Soybeans for Show, Fallout for Everyone Else

From Busan to the breadline, Trump’s performative peace, nuclear swagger, and the quiet war on hunger.

Good morning! If you’re wondering why the markets are twitching like a caffeine addict in a rainstorm, it’s because Donald Trump just rated his latest summit with Xi Jinping “a twelve out of ten”, which in Trumpian numerology means “nothing happened, but it looked fantastic on television.” The meeting, staged in Busan, South Korea, had all the dignity of a cruise-ship talent show. South Korea played the gracious host, stocking up on Diet Coke and recalibrating hotel water pressure to presidential specifications, while Trump roamed the peninsula like a man in search of a drive-thru. The result was predictably spectacular: a one-year “deal” with China that will be renegotiated annually, or in other words, never actually exist.

From the outset, the summit was more catering than diplomacy. China’s token purchase of three cargoes of U.S. soybeans, a modest 180,000 tons, became “tremendous amounts” in Trump’s retelling, the kind of inflation he actually celebrates. Farmers back home, still reeling from collapsed markets and rising input costs, are meant to clap like trained seals while Illinois declares an agricultural emergency. Trump is selling the illusion of plenty: a harvest of press releases, a bounty of bluster.

There’s a grim kind of logic to it. If you were Xi Jinping, or anyone else with a functioning calculator, would you lock your country into a long-term agreement with the United States right now? Of course not. You’d do exactly what Xi did: toss the showman a few soybeans, smile for the cameras, and wait him out. Why buy a thirty-year bond from a nation that changes policy with the wind and foreign ministers with the seasons? The entire world is learning to trade with the United States the way you deal with a moody landlord, cash on delivery, one month at a time, and document every conversation.

Trump, for his part, announced that “all of the rare earth has been settled,” which sounds more like an incantation against science. His Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, dutifully appeared on the Sunday shows to promise that China was delaying its rare-earth export restrictions by a year, a conveniently identical term to the so-called trade deal. What a coincidence: all of America’s international agreements now expire right before the next election.

But the pièce de résistance came midair, during the now-infamous Air Force One gaggle, where the president, buffeted by turbulence and delusion, performed his own post-summit commentary. Between asides about camera angles (“I don’t have the shakes, people will think I do!”) and praise for Xi’s leadership (“a great leader of a very powerful country”), he cheerfully admitted that he’d traded away half of his China tariffs in exchange for Xi’s “promise” to work harder on fentanyl. Because nothing says tough-on-China like cutting tariffs as a thank-you note for unverifiable narcotics enforcement. The ghost of Ronald Reagan is slamming his head into a teleprompter.

When pressed about his sudden decision to resume nuclear weapons testing, America’s first since 1992, Trump offered the strategic equivalent of a shrug. “They seem to all be nuclear testing,” he said. “If they’re going to test, I guess we have to test too.” Within seconds, he pivoted to say he’d like to see “denuclearization,” proving once again that his brain treats global security like a ping-pong ball. His aides looked on in horror, presumably wondering if there’s a test site in Mar-a-Lago.

Back home, while the cameras followed Trump’s airborne soliloquy, his administration quietly moved to gut emergency SNAP provisions, the last thin thread of food security for millions of Americans. Under the new contingency plan, states would lose automatic access to supplemental aid during crises and be forced to reapply for federal waivers every sixty days. Food inflation? Not an emergency. Crop failure? File an appeal. It’s austerity disguised as “fiscal discipline,” and it’s happening in the same week the president promised “tremendous soybean purchases” from China, a foreign sop for a domestic wound he himself inflicted.

More than twenty blue states have already filed suit, arguing the policy violates both federal statute and basic decency. If they prevail, benefits will likely continue, but only in those states, deepening the divide between the America that still feeds its poor and the one that tells them to eat market confidence. In Trump’s America, farmers get phantom soybeans; the poor get paperwork.

By the time Air Force One landed, Trump had declared the trip “an unbelievable success,” citing imaginary trillions flowing into the U.S. and congratulating himself for world peace in Southeast Asia. His handlers, visibly exhausted, could only nod. After all, when your boss just restarted the nuclear arms race and bartered tariffs for fentanyl enforcement, arguing details is above your pay grade.

So here we are: the world’s largest economy now runs on twelve-out-of-ten diplomacy, a trade deal that renews annually like a bad cable subscription, and a food aid program that vanishes every two months unless you beg for it. If you were a foreign leader, you wouldn’t sign anything longer than a lunch receipt either. And if you were an American family trying to buy groceries, you’d be forgiven for wishing the president cared as much about your table as he does about his Diet Coke supply.

Trump got his photo op. China got its breathing room. And the rest of us got a rerun of the same tragicomedy: Soybeans and Fallout, season four of the endless show no one can turn off.

If there’s one thing history keeps trying to teach us, it’s that empires collapse not from lack of power, but from lack of wisdom. And when you have a president this erratic, this casually reckless with nuclear language, the rest of us don’t have the luxury of waiting for someone else to intervene. The world is literally depending on us.

This is not the moment for despair, it’s the moment for nonviolent defiance. A campaign of peaceful disruption, of conscience and courage: general strikes, rolling strikes, mass refusal. We can’t match the president’s arsenal, but we can overwhelm his indifference. Every act of resistance, every refusal to cooperate with madness, is a vote for survival, not just for Americans, but for every life orbiting this fragile blue planet.

We stop nuclear war not by matching his rage, but by refusing to fuel it. Peace isn’t passive; it’s resistance with discipline and heart. If our leaders won’t protect the world, then the people will, because someone has to.