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.

While Americans were trained to fear immigrants, trans kids, and each other, the billionaire class quietly extracted trillions from the middle class and captured the nation’s politics, media & courts… For decades, many Democrats have suspected what’s now being confirmed in plain English by a Trump insider. Ashley St. Clair — the 27-year-old former Turning Point USA brand ambassador and mother of one of Elon’s 14 kids who built a million-follower platform on X and became one of MAGA’s most visible young women — has spent the past few weeks blowing the lid off the entire racket. In a series of TikTok monologues and a recent feature in The Washington Post, she’s describing in detail how the Republican’s right-wing influencer economy actually works, and her bottom line is brutal: she estimates that “roughly 99 percent” of the largest right-wing influencers are compensated in some form, most of it locked behind nondisclosure agreements so airtight that anyone who tries to talk about it will get buried under litigation they can’t afford.