Episode Details

5️⃣ TRUMP LANDS IN BEIJING — XI SENDS A DEPUTY

Air Force One touched down at Beijing Capital at 7:50 PM local time, 7:50 AM Eastern. Three hundred Chinese children in blue and white uniforms waved American and Chinese flags. The man at the foot of the stairs was Vice President Han Zheng. Xi Jinping was not there. He will receive Trump on Thursday morning. Melania did not make the trip. The first lady stayed home.

The choreography of the welcome was deliberate. The Chinese president sent his deputy to the tarmac. The American president walked off the plane with billionaires and a Hollywood director accused by six women. Xi made Trump wait a day for the photo.

The trip is officially about trade and Taiwan. Trump arrived in Beijing with the Iran war burning $4 billion of US weapons every fourteen days, the Strait of Hormuz frozen, his tariffs surviving on a court reprieve, and CPI printing 3.8%. Xi sets the terms Thursday. The trade concession Xi extracts is the news.

4️⃣ BRETT RATNER FLIES TO CHINA WITH TRUMP

Dean called it on air. The flying Epstein memorial. Among the cabinet and the CEOs on Air Force One — Musk, Cook, Huang, Fink, Solomon, Schwarzman, Hegseth, Rubio — was a name no one expected. Brett Ratner. Accused in 2017 by Olivia Munn, Natasha Henstridge, and four other women of sexual harassment and assault. Another woman accused him of rape; he sued, then dropped it. Elliot Page accused him of outing him on the X-Men set at eighteen. Forced out of Hollywood at the peak of MeToo.

Ratner directed the Melania documentary for Amazon. Two-thirds of the New York crew asked not to be credited. Crew members described “chaos” on set. He lived at Mar-a-Lago while filming it. The Epstein files name him — emails confirm he was used by Epstein as a bridge to other people for nearly a decade. There is a photograph of Brett Ratner shirtless and embracing Jean-Luc Brunel, the modeling agent who scouted underage girls in Europe for Epstein and who killed himself in his Paris cell in 2022.

The Hollywood Reporter says Ratner is scouting locations for Rush Hour 4. Not buying it. He is on the plane because the plane is full of men who knew what Epstein was and stayed in the room. The Palm Beach hearing on Tuesday put a fourteen-year-old, an Uzbek model named Rosa, and a 1996 whistleblower named Maria Farmer on the record as survivors of that network. The same week, the President of the United States flew the network’s documentarian to Beijing on Air Force One. The signal is the choice. The choice is the signal.

3️⃣ UAE SECRETLY STRUCK IRAN IN APRIL

The Wall Street Journal reported overnight that the United Arab Emirates carried out a covert military strike on Iran in April — an attack on the Lavan Island refinery in the Persian Gulf. The Trump administration knew. The Trump administration welcomed it. The Iran war is no longer a US war. It is a Gulf coalition war, fought partly in the open and partly in shadows, and the White House is quietly recruiting more Gulf states to join the strikes.

Iran’s parliament speaker says the Islamic Republic’s military is “ready to teach a lesson” to any aggressor. Qatar accuses Iran of “weaponising” the Strait of Hormuz and “blackmailing” Gulf states. Iran today accused Kuwait of attacking it. The whole region is fragmenting into a multi-front war, and the United States is the player making it possible. Israel is doing everything under the umbrella of US security. Kuwait is doing everything under the umbrella of US security. The UAE struck Iran with US blessing.

And the receipt is on the water. The USS Gerald R. Ford, flagship of the American navy, limped out of Greece this week. Iran damaged it badly enough that it is going to dry dock for two years. Two years. Bob Kagan — one of the country’s longest-serving war hawks — wrote in The Atlantic that the war is lost. Donald Trump’s response to Kagan was t