Episode Details

Xi Jinping couldn’t have choreographed a more picture perfect display of the decline of the American empire than showed up in Beijing today. True to form, Trump didn’t miss an opportunity to sing Xi’s praises while ignoring the harsh realities that his host was aiding an abetting Iran - the very enemy that has locked his presidency into freefall since the war he began more than 60 days ago.

5️⃣ Day Two in Beijing

Xi opened with cooperation, partnership, the “Thucydides trap.” He also opened with a threat: handle Taiwan wrong, the Chinese Foreign Ministry readout said, and “the two countries would collide or even enter into conflict.” The threat was in the official Chinese readout. Trump’s response was a hymn. “You’re a great leader. I say it to everybody. Sometimes people don’t like me saying it, but I say it anyway.” He praised the children — “They were happy. They were beautiful” — the same beat the Epstein files have taught us to listen for. He praised the delegation he had dragged across the Pacific with him. He bowed Xi through the door first on the way out. Please, sir. After you. Please.

Dean said it on air and we’ll say it again here: this was not a summit. It was a surrender, choreographed by Beijing, accepted by a president too broken by his own Iran war to refuse. Xi got 200 Boeing jets and a working assumption that Taiwan is now his to take when he wants. Trump got a sentence. China will stop arming Iran. We have heard this sentence before, in 2019 and again in 2023, and each time the shipments resumed through front companies, Gulf transit hubs, and the same secret routes the Joint Staff was mapping when it wrote this week’s assessment.

4️⃣ The Pentagon Already Knew

A confidential intelligence assessment landed on Gen. Dan Caine’s desk this week. Washington Post‘s John Hudson broke it at 12:10 AM ET. The Joint Staff intelligence directorate ran it through the DIME framework — diplomatic, informational, military, economic — and produced one conclusion in four colors of ink: China is winning the war Trump started.

Since the Iran war launched February 28, Beijing has sold weapons to the Gulf allies the United States is sworn to defend, kept the world’s energy moving after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, watched the Pentagon burn through the Patriots, THAADs, and Tomahawks Washington would need to defend Taiwan, labeled the war “illegal” in its messaging, and pulled Thailand, Australia, and the Philippines closer. Trump carried the assessment to Beijing in the same plane as Elon Musk and Jensen Huang and Marco Rubio. He did not let the report change the script. Beijing has no incentive to stop arming Iran. Beijing has every incentive to keep the war bleeding.

3️⃣ The Men on the Epstein Tape

Yesterday Narativ published the enhanced audio from Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, dated February 2013. Ehud Barak — former Israeli prime minister, former defense minister, named only as a “former prime minister” by Virginia Giuffre in her book and described as one of the most violent men inside the network — sat with Larry Summers and Epstein and asked, on tape, to be bought. He did not want to end like Gerhard Schröder, he said. He wanted a quiet five million a year and a useful job and a friend in the Kremlin. Weeks after the dinner, Barak flew to St. Petersburg and met Vladimir Putin. A million-dollar wire from oligarch Viktor Vekselberg — sanctioned by the United States since 2018 for facilitating malign Russian activity — arrived in Barak’s Hyperion E.B. account.

One name on Barak’s books that surfaced in the reporting today: Scott Bessent. Half a million dollars a year. The Treasury Secretary who is sitting on the unreleased Treasury files on Jeffrey Epstein is in a financial relationship with a man Putin paid to do whatever Putin asked.

2️⃣ Lutnick Lied Eight Times

Howard Lutnick sat in Room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Bui