Wednesday Afternoon News Updates: Trump Goes to China as Xi Holds the Cards – 5/13/26
Hi all, Ben here. It’s Wednesday. Here are the latest updates. Top stories we’re tracking today:
Before I go any further, I want to encourage all those who are able to join as paid subscribers to do so today by clicking here if you are able. This is how we grow. If you’re already a Meidas+ paid Substack subscriber, thank you for your support of pro-democracy media! Now let’s dive in. Trump lands in Beijing as Xi sends a messageLet’s start with Donald Trump, gripping the Air Force One handrail for dear life, inching his way down the stairs step by careful step, while schoolchildren on the tarmac waved mostly Chinese flags in his face. This is the guy who spent years mocking Joe Biden for physical stumbles. And we can move past just the optics, because the substance was worse. Xi Jinping did not show up to greet Trump. Not only that, he didn’t send his Foreign Minister either. What Trump got was China’s Vice President Han Zheng, U.S. Ambassador David Perdue, China’s Ambassador to Washington, and an Executive Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs. As former Ambassador Luis Moreno put it, and he’s done more than a few of these POTUS visits abroad, that doesn’t happen unless someone is sending a message. Xi sent a message. Trump got the bells and whistles. The motorcade, the ceremony, the pageantry. The surface level stuff someone like Xi knows is enough to get Trump’s ego satiated before he makes his move. His first public communication after wheels down was a Truth Social post defending Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s invitation status on Air Force One. Now, the White House published a full list of the business leaders who joined Trump on this trip: Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Fink, Stephen Schwarzman, David Solomon, Jane Fraser, Kelly Ortberg, Jensen Huang, and a roster of other Fortune 500 CEOs. Trump is clearly trying to use their presence as a crutch, as if surrounding himself with America’s corporate elite will make him look powerful walking into a room with Xi. It’s doing the opposite. It looks desperate. It looks like a man who knows he’s outmatched and is packing the bench hoping nobody notices. And let’s be clear about what Eric Trump and Lara Trump are doing on that plane. Eric runs the Trump Organization. Whatever business opportunities come out of China in the next 48 hours, you can be confident the family is positioning itself to benefit. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about that. Not a single China expert aboard Air Force OneBrett Bruen, a former U.S. diplomat, noted something that should alarm everyone: there was not a single China policy expert on Air Force One. No NSC official. No State Department specialist on Chinese affairs. Normally a presidential visit of this magnitude would include briefers whose entire careers have been spent understanding how Xi Jinping thinks, what he wants, and where the pressure points are. Instead, Trump brought his kids and a collection of CEOs focused on their own bottom lines. It’s the perfect representation of the American oligarchy. The response from the White House communications shop? Steve Cheung called Bruen a “slope-brained, mouth breathing moron” and told him to stop calling himself an expert in anything “aside from sucking.” That is a direct quote from an official White House spokesperson. That is the level of professionalism representing the United States on the world stage right now. It’s humiliating. Inflation gets even worseWhile Trump was flying to Beijing to beg Xi to “open up” China for American business, the economic news back home was getting worse by the hour. April’s Producer Price Index came in at 6% year-over-year — well above the 4.9% expectation, and the highest reading since January 2023. Month-over-month, PPI jumped 1.4%, nearly triple the 0.5% consensus forecast. Core PPI rose 1% against an expectation of 0.3%. Every single one of the 48 economists in Bloomberg’s survey predicted a lower number. Every single one was wrong in the same direction. PPI measures what producers and manufacturers are experiencing. When their costs go up, those costs eventually get passed to consumers. We already reported yesterday that consumer inflation — the CPI — hit 3.8%, a multi-year high. PPI moving like this means more consumer pain is coming through the pipeline. Rate hikes, not cuts, are now increasingly being discussed. CNN’s Harry Enten said this morning that the five worst presidential approval ratings on inflation ever recorded all belong to Donald Trump, and they’ve all come in the last month. Not Biden. Not Jimmy Carter. Trump. All five. Historic lows. Even MAGA Mike Johnson, on Fox this morning, couldn’t spin it. He acknowledged the inflation numbers were “not good news” before pivoting to blame the war with Iran. And that’s the lie I want to call out directly. The economy was already in serious trouble before the Iran War. The war made things dramatically worse, yes — but don’t let them get away with using it as a blanket excuse heading into the midterms. The damage started the moment Trump’s tariff regime went into effect. The Iran War poured accelerant on a fire that was already burning. Then Johnson got asked at a press conference whether the final government funding bill should explicitly rule out taxpayer money for Trump’s ballroom renovation at the White House. His answer was essentially: the president wants to build it with private money, but the Secret Service has security concerns, so Congress may need to fund that part. In other words: yes, your tax dollars may be paying for a ballroom at the president’s residence. We’re doing that right now. Burgum grilled on Capitol HillInterior Secretary Doug Burgum is testifying on his department’s budget today and struggling through nearly every exchange. He refused to answer a straightforward yes-or-no question about whether Americans are struggling with rising costs, pivoting instead to Biden. He justified the no-bid contract the paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — legally reserved for serious government injury — by citing nineteen broken fountains. He had no answer when Congressman Huffman pointed out that Trump himself said the National Mall arch is for him, and that the White House insisted it be taller than the one in Pyongyang. He couldn’t defend cutting $1 billion from national parks while the ballroom project moves forward. He claimed the data was lying when Congressman Magaziner showed that his own home state undercuts his argument against renewables. And when asked whether Trump’s claim that wind turbine noise causes cancer is true or false, he said nothing. So much for “obliterated”The New York Times is reporting on newly surfaced classified military intelligence assessments showing that Iran has quietly regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers, and underground facilities. U.S. intelligence now assesses that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, and that approximately 90% of Iran’s underground missile sites are partially or fully operational. Their drone and ballistic missile capabilities are effectively back online. So the war that Johnson is now blaming for the economic catastrophe? It didn’t finish the job. Iran is reconstituted. And meanwhile, a Canadian journalist on television this week put it about as bluntly as anyone has: she noted that observers in China are wondering how the U.S., which should have had every advantage in a war it started, is getting bogged down by a much lesser military power. The response from her Canadian colleague? “That is an American tradition.” Ouch. Lake Tahoe residents losing power for AI data centersNearly 50,000 residents on the California side of Lake Tahoe are about to lose access to their current electricity provider because Nevada-based NV Energy is redirecting power to AI data centers in Nevada. By May 2027, NV Energy will stop supplying 75% of Liberty Utilities’ electricity for the region. Liberty says it’s routine energy contracting. Local residents and officials are not buying it. “It’s like we don’t exist,” one North Lake Tahoe resident told Fortune. Real communities are being deprioritized so that server farms can stay cool. That’s the world Elon Musk and his allies are building. See ya never, Trump Tower AustraliaThe $1.1 billion Trump Tower project in Gold Coast, Australia is finished. The developer, Altus Property Group CEO David Young, says the Trump brand has become too “toxic to Australians” — largely because of the Iran War — for the project to survive. Eric Trump had posted AI-generated renderings of the building just three months ago. The Trump Organization is now blaming Young for financial failures and calling his explanation a distraction. Less than 90 days from announcement to collapse. That’s the afternoon update. Things are moving fast. Stay locked in, and I’ll be back with more as it develops. |
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