The Best of the Rest of the News. — So the bombs, the dead Iranians, the smashed cities, and the trillions in regional chaos were all just a PR campaign? Like something to redirect our attention? — Pete Hegseth, the cable-news weekend host with drinking and infidelity problems and a Signal habit, has now blindsided his own Pentagon by canceling the deployment of 4,000 American troops to Poland, the country Trump himself just called a “model ally.” — The Trump administration is now openly preparing to indict 94-year-old Raul Castro, and if you’ve been watching the Putin Doctrine playbook, you already know how this movie ends, too. — In what may be the most spectacular self-own of the week, Trump told Sean Hannity that America needs 500,000 Chinese student visas and that the Chinese Communist Party should be allowed to buy American farmland. — JD Vance — Yale Law graduate, venture capitalist, couch-lover, and current Vice President of the United States — has officially rolled out the GOP’s 2026 update of Ronald Reagan’s Black “welfare queen”: she now drives a Lamborghini. — Speaking of billionaires hunting the social safety net, they just notched their biggest scalp yet. — You Just Can’t Make This Up Alert: As Hantavirus Threat Grows, Trump Turns to a Penile Implant Expert to Reassure America.

The Beijing summit fuels alarm over corruption, authoritarian influence, and America’s fading credibility… Donald Trump landed in Beijing yesterday aboard Air Force One with a billionaire’s retinue that read like a Forbes 400 family reunion, and the man he came to see didn’t even bother to walk out to the tarmac to greet him. (In 2009, when Obama visited, Xi personally met his plane.) Xi Jinping sent his Vice President, Han Zheng, and the message couldn’t have been more of a slap in America’s face: this clownish, incompetent, criminal, unfaithful, backed-into-an-Iran-corner-of-his-own-making President of the United States, on his first state visit to China in nearly nine years, isn’t worth the dictator’s interrupting his morning tea.

Wealth and celebrity have blinded people to what ordinary Americans can plainly see… ill Maher and Sen. John Fetterman sat around joking about Donald Trump’s new White House ballroom like a couple of wealthy guys at a country club laughing over cocktails while the republic burns outside the window. Maher dismissed the outrage by calling the cost “couch money.” Fetterman rolled his eyes and reduced the backlash to “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” They practically patted each other on the back for being the last two supposedly reasonable men in American politics. Calm down, peasants, they were essentially saying. It’s only a $330 million gilded palace add-on for a man who already treats the presidency like his private casino. This is what elite detachment looks like in America now. Smug. Self-satisfied. Historically illiterate.

Texas billionaire Ross Perot jumped into the race to take on the two neoliberal “free traders” George HW Bush and Bill Clinton. If America signed NAFTA, Perot warned, there would be “a giant sucking sound from the south” pulling jobs out of America. Worse, Perot warned, this would eventually become a national security issue: when we reached the point where we couldn’t make an aircraft carrier or missile without parts from China or another foreign country, our ability to defend ourselves would be severely compromised.