hallway, bumping shoulders, each pretending the other one is not there.

Trump is preparing for a high-stakes meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing next week, because apparently Mother’s Day weekend needed a little “two most powerful men on Earth compare grievances while the world economy sweats through its shirt” energy.

The agenda is enormous: Iran, trade, Taiwan, artificial intelligence, rare earths, semiconductors, fentanyl, the South China Sea, China’s nuclear buildup, and the case of jailed Hong Kong democracy activist Jimmy Lai. Expectations, however, are modest. The most likely outcome appears to be some limited investment agreements and an extension of the temporary trade truce Trump and Xi struck after last year’s bruising tariff fight.

The more revealing part is the backdrop. Trump enters the summit entangled in a war with Iran, China’s closest partner in the Middle East, while the conflict has helped trigger a global energy crisis and pulled U.S. military attention and resources away from Asia. The war has also depleted American munitions, raising questions among some Chinese analysts about whether the United States could defend Taiwan if Beijing decided to test the moment.

Xi, meanwhile, is not exactly arriving from a position of carefree strength. China is dealing with slower growth, higher energy costs, and the threat of a global recession that could hit its export-heavy economy hard. So the meeting may be less about solving the U.S.-China rivalry than about both men trying to buy time while sharpening the knives behind their backs. Not the kind of thing one wants simmering in the background while trying to enjoy pancakes with the kids.

Speaking of strongmen pretending chaos is strategy, Putin appears to be borrowing from Donald Trump’s favorite playbook: announce that something is basically solved, then let the fine print reveal that nothing has actually changed.

Putin claimed the war in Ukraine is “coming to an end,” but senior Kremlin officials immediately made clear there is no quick peace on the table. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the United States may be “in a hurry,” but a Ukraine settlement is “too complex” and peace remains “a very long road.” Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said negotiations would “probably resume,” but Moscow sees no basis for new trilateral talks until Ukrainian forces withdraw from the Donetsk region, a demand Kyiv has already rejected.

Kyiv Post and Kyiv Independent are reporting the same basic posture from Moscow: Russia is insisting that progress will remain frozen unless Ukraine gives up Donbas, including territory Russia has failed to seize after years of brutal, costly offensives. At the same time, the Kremlin says it expects Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to return to Moscow “quite soon” for more talks, despite the fact that Trump’s envoys have reportedly made repeated trips to Russia while still not visiting Kyiv.

That is not exactly a subtle diplomatic signal. It looks less like a peace process than Moscow auditioning for a surrender process with American middlemen in the room.

Ukraine, meanwhile, is calling for an unconditional ceasefire along the current front lines as the starting point for talks. Russia is demanding the entire Donbas region, including territory it could not conquer militarily. So Putin gets to sound reasonable, Trump’s envoys get to look busy, and the actual Russian condition remains: Ukraine must give Russia what Russia could not win.

Classic strongman theater: declare victory-ish, demand surrender-ish, call it diplomacy, and hope everyone mistakes exhaustion for peace.

Which brings us, somehow inevitably, to Trump dressed as a Mandalorian.

Subtlety died of embarrassment sometime around 2016, so the White House marked Star Wars Day by circulating an image of Trump styled as a Mandalorian warrior, complete with armor, halo lighting, an American flag, Grogu tucked into his gear, and a tiny White House glowing in the corner like a nationalist snow globe.

The caption reportedly read: “In a galaxy that demands strength, America stands ready. This is the way. May the 4th be with you.”

The key detail is the White House watermark. This was not just some random MAGA meme scraped from the internet and passed around by a guy named PatriotEagle1776 whose profile picture is a truck wearing sunglasses. This was branded through the official machinery of the presidency. That turns the whole thing from embarrassing fan art into state-sponsored cosplay propaganda.

And the timing is fascinating. The post came as Disney was ramping up publicity for The Mandalorian & Grogu, opening May 22. So the White House essentially used Disney’s own intellectual property to generate either free publicity or a poisoned promotional tie-in for a Disney blockbuster while simultaneously existing in an adversarial relationship with the company.

Lucasfilm had no comment, according to The Hollywood Reporter, which starts to look less like capitulation and more like a cold calculation. Why hand Trump a fight that would only draw more attention to the image days before opening weekend? Disney is many things, but allergic to risk is certainly one of them. Sometimes the mouse does not roar because the mouse has done the math.

Still, the image itself deserves attention because it is not merely ridiculous. It is revealing.

Trump’s political movement constantly tries to appropriate the language of rebellion while behaving like the empire. They cast themselves as freedom fighters while demanding loyalty oaths, targeting enemies, punishing dissent, militarizing civic life, and turning the presidency into a merch table with subpoenas. They want the aesthetics of resistance without the inconvenience of resisting power, because they are the power.

That is why the Star Wars imagery is such a spectacular self-own.

George Lucas built Star Wars out of the visual language of empire, fascism, rebellion, myth, and propaganda. He did not accidentally borrow from authoritarian spectacle; he studied it, repurposed it, and made it legible to modern audiences. The throne room ceremony in A New Hope famously draws on the staging of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. The monumental symmetry, the ceremonial procession, the massed bodies, the architecture of triumph, Lucas knew exactly what visual grammar he was invoking.

But the point was not to celebrate fascist spectacle. The point was to show how power wraps itself in grandeur, ritual, and heroic imagery. Star Wars is obsessed with how republics become empires, how fear becomes policy, how emergency powers become permanent, how myths can liberate or enslave, and how people convince themselves they are saving civilization while helping build the machine that crushes it.

And now the White House is apparently looking at that entire warning label and saying: great, but what if the emperor had better branding?

The image casts Trump as a mythic protector figure: armored, holy-lit, flag-bearing, carrying Grogu like a sacred child through the snow. It is paternal, militarized, sentimental, and authoritarian all at once. It is not just “Trump is strong.” It is “Trump is the guardian of innocence, the warrior-father, the chosen protector, the man who carries the future through the storm.”

That is not politics. That is cult iconography with a Disney+ subscription.

And it is especially absurd because The Mandalorian itself is a story about a lone warrior who slowly learns that rigid codes and weaponized identity are not enough. Din Djarin’s entire arc is about care breaking through dogma. Grogu is not a prop that makes the armored man look tender. Grogu is the moral center that forces the armored man to become something more human.

So naturally, the White House looked at that and thought: perfect, put the baby in the pouch and make the president look taller.

Fans immediately understood the problem. Earlier this year, Trump had also been depicted with a red lightsaber, the color associated with Sith Lords and villains in Star Wars lore. As one fan put it: “Imagine watching Star Wars and thinking that the ones with the red lightsabers are the good guys.”

Exactly.

This happens when a movement consumes pop culture entirely as branding, not meaning. They see armor and think hero. They see flags and think virtue. They see rebellion and imagine it means being rude to fact-checkers. They see Star Wars and somehow miss the part where the bad guys are the ones obsessed with domination, spectacle, loyalty, and crushing democratic resistance.

Of course, that is the whole trick. Authoritarian movements do not announce themselves by saying, “Good morning, we are here to destroy the republic.” They arrive wrapped in symbols people already love. They borrow the music, the myths, the heroes, the slogans. They call coercion strength and cruelty order. They call surrender peace, propaganda communication, and call cosplay leadership. Then they put a White House watermark on it.

So that is where we are this Mother’s Day: Trump rage-posting through a war, Iran warning that its fingers are on the trigger, Xi preparing to test a distracted and depleted America, Putin pretending his demand for Ukrainian surrender is a peace process, and the White House trying to turn the president into a Mandalorian saint while accidentally reminding everyone that the empire always had excellent graphic design.

The Force is not with this communications shop.

Happy Mother’s Day. Hug your people. Drink something warm. And may the fourth branch of government, exhausted women with coffee and Substack subscriptions, continue to hold the line.

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On Saturday afternoon, while the Strait of Hormuz remained effectively closed to tanker traffic, while 1,600 ships sat bottled up in the Persian Gulf, while six people were reported missing after an overnight American strike on an Iranian port, the President of the United States posted an AI-generated image of himself standing on a Navy carrier deck watching ships explode.

He also posted “Bye Bye, Drones” above a graphic of a destroyer firing laser beams. He posted a before-and-after comparison: 159 Iranian ships sailing under Obama and Biden, 159 Iranian ships on the ocean floor under Trump. He posted “Drones Dropping Like Butterflies” alongside an AI rendering of Iranian drones falling into the sea. He posted a fat caricature of the Governor of Illinois eating a comically oversized meal. He did all of this from his golf course in Florida, where he was watching a tournament, between approximately 3:51 and 5:36 in the afternoon.

These timestamped posts are now part of the permanent record. Xi Jinping’s intelligence services don’t need to hack anything, they can scroll Truth Social. The IRGC’s strategic planners, whose missile capability remains largely intact despite the cartoon ocean floor imagery, are drawing their own conclusions about who they’re dealing with. Every adversary with an internet connection received, for free, on Saturday afternoon, a precise and detailed picture of the American president’s relationship with reality.

Thus far, Congress has said nothing. The GOP caucus, which controls the levers of oversight, which has access to classified damage assessments that reportedly contradict everything Pete Hegseth has told the public, which is constitutionally empowered to demand answers, said nothing. This is where the story stops being darkly comic and becomes something that requires a different kind of language.

History offers a useful framework, if we’re willing to use it honestly. When conservative German politicians handed Franz von Papen’s coalition the chancellorship in January 1933, they believed they were making a controlled transaction. Hitler was useful, a battering ram against the left, a mass mobilizer they could aim and redirect. Papen said the quiet part out loud: within two months, he assured his colleagues, they would have pushed Hitler into a corner so tight he’d squeak. The conservative establishment’s fatal miscalculation was not that they failed to see Hitler clearly, but that they saw him clearly enough to use him and believed that the same qualities that made him useful also made him manageable. They were wrong about the second part in ways that consumed them.

The Republican establishment has spent a decade making the same calculation. Trump was useful, a base mobilizer, a culture war instrument, a wrecking ball aimed at institutions they found inconvenient. They swallowed their private assessments and made their accommodations. What they failed to account for, as Papen failed to account for it, is that a man without genuine institutional loyalty, without consistent ideological commitments, without the normal political self-preservation instincts that make actors predictable, such a man cannot be contained by rational strategy. You cannot negotiate with someone who doesn’t experience consequences the way you do. The containment strategy contains nothing. It does, however, make the containers complicit.

The Night of the Long Knives, June 30 to July 2, 1934, is instructive here. Ernst Röhm had been Hitler’s oldest ally, one of the very few people who addressed him informally, a man who had been indispensable to the Nazi rise. He led the SA, the Brownshirts, the street muscle that had made everything possible. By 1934 Röhm had ambitions that made him inconvenient to the industrialists and military establishment whose support Hitler now needed more than he needed the SA. Over one weekend, Hitler had him murdered, along with the broader SA leadership and anyone else who had become inconvenient, rivals, witnesses, old enemies, Papen’s own secretary. Papen survived only because he was still momentarily useful. He was placed under house arrest and thoroughly terrified. Perhaps most chillingly, the German cabinet retroactively legalized the murders. The judiciary concurred, and the military, relieved that the SA threat to their institutional prerogatives had been eliminated, said nothing.

They got what they wanted in the short term. Then they lost everything on the longer timeline.

Consider the current roster of the useful and the spent.

Jeff Sessions was Attorney General. Mike Pence was Vice President. Bill Barr provided the juridical cover. James Mattis, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, the adults in the room, as they were briefly and hopefully called, each made their calculation that their presence was moderating, stabilizing, essential. Each was consumed.

Consider Pam Bondi, the recently fired Attorney General, installed with a specific mandate to manage the Justice Department as a protective instrument. She is already caught between congressional pressure over the Epstein files and the demands of the man she serves, with no exit from that corridor that doesn’t damage her. Kristi Noem dismantled a carefully constructed political identity, the presidential-adjacent brand, the Mount Rushmore backdrop, and received in return the kind of casual dismissal reserved for people who’ve already been squeezed. Lori Chavez-DeRemer surrendered the independence that was her political identity for a cabinet position that has made her radioactive in exactly the districts she’d need to survive. Kash Patel is running the FBI on a mandate of retribution and loyalty, leaving a paper trail of his own that will outlast whatever protection he currently enjoys.

Protection is always conditional. It is always, eventually, withdrawn. Röhm knew Hitler from the very beginning and it did not save him.

After the collapse came Nuremberg. The trials established something legally new: that institutional complicity is its own category of crime, that the lawyers who wrote the opinions and the judges who signed the orders and the bureaucrats who processed the paperwork bore individual responsibility for what the machinery produced. “I was following orders” was not a defense. The Judges’ Trial prosecuted men who had simply done law, and found them guilty of the law they had done.

The American situation will not end in Nuremberg trials. The analog does not extend that far and it would be both inaccurate and hysterical to suggest it does. But the people who have used legal and institutional instruments to shield one man from accountability while dismantling the mechanisms designed to protect everyone else are creating a record. History has a longer memory than a news cycle. Some of Hitler’s enablers hanged. Some fled to South America. Some lived out quiet lives under assumed names. Eichmann made it to Buenos Aires. The Mossad found him in 1960.

The pursuit, when it comes, tends to be longer and more determined than the pursued expect.

On Saturday afternoon, the President of the United States posted AI images of naval warfare from his golf course while an actual naval conflict closed one of the world’s most critical shipping lanes. World leaders and adversaries watched in real time. The Republican Congress, with its classified briefings and its constitutional obligations, said nothing.

These posts are timestamped. They will sit in the archive alongside the Cuban Missile Crisis cables, the Eisenhower memos, the Roosevelt correspondence, the record of how American power was exercised at its most serious moments.

“Bye Bye, Drones.”

The record is the indictment. Everyone who had the power to intervene and chose silence is also in it.

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Regrettably for Trump, reality keeps rudely refusing to board the plane. The Strait of Hormuz is still contested. Iran’s mosquito fleet is still intact. Gulf allies are questioning whether America’s security guarantee comes with a deductible the size of their oil infrastructure. Satellite imagery shows Iranian and Iranian-backed forces hit 18 U.S.-linked military sites across seven countries. Chinese firms have just been sanctioned for allegedly helping Tehran target American forces. And Benjamin Netanyahu, who helped sell Trump on the fantasy of an easy Iran war, has, in the words of one former Israeli diplomat, “screwed” Trump “pretty badly,” and been screwed in return, leaving both men trapped in a failing enterprise neither can publicly abandon. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the grand bargain?

The Financial Times has a long and useful look at Trump’s upcoming visit to China, and the central theme is that Trump is walking into Beijing in a very different world than the one he pretends to command. He wants a spectacle, deals, soybeans, Boeings, and a trade truce. He wants a headline that lets him claim he personally stabilized civilization between lunch and dessert. He likely wants a hug from Xi Jinping, who normally reserves physical warmth for Vladimir Putin, but we’ll come back to that.

China is no longer behaving like a supplicant in the American-led order. It has leverage, and it knows it. The FT notes that China’s pressure over critical minerals helped force the U.S. to unwind extreme tariffs that had reached 145 percent, puncturing Trump’s favorite fantasy that America “holds all the cards.” That era, one expert told the FT, is “gone, I would say for ever.” The “I would say” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It sounds like someone who wished they didn’t have to say it.

This is the danger of Trump’s foreign policy in its purest form. He mistakes personal flattery for strategy and believes relationships between superpowers work like Mar-a-Lago dinner seating charts. He imagines that if Xi calls him “my friend” and perhaps compliments the drapes, then America has won. Meanwhile, China is looking at rare earths, semiconductors, Taiwan, Iranian oil, advanced manufacturing, and the long game of replacing American dominance with something far more favorable to Beijing.

Trump wants to walk into China as Nixon with a Truth Social account. Instead, he may arrive as the president asking Xi Jinping to help him clean up the war Netanyahu helped sell him.

And then there is this. The U.S. has now sanctioned Chinese commercial satellite companies for allegedly helping Iran target U.S. forces in the Middle East. According to FT reporting, the State Department targeted three Chinese groups — The Earth Eye, MizarVision, and Chang Guang Satellite Technology — accusing them of providing satellite imagery that helped Iran conduct military strikes against American forces and allied facilities. One of the companies had already been tied in FT reporting to Iranian access to Chinese satellite capabilities, and another had reportedly supplied imagery to Iran-backed Houthi rebels targeting U.S. warships in the Red Sea.

So Trump is heading to Beijing hoping Xi can help stabilize Iran while Washington is simultaneously accusing Chinese firms of helping Tehran make the war more dangerous. That is not diplomacy on easy mode. That is a Jenga tower made of tariffs, satellites, oil shipments, Taiwan concessions, Iranian drones, and Trump’s desperate need for a win he can’t define.

The Taiwan piece is especially ominous. Chinese officials reportedly want Trump to change U.S. language from not supporting Taiwanese independence to saying Washington “opposes Taiwanese independence.” That may sound like diplomatic hairsplitting, but it would be a major rhetorical concession to Beijing. And Trump has already shown he is willing to soften criticism of China when he thinks it might help him get a trade deal. FT reported that during Trump’s first term, he told Xi the U.S. would tone down criticism of Beijing over Hong Kong protests to help revive trade talks.

Asian allies worry that Trump might sell out Taiwan for a soybean receipt and a compliment about his golf swing, because they are reading the man’s résumé.

The connective tissue between Beijing and Iran comes from The Guardian’s analysis of the deteriorating Trump-Netanyahu alliance. Former U.S. ambassador Daniel Shapiro told The Guardian that Trump wants the Iran war “more or less behind him” before he sits down with Xi, because otherwise he arrives in Beijing in the weak position of asking China to pressure Iran into accepting terms it has not accepted. Trump does not want to look like a supplicant. Unfortunately for Trump, looking like a supplicant becomes difficult to avoid when you are, in fact, showing up needing help.

The war is not behind him. The strait is still contested. The mosquito fleet is intact. Gulf states are fracturing. U.S. bases have been exposed as vulnerable fixed targets. And China, the country Trump needs for leverage over Tehran, is also the country whose companies Washington has just accused of helping Tehran target American forces. This is the inevitable outcome when foreign policy is run by men who think “dominance” means starting a fire, declaring it beautiful, and then asking the arsonist next door if he has a hose.

The New York Times adds a devastating visual-investigation layer to all of this. Amid competing Iranian propaganda and U.S. talking points, the Times analyzed satellite imagery and verified that Iranian and Iranian-backed forces hit 18 military sites in seven countries where the U.S. operates. The Times cross-checked Iranian-released imagery against European commercial satellite imagery because U.S. officials had asked American satellite companies to restrict or remove imagery from the region — not merely restrict future releases, but retroactively remove images going back to early March. The Times found that the images showing damage were not fake, though some Iranian claims about what was hit still needed correction.

Trump has been trying to minimize Iran’s response as a “trifle.” A trifle. As in dessert. As in something you might serve after dinner, not something involving dead American service members, damaged radar systems, destroyed buildings, hit communications infrastructure, and attacks across the U.S. footprint in the Middle East.

The Times described this as the widest-ranging attack on U.S. military sites in the region ever. Some of the strikes killed American service members, including six at a makeshift command post in Kuwait and one in Saudi Arabia. Satellite imagery showed strikes on communications infrastructure at the U.S. Fifth Fleet base in Bahrain, radar systems, warehouses, fuel tanks, shelters, and even aircraft. The loss of aircraft alone likely runs around one billion dollars, according to analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. A single radar system damaged in Jordan costs approximately five hundred million dollars to repair or replace. Analysts told the Times that the attacks likely did not cripple America’s offensive capabilities against Iran, but they did reveal new vulnerabilities in the U.S. regional posture — and a price tag that makes “trifle” an interesting word choice.

The United States can still hit Iran hard. Nobody serious doubts that. But Iran does not have to beat the U.S. military in a conventional war. It only has to survive the punch, expose the costs of America’s footprint, and make every base, ship, radar system, fuel tank, and allied facility part of the target map.

The FT’s piece on Iran’s “mosquito fleet” makes the same point at sea. Trump bragged that Iran’s navy was “lying at the bottom of the sea, obliterated,” which is a little like declaring you solved a mosquito problem by punching a parade float. Iran’s conventional navy may be battered, but the real threat in Hormuz is the IRGC’s asymmetric force: hundreds of fast-attack boats hidden in coves, caves, tunnels, and along Iran’s rugged southern coast, backed by drones, missiles, mines, and geography.

These boats do not need to sink an aircraft carrier. They do not need to defeat the Fifth Fleet. They need to make merchant shipping nervous, insurers twitchy, and energy markets unstable. Experts cited by FT estimate that the IRGC has between 500 and 1,000 operational armed speedboats of varying capabilities, plus more than 1,000 drone boats and missile batteries deployed along the coast. The U.S. can destroy boats when they come into open water, and it has destroyed some. Protecting almost every vessel passing through Hormuz is vastly more expensive than forcing the world to wonder whether the next vessel might be hit. That is the grim genius of asymmetric warfare. You do not beat the giant. You make the giant spend billions swatting mosquitoes.

Trump keeps measuring victory by what he blew up. Iran is measuring survival by what it can still threaten. While Trump pretends all of this is under control, Gulf states are reading the fine print on America’s security guarantee.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Arab Gulf monarchies are deeply worried that any deal to end the war will focus on Washington’s main concern, Iran’s nuclear program, while leaving intact the threats they actually fear most: Iran’s conventional missiles and allied militias. Gulf states that hosted major U.S. military installations and relied on American protection saw those bases become targets, and they now realize they had little sway over U.S. military actions that directly affected their own security.

The “America protects its allies” brochure has some fine-print problems. Gulf states hosted U.S. bases assuming the bases would deter Iran. Instead, the bases helped make them targets. They watched Washington launch strikes without fully accounting for their security concerns, then watched U.S. officials downplay Iranian retaliation as “low harassing fire” and “trifling” — characterizations that land differently when your oil infrastructure is part of the damage assessment.

The result is a regional scramble. The Gulf monarchies are divided over how to approach Iran, Israel, and the United States. The UAE was heavily targeted and is leaning closer to Israel while also signaling more go-it-alone instincts — it recently announced it would leave OPEC, a striking signal that regional cooperation has lost its appeal. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are looking to other powers for support, including Pakistan, South Korea, Ukraine, China, Russia, and Turkey. Oman is urging continued diplomacy with Iran. The Abraham Accords normalization project, already damaged by Gaza, has been further shaken by the Iran war and by doubts about U.S. protection.

That list of countries Gulf states are now courting is its own editorial. When your security guarantor launches a war without consulting you, gets your infrastructure targeted in the retaliation, and then calls it a trifle, you begin returning other people’s calls.

Then there is Netanyahu.

The Guardian’s Julian Borger adds the element that has been strangely under-discussed: the Trump-Netanyahu alliance is showing signs of strain because both men are trapped inside the same failed enterprise. Netanyahu publicly insists that he has “full coordination” with Trump and that the two speak almost daily. But Israeli press reports suggest Israel has been left out of U.S.-Iran cease-fire efforts and Pakistani-brokered peace talks. Israeli officials reportedly had to use intelligence assets to figure out what Washington was negotiating.

When a politician keeps insisting everything is coordinated, that is usually a good time to check whether the furniture is being loaded into separate moving trucks.

Netanyahu spent decades pushing the U.S. toward war with Iran. He helped coax Trump into abandoning the 2015 nuclear deal, which in turn helped Iran expand its nuclear program. This year, Netanyahu reportedly sold Trump on the idea that war with Iran would be easy: the economy was broken, the public was ready to revolt, the Revolutionary Guards were overrated, and the regime was an overripe fruit ready to fall. One former Israeli diplomat described Netanyahu essentially telling Trump that, together, they could win in three or four days.

Three or four days.

It is amazing how often catastrophic foreign policy decisions begin with very confident men promising that a war will be quick.

They were wrong on every count. The Iranian people did not rise up. The regime did not fall. The Revolutionary Guards were not too weak to hit back. Iran inflicted serious damage on U.S. bases and Gulf monarchies, closed or contested the Strait of Hormuz, and triggered a global economic crisis. By late March, according to one former Israeli diplomat quoted by The Guardian, Trump was showing signs of deep disappointment with Netanyahu.

This is where Alon Pinkas’s logic is so elegant and grim. Trump cannot publicly blame Netanyahu without admitting he was manipulated into a war. Netanyahu cannot break with Trump without losing his last external lifeline. So they are locked together in a failing enterprise, each man prevented from accountability by the other’s presence. Think a hostage situation with flag pins.

That loops us right back to Beijing. Trump wants to sit down with Xi as the master dealmaker. But if Iran is not stabilized, he sits down as the man who needs China — Iran’s key oil customer and a superpower with its own agenda — to help pressure Tehran into terms Trump has not been able to secure. That is a man arriving at the negotiation table with smoke on his suit and someone else’s fire extinguisher on his Christmas list.

Back home, the Trump administration is dealing with these minor matters of war, global energy disruption, vulnerable U.S. bases, fractured alliances, and Chinese leverage by doing what any serious government would do: turning public office into a monetized lifestyle channel.

Kash Patel allegedly handed out custom bourbon bottles with his name on them while conducting FBI business. Because apparently the Federal Bureau of Investigation now comes with a tasting room. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced scrutiny over military helicopter flybys near Kid Rock’s Nashville home. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington asked the Defense Department inspector general to investigate. The IG’s office reportedly said Hegseth “decided not to pursue this matter.” Usually inspectors general investigate agency leaders. In this version, the agency leader tells the watchdog whether the watchdog may watch.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, meanwhile, has been filming a family road-trip series for seven months, sponsored by Toyota, Shell, Royal Caribbean, and United Airlines — companies that, by the purest coincidence in the history of coincidences, might have business before the Transportation Department. Duffy says a road trip “fits any budget,” which is a bold thing to say while Americans are staring at gas prices tied to Trump’s Iran war fallout.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new theory of public service: every cabinet job is just a brand partnership waiting to happen. Somewhere, an ethics lawyer is chewing drywall.

Scott MacFarlane has reporting on the legal fight over Trump’s White House East Wing ballroom that is both ridiculous and genuinely alarming. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is challenging the project, has filed a response accusing the Justice Department of making multiple false statements in a federal court filing — statements, the Trust says, that DOJ’s own counsel know to be false. DOJ claimed the Trust had been shown detailed non-public plans by top military and Secret Service officials. False, says the Trust. DOJ claimed the military asked the Trust not to sue because of the facility’s top-secret nature. Also false.

The Trust’s summary of DOJ’s filing is worth quoting directly: “What’s been filed by the Department of Justice may be standard fare for a social media post, but in a federal court filing, it’s neither appropriate nor permitted.” The filing cited the specific bar conduct rule prohibiting false statements to a court. These were not junior attorneys. The response notes the DOJ filing was signed by three of its most senior lawyers, none of whom had appeared in the case before.

When the Justice Department stops acting like the people’s lawyer and starts acting like Trump’s personal reply guy, this is what happens. Court filings start sounding like 3 a.m. rage posts, and everyone is supposed to pretend this is normal.

One final detail: the ballroom was supposed to be free. Then donor-funded. Then paid for by Trump himself. There is now a congressional request for one billion dollars in taxpayer money for the security portion alone. Nothing says “self-funded vanity project” like asking the public to cough up a billion dollars so the president can have a ballroom.

That is the Trump doctrine today in miniature. Abroad, he mistakes escalation for dominance and then needs rivals to help manage the fallout. He lets Netanyahu sell him a fantasy war, watches Iran survive it, watches U.S. bases get hit, watches Gulf allies fracture, watches Hormuz remain unstable, and then heads to Beijing hoping Xi will help him turn the page before anyone notices the page is on fire.

At home, his cabinet treats public office like a content studio, his Justice Department files courtroom arguments that read like Trump’s comment section, and taxpayers are being asked to finance the security apparatus around a presidential vanity project that was definitely, absolutely not supposed to cost them a thing.

The summit may or may not happen. The war may or may not end. The ballroom will almost certainly get built. And somewhere in a cove along Iran’s southern coast, a fast-attack boat is waiting to see how it all turns out.

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On May 7, 2026, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva walked out of the White House and gave a twenty-minute press conference. He discussed Iran, Cuba, nuclear nonproliferation, rare earths, trade negotiations, the procedural history of a 2010 Brazil-Turkey nuclear agreement he had personally handed to Donald Trump across the table that afternoon, and his mild amusement that Trump had promised to read it that evening. He was specific, self-aware, occasionally funny, and completely coherent in his second language.

Donald Trump posted four sentences on Truth Social.

The bilateral meeting between the two presidents had been listed as open to credentialed press. Fox News spent the better part of the afternoon telling its audience the joint appearance was imminent, “we promise, any moment now,” before the Brazilian delegation quietly departed and the press conference that had been repeatedly promised simply ceased to exist. No explanation was offered.

It was the latest and most visible data point in a pattern that a growing cohort of credentialed medical professionals have been documenting for years, warning about with increasing urgency, and watching confirm itself in real time, often faster than anyone can write it down.

That same day, Trump took a presidential motorcade to the National Mall to inspect renovation work at the reflecting pool. When ABC reporter Rachel Scott asked why, with the Iran war at a critical juncture, he was spending significant time on decorating projects, Trump called it “such a stupid question,” told Scott she “probably understands dirt better than I do,” and described her to the assembled crowd as “one of the worst reporters” and “a horror show.” As the press was being thanked and ushered out, Trump turned to an aide and, according to multiple accounts and lip reading of available video, called her a bitch.

It was not a calculated political attack of the kind Trump has always deployed strategically. It was an unguarded, reflexive response to having an inconvenient truth named out loud, the kind of disinhibition that is clinically distinct from deliberate cruelty, and that those tracking his condition have been flagging with increasing alarm.

One day earlier, at a Mother’s Day event in the Rose Garden, Trump had delivered what was nominally a tribute to angel moms and Gold Star mothers. What it actually was, for anyone listening carefully, was a clinical document. The speech looped. It perseverated. It moved without transition from border statistics to shoe-ruining mud to drug interdiction percentages to the reflective properties of white stone to Lee Greenwood. He asked grieving mothers on camera whether time had healed their wounds. He answered his own question. He mentioned his own mother twice.

The audience was friendly, the setting controlled, the format designed to minimize the unscripted. This has become a template.

This pattern has not gone unnoticed by the medical community, and saying so is no longer the province of fringe commentators or partisan operatives. On November 4, 2024, the day before the presidential election, fifty nationally renowned geriatric, neurological, and forensic psychiatric experts published an open letter to the American people. They were careful about what they were and were not claiming. They were warning, not issuing a diagnosis. The distinction matters.

The behaviors they documented were observable and repeated: deterioration in language skills including paraphasias, (substituting invented sounds for real words), impaired memory filled in with confabulation, tangential thinking, perseveration, disinhibition in speech and behavior, and the amplification of maladaptive personality traits. They noted these signs comprised critical information for voters. They submitted their informed opinion, they said, in the interest of public trust and safety.

Alas, the electorate did not act on it. Eighteen months later, the same cohort of professionals, this time thirty-six of them, their names and institutional affiliations now publicly attached, escalated. On April 30, 2026, their statement was entered into the Congressional Record at pages S2162-S2163 by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed of Rhode Island. The signatories included two Nobel Peace Prize recipients, former faculty from Harvard, Yale, Vanderbilt, Columbia, and George Washington University, a past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and a consultant profiler to the executive branch of the federal government. Not fringe, they were the establishment sounding an alarm the establishment would ordinarily prefer not to sound.

Their 2026 assessment was unambiguous: Trump’s mental state had deteriorated further since their 2024 warning. The observable signs now included grandiose and delusional beliefs, among them imagery of himself as Pope, as a mythical warrior hero, as a combat pilot dropping feces on civilians. Severely impaired judgment and impulse control. Significant disinhibition and perseveration, including what they described as seemingly compulsive manic-like late-night communications, one hundred and fifty social media posts in a single night. And escalating threats of violence that they characterized as endangering national and global stability.

They invoked the Declaration of Geneva, the successor to the Hippocratic Oath binding physicians to humanitarian principles since the Nuremberg trials, as the ethical foundation for speaking publicly. This, they were saying, is what the duty to warn looks like when the patient is the most powerful person on earth.

The letter closed with a Nixon parallel that was not rhetorical. In August 1974, as impeachment loomed, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger was so alarmed by Nixon’s condition that he directed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs that any military orders from the president, especially nuclear ones, first be cleared through him or Secretary of State Kissinger. The nuclear football was quietly removed from Nixon’s control.

The thirty-six physicians asked, directly and on the congressional record, whether we could trust Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio to do the same.

It is a question that answers itself. Schlesinger acted as a check on Nixon because he was alarmed by what he saw. He was an institutionalist who understood that his responsibility to the republic superseded his loyalty to the man who had appointed him. Whatever one thought of the Nixon administration, it contained people capable of that distinction.

The current cabinet does not make that distinction. Pete Hegseth is not a reluctant instrument of this administration’s worst impulses. He is a committed one, and has actively worked to dismantle oversight structures within the Department of Defense, purge perceived ideological enemies from the military’s senior ranks, and reshape the armed forces around a nationalist-Christian warrior identity that is his own as much as it is his patron’s. Still, he is coherent where Trump is not, ideologically driven where Trump is impulsively reactive, and fully capable of the kind of operational planning that advanced cognitive decline tends to disrupt. He does not share Trump’s pathology. He shares Trump’s conclusions, and he is more dangerous for the difference.

The thirty-six physicians asked whether Hegseth would do what Schlesinger did. The more unsettling question is what Hegseth would want in return if he did. A man who has used the Pentagon as an instrument of ideological consolidation does not invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment out of civic duty. He does it when it serves a larger project. The question of who benefits and how is never far from any move he makes.

This is the closed loop that the physicians’ letter, for all its courage and precision, does not fully reckon with. The constitutional remedies it invokes, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, cabinet action, removal, were designed for a political culture in which the people empowered to act shared basic commitments to the republic’s continuity. That assumption is load-bearing, and today it may no longer hold.

Impeachment remains the safer theoretical course, precisely because it routes around the cabinet entirely and places the decision with the legislature. Legal scholars have noted that impeachment proceedings, if constructed around conduct in which the next several figures in the line of succession were complicit, and the list of qualifying offenses is not short, running from war powers violations to the concealment of the Epstein files to systematic due process abrogation, could create the predicate for challenging their fitness to assume the presidency as well.

But impeachment requires a House majority that does not currently exist, and recent redistricting has made the arithmetic of flipping it considerably more difficult than the raw polling would suggest. There is no realistic path before January at the earliest, and only then if Democrats take both chambers, a substantial if.

The kakistocracy is doing a creditable job of undermining itself. The tariff regime has rattled business constituencies that were prepared to be accommodating. The Epstein file concealment is a slow burn with too many people holding too much exposure for it to stay managed indefinitely. The DOJ’s weaponization is generating a legal record that will outlast the administration. And the cognitive deterioration that the White House has worked so hard to manage, the controlled settings, the friendly audiences, the bilaterals that go dark, has a horizon.

That horizon may be only six days away. On May 14th and 15th, Donald Trump travels to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping, the first visit to China by an American president since Trump’s own first term in 2017. This will not be a carefully curated audience, or a charming Rose Garden ceremony. It is Xi Jinping on his own turf, holding most of the high cards, fully aware that he holds them, and in no particular hurry to pretend otherwise. Five days before the summit, China’s Ministry of Commerce issued a directive instructing every Chinese citizen, company, and organization not to recognize, enforce, or comply with American sanctions. Xi did not send that signal by accident.

The agenda is genuinely consequential. Iran dominates; China hosted Iran’s foreign minister this week for the first time since the war began, and Beijing’s leverage over any ceasefire pathway is considerable. Trade, rare earths, Taiwan, nuclear security, artificial intelligence, each of these issues carries the weight of civilizational stakes, and none of them admits of the vague four-sentence readout that served as the official American account of the Lula meeting. Xi’s government has its own communications apparatus, its own interests in characterizing what happens in that room, and no particular incentive to protect the White House’s narrative management operation.

The summit was originally scheduled for March. It was postponed when the Iran war erupted. There is every possibility it gets postponed again, Trump’s schedule has shown a pattern of contracting around manageable environments, and Beijing is the least manageable environment imaginable. If it is cancelled or delayed once more, that will itself be a story, and not a difficult one to read.

If it proceeds, the concealment strategy that has defined this administration’s handling of Trump’s public appearances will face its most demanding test. Lula walked out and held his own press conference because he had a coherent account to give and a domestic audience to give it to. Xi will not hold a press conference on Trump’s behalf. What comes out of Beijing will come out on China’s terms, in China’s time, filtered through Beijing’s assessment of what serves Beijing’s interests. The White House will not control that narrative. It has never been less equipped to try.

Thirty-six physicians put their names and reputations on the congressional record last month and said, with the precision their training affords them, that what we are watching is not theater and not politics. It is, in their expert opinion, a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline. They said steps toward removal must be undertaken with the greatest urgency.

Dr. John Gartner, among the most vocal of the professionals tracking this deterioration, offers a formulation that is worth sitting with. The Donald Trump you see today, he says, is the best you will ever see him. It will only get worse from here.

Read that again in the context of what this week produced. The controlled settings. The bilateral that went dark. The motorcade to the reflecting pool. The reporter called a bitch under his breath while the cameras were being thanked and ushered out. The four-sentence Truth Social post standing in for American diplomacy while Lula gave twenty minutes of coherent testimony about the same meeting. If this is the best, the trajectory in the other direction is not abstract. It is a matter of when, not whether.

The urgency has not decreased since they wrote that. It has a departure date now. Beijing. Six days.

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Marty Makary was a Johns Hopkins surgeon. He was also, briefly, the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. He got the job because he was a useful face for an administration that needed someone who could pass a confirmation hearing without embarrassing anyone. He lost the job, reportedly, because he declined to approve blueberry and mango vape flavors on youth health grounds, reversed course under White House pressure, and was then deemed insufficiently loyal by the same people who pressured him. Also because he didn’t block a generic form of the abortion pill when he apparently could have, and because Marjorie Dannenfelser said so.

This is the immune system working exactly as designed. The kakistocracy doesn’t accidentally hire people with judgment. It hires them deliberately, extracts their credibility, and ejects them when the judgment becomes inconvenient. What looks like chaos is actually a remarkably efficient filtering mechanism. The survivors are the ones who learned not to bite back.

The reward structure works in the opposite direction. While the immune system is busy rejecting competence at the FDA, the people closest to the president are quietly building portfolios in the industries his administration is actively reshaping.

Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are anchor investors in American Ventures, a Palm Beach vehicle that has spent the last ten months channeling hundreds of millions of dollars from family offices and wealthy individuals into drone manufacturers, crypto platforms, AI companies, and defense tech. Their father has signed executive orders accelerating domestic drone production. He has pledged to make the United States the crypto capital of the world. He is prosecuting an active shooting war in the world’s most critical oil chokepoint.

The brothers are, their spokespeople are careful to note, passive investors. They have no operational involvement. They do not interface with the federal government on behalf of any company they invest in.

The drone company they backed just received a Pentagon procurement order. The construction shell they backed just landed $1.6 billion in letters of interest from federally funded agencies. The firm managing their money is named Dominari Holdings, in Latin, “to dominate.”

But passive. Very passive.

This is the kakistocracy’s rewards structure: proximity to power converted into returns, with just enough legal daylight between the president’s signature and his sons’ portfolio to make the whole arrangement technically articulable as legitimate. The deniability is built into the architecture.

The externalities, of course, go on the other ledger, the one nobody is keeping. Since February 28th, the United States and Israel have been at war with Iran. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes, has been effectively closed. Rubio is doing press conferences. Trump is insisting the ceasefire is holding while the Navy is disabling tankers on video.

University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers has tallied the true cost at hundreds of billions, possibly trillions. The Pentagon’s stated $25 billion figure, he notes, is “cash flow accounting,” meaning the missiles already fired, the planes already lost. It doesn’t count the million fewer Americans likely to be working in a year, or the roughly $400 billion in lost income Goldman Sachs has projected, or the $4,000 per household buried in the new defense budget request. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, told Congress he didn’t have a ballpark. Wolfers does, and even he didn’t count the oil spill.

Off Kharg Island, Iran’s main crude export terminal, a slick covering 71 square kilometers is spreading southwest toward the coastlines of the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Eighty thousand barrels and counting, leaking into an active war zone where no cleanup is possible, and no one is coming. The Pentagon won’t confirm whether it’s tracking it. The people whose investment vehicles are positioned in the companies selling the weapons that may have caused it are not required to comment.

This is what kakistocracy looks like at scale. Not the cartoonish incompetence of the standard critique, but something more structural and more durable: a government that has methodically removed every mechanism, institutional, legal, diplomatic, environmental, designed to make the people running it answer for what they break.

The immune system rejects competence. The rewards flow to proximity. The externalities spread, unchecked, toward someone else’s shore, while the passive investors are already pivoting to the next deal.

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And I have to hand it to them, because as distractions go, “look, aliens” is really one of the classics. It has everything: mystery, blinking lights, grainy photographs, vague military stamps, the faint suggestion that someone’s uncle once saw a silver Frisbee near a cornfield, and the irresistible promise that the truth is finally coming out, provided you don’t ask why the truth looks suspiciously like a county fair ashtray wired to a flashlight battery and photographed by a man with a migraine.

This is the part where we are supposed to gasp, clutch our pearls, and say, “My God, the government has been hiding flying saucers,” but unfortunately, the documents have the erotic charge of a municipal zoning dispute. They aren’t so much “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” as “Somebody in Hackensack Saw Something Weird and the FBI Made a Folder.” It is less Area 51 and more Area 4B, bottom drawer, miscellaneous, please forward to the Air Force if anyone still cares.

And that’s really the beauty of it. The files appear to be full of unconfirmed sightings, bureaucratic shrugging, letters from citizens, newspaper clippings, assorted flying-disc gossip, and enough “not within our jurisdiction” energy to power a mid-sized government agency through an entire fiscal year. It is a national security matryoshka doll, except every doll inside is another guy saying, “Have you tried calling the Air Force?”

There are reports of discs, balls, saucers, lights, objects, alleged fragments, and my personal favorite genre, “a thing in the sky that was definitely not like the other things in the sky, according to a person who was very sincere and possibly standing near a barn.” There are old memos about whether the Army Air Forces were investigating flying discs, which is bureaucrat for “everybody please stop calling us unless the saucer has a routing number.” There are photos of a supposed flying disc found in Saybrook, Illinois, and I am not saying it looks like someone’s toaster joined a cult, but I am saying if you told me it had been assembled by a raccoon with access to RadioShack, I would not file a formal objection.

This is what they are giving us. Not alien bodies, not a trembling general saying, “We have recovered non-human craft,” and not a saucer parked behind a velvet rope while some Air Force colonel explains that the occupants traveled across a trillion miles of space to tell humanity to stop letting private equity buy veterinary clinics. No, what we get is a pile of files that appear to have been picked clean by every conspiracy researcher, UFO obsessive, retired librarian, paranormal podcast host, archive gremlin, and cigarette-voiced man named Cliff who has been running a Geocities-adjacent “truth portal” since 1998.

The world’s greatest conspiracy investigators have already been through this stuff with tweezers, night vision goggles, red yarn, and a level of commitment most of us cannot muster for flossing. These are not hidden treasures, at best, these are the garage-sale VHS tapes of the national security state, and the government is now standing there with jazz hands like it has just pulled Excalibur out of a manila folder.

Meanwhile, in the real world, where the rent is too high, the wars are too many, the billionaires are too bored, and the Epstein files continue to exist in the political imagination like a cursed filing cabinet nobody in power wants to open without oven mitts, we are being invited to stare lovingly at the possibility that someone in 1947 saw a shiny thing above Idaho.

Don’t look over there at the war, America. Don’t look over there at the names, the networks, the money, the cover-ups, or the men in suits suddenly developing lifelong commitments to privacy law. Don’t look at the collapsing institutions, the looting, the cruelty, the dead-eyed pageantry of people with security clearances pretending they are surprised by the consequences of their own decisions. Look here instead, because this one has aliens, and aliens test better with the key demographic.

It’s the oldest trick in the collapsing-empire playbook. When the citizens start asking why everything is on fire, produce a glittering object and say, “Is this perhaps a spaceship?” When people ask why the same ruling class that cannot deliver health care, clean water, honest budgets, functioning trains, or a website that doesn’t require three blood sacrifices to reset a password is suddenly trusted to curate the truth about extraterrestrial life, simply stamp “declassified” on a stack of old documents and let the History Channel do the rest.

And honestly, I respect the audacity. It takes a special kind of political imagination to look at a nation howling under the weight of corruption, mass distraction, economic precarity, militarized everything, and elite impunity, and decide the appropriate response is, “What if we released some old flying saucer paperwork and hoped everyone got weird for a week?”

The insult is not that they think we believe in aliens, plenty of people believe in aliens, and frankly, given the evidence of human leadership on Earth, extraterrestrial intelligence is one of the more comforting theories still available. The insult is that they think we’ll accept the aliens as a substitute for accountability, as if the possibility of life on other planets is supposed to make us forget the very confirmed presence of predators, profiteers, liars, and war pigs on this one.

Because that’s the thing about these files. They aren’t really about aliens; they’re about atmosphere and about taking our very reasonable suspicion that powerful people hide important things and feeding it a diet of vintage saucer confetti until it forgets what it came into the room to demand.

I’m not saying there is nothing interesting in the files. There’s plenty that is interesting, in the way old FBI documents are always interesting, because every page feels like it was typed by a haunted stenographer during a thunderstorm. There are witnesses, memos, clippings, odd objects, reported sightings, little bureaucratic handoffs, and the unmistakable smell of government employees trying to figure out whether “flying disc” goes under national security, public nuisance, or “please make this someone else’s problem.”

But “interesting” isn’t the same as “explosive,” and “declassified” isn’t the same as “revelatory,” and “the government released a bunch of UFO paperwork” is not the same as “the government told the truth.” Sometimes a file is just a file. Sometimes a flying saucer is just a hubcap with delusions of grandeur. Sometimes the most alien thing in the room is the idea that we are supposed to believe any of this is happening for our benefit.

So yes, by all means, read the alien files. Enjoy the little lights in the sky, marvel at the saucer-shaped doodads, tip your hat to the citizen correspondents who wrote to J. Edgar Hoover with more faith in federal responsiveness than any modern American could safely metabolize, and appreciate the archival weirdness of it all, because it is weird, and weird is one of the few remaining public goods not yet fully privatized.

But don’t let the shiny object do what shiny objects are designed to do. Don’t let “maybe aliens” become the screensaver that activates whenever power is asked an actual question. Don’t let them replace the demand for names, documents, accountability, and consequences with a mid-century scrapbook of “some guy saw something over a field.”

If the aliens are real, I hope they have better recordkeeping than we do. I hope they arrive with receipts, subpoenas, universal health care, and a working theory of why the most powerful nation on Earth keeps acting like a raccoon trapped in a defense contractor’s dumpster. I hope they beam down, take one look at our leadership class, and say, “We traveled across the galaxy for this?”

Until then, the files are fun, the timing is suspicious, the saucers are mostly soup lids, and the kakistocracy remains, as ever, committed to the ancient art of pointing at the sky while picking your pocket on Earth. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, please release the Epstein files, which is what the country actually wants to see, instead of waving a glowing hubcap at us like we’re cats discovering the red laser pointer for the first time.

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