Red Carpets, Red Flags

Xi hosts autocrats in Tianjin while Trump slaps toll booths on Lady Liberty, plays GI Joe in Venezuela, and hides behind QAnon memes as Ukraine burns.

Good morning! In Tianjin, Xi Jinping is staging his biggest spectacle yet: a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, where autocrats and strongmen strut across red carpets while the West looks on with indigestion. Putin is basking in the glow of Xi’s hospitality, conveniently forgetting the part where his missiles just killed Ukrainian children and took out an EU mission building. Narendra Modi, supposedly America’s counterweight to Beijing, is smiling for the cameras too, having decided that Trump’s friendship is worth about as much as one of his golf course IOUs. The message couldn’t be clearer: while Trump is busy setting fire to NATO and inventing tariffs out of thin air, Xi is building himself a stage where Eurasia’s contradictions can sit at the same table and nod gravely about “multipolarity.”

And yet, multipolarity apparently comes with a soundtrack of air raid sirens. Russia has now said the quiet part out loud: there will be no peace in Ukraine, only more bombs. General Valery Gerasimov announced the autumn “tasks” would be fresh offensives and more mass missile strikes, proving Trump’s “we’ll know in two weeks” deadline for peace was about as realistic as his hairline. The latest assault on Kyiv killed 25, including three children, and tore through a shopping center while narrowly missing EU officials. But in Trump’s fantasy, Putin is still on “his best behavior.” Reality begs to differ.

Closer to home, Trump is hard at work making sure fewer foreigners ever bother to see the inside of America. A brand-new $250 “visa integrity fee” will jack the price of a U.S. visa to $442, one of the highest anywhere, just as overseas tourism numbers collapse for the fifth month straight. International visitor spending is projected to tumble below $169 billion this year, leaving entire swaths of the hospitality industry gasping. Students from India, once a bedrock of U.S. universities, are down nearly 18%. But hey, nothing says “land of the free” like slapping a toll booth on Lady Liberty and calling it patriotism.

On the Venezuelan coast, Trump is trying to play GI Joe, sending seven warships, a nuclear submarine, and a surveillance aircraft to provoke Nicolás Maduro into a chest-thumping contest. Maduro, never one to miss a good show, responded by boasting he’s mobilizing 4.5 million militia and 15,000 troops. Trump himself looks like he can barely walk a golf course without a caddy throwing his ball out of the rough, yet he’s posting AI memes of himself in SWAT gear with QAnon slogans like a swollen septuagenarian role-playing as a commando. America is supposed to take this seriously as a show of strength. Instead, it looks like an elderly man shaking his fist at the clouds and calling it foreign policy.

At home, cruelty is the point, and the point is sharpened daily. Trump has gutted $4.9 billion in foreign aid with a stroke of his “pocket rescission” pen, effectively erasing USAID programs that fed the hungry and kept children alive across the globe. Marco Rubio, back when he was pretending to be reasonable, once admitted foreign aid curbed terrorism and saved lives. Now, thanks to Trump, the world gets to learn how much more dangerous, and starving it becomes without it.

Even American families aren’t spared. Senator Tammy Duckworth has exposed how the administration is illegally freezing child care grants for low-income student parents, forcing them to choose between dropping out of school or going deeper into debt. Nearly a quarter of undergraduates are parents, and the one program meant to keep them afloat is being strangled by bureaucratic cruelty. Six million student loan borrowers are already in default, their credit destroyed. Trump’s America is a place where parenting students can’t afford daycare, farmers can’t sell their crops because of tariff tantrums, and small towns in Nebraska and Iowa are openly admitting they’re in recession. But don’t worry, Trump insists the economy is “the best in history.”

And then there’s the story that should be splashed across every front page but somehow isn’t: in early August, an Israeli cybersecurity official named Tom Artium Alexandra was arrested in Las Vegas during an FBI sting. He allegedly arranged to meet what he thought was a 15-year-old disabled child; instead he was caught by undercover agents and charged with attempting to lure a minor into sexual activity, a felony that carries up to ten years in prison. Within days, Alexandra posted a $10,000 bail, unusually low for a foreign national accused of such a crime, and promptly boarded a flight back to Israel. He skipped his scheduled U.S. court hearing last week.

By any normal standard, this is where extradition demands would come in, where the president would thunder about “protecting our children.” Instead, the Trump DOJ has gone quiet. Prosecutors acknowledge his passport should have been seized. A Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Nevada even vented online that Alexandra must be forced back to face justice. Yet the White House has done nothing. Netanyahu hasn’t been pressed, and the accused is now free, enjoying life back home.

The mix is toxic: Trump, Israel, pedophilia, corruption. If you were cooking up a scandal in a lab, this would be the recipe. And yet, the president, who never misses a chance to rage about immigrants at the border, or students protesting tuition hikes, has nothing to say about a foreign predator walking out of an American courtroom and vanishing on the first flight home.

Finally, technology itself has entered the fray. ICE agents, who now raid homes and schools with their faces hidden behind masks like stormtroopers in cargo pants, are suddenly being “unmasked”, not by Congress or courts, but by activists with artificial intelligence. A Netherlands-based organizer named Dominick Skinner and his volunteer group take video clips of raids where even part of an officer’s face is visible, feed them into AI software that guesses what the full face might look like, and then run those images through a public search tool called PimEyes. PimEyes is basically Google for faces: it scans billions of pictures posted online and spits out lookalike matches, often leading straight to a LinkedIn or Instagram profile.

That’s how the group says they’ve identified dozens of ICE employees. Republicans are furious, pushing bills that would make it a crime to “doxx”, that is, publish the names of federal officers. Democrats are divided: some argue that law enforcement shouldn’t be able to hide their identity in the first place, others worry that vigilantes using facial recognition sets a dangerous precedent.

And here’s the kicker: the technology is wrong more than half the time. Skinner himself admits 60% of the first matches are duds. But the symbolism lands anyway. The masks were meant to strip these agents of accountability, to make them faceless instruments of Trump’s immigration raids. Now, even flawed AI has made that facelessness into a liability. Trump’s enforcers no longer get to hide in the shadows.

So there it is. Xi Jinping rolls out the red carpet, Putin rolls out the missiles, Trump rolls out visa toll booths and QAnon memes, and ICE agents roll out with masks only to be unmasked by AI. It would be funny if it weren’t so grotesque. America under Trump is shrinking inward, petty and cruel, while autocrats abroad puff themselves up as “architects of a new order.” The world sees it, allies see it, even farmers in Nebraska see it. The only one who doesn’t is the sickly old man with swollen ankles posting death cult memes at three in the morning, insisting he’s winning.