Good morning! Sometime today, the President of the United States will board Air Force One and depart for Beijing, where he will meet Xi Jinping for what may be the most consequential diplomatic summit of his presidency. He will arrive Wednesday, participate in Executive Time, closed press, as always, and then walk into the Great Hall of the People fifteen minutes before sitting down for a bilateral meeting with the most prepared counterparty on earth.
He spent last night posting conspiracy theories from an account called “Cat Turd.”
Between the hours of 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. on the eve of his departure for China, Donald Trump published somewhere between 75 and 100 posts to Truth Social. If you are the kind of person who believes that a president’s pre-flight preparation the night before a nuclear-adjacent diplomatic summit should involve, say, reviewing briefing materials or sleeping, you are going to find the contents of those posts challenging.
He began at 10:15 p.m. with a post accusing Barack Obama of orchestrating a CIA coup to steal the 2016 election. This was followed with a repost from an account called “Cat Turd” demanding Obama’s arrest. By 10:22 p.m. he had pivoted to 2020 election fraud, citing as his source an account called “Real Robert” and a publication that generously might be described as post-journalistic. At 10:23 he was demanding that Rudy Giuliani’s $150 million defamation judgment be refunded. At 10:24 he was reposting a fake John F. Kennedy Jr. account calling for Obama’s arrest as a “renegade.” At 10:30 he was calling for the arrest of Jack Smith and Merrick Garland. At 10:40 he was expressing dissatisfaction with his own Attorney General for insufficient arresting of Hillary Clinton. By 10:47 he had endorsed the characterization of Obama as “the most demonic force in politics.” Somewhere in there he posted random TikTok videos, including what appears to be a skit about a DoorDash driver.
At 1:12 in the morning, he closed the evening with a post about the reflecting pool and the failing New York Times. He boards the plane today.
The clinical term for the compulsive return to the same themes regardless of context or relevance is perseveration. The 2020 election, Obama, Hillary, Comey, the media, the reflecting pool — they cycle back with the regularity of a skipping record, indifferent to what else is happening in the world or what is scheduled for the following morning. Neurologists who study frontotemporal dementia will recognize the pattern. So will the thirty-six medical professionals who signed a letter to Congress last month alerting lawmakers that the president is unwell. Congress received that letter and, in the great tradition of institutions prioritizing short-term comfort over long-term consequence, did nothing.
The posts are timestamped. They are archived. They are public. Future historians will not have to reconstruct this picture from secondhand accounts. The subject assembled it himself.
Yesterday’s daytime posting, for context, was the companion piece to the midnight material, not paranoid, but grandiose, which neurologically is the other face of the same coin.
He reposted an AI-generated image of workers appearing to carve his face into Mount Rushmore, captioned “Things are moving along nicely for America’s 250th birthday in July!” with a sunglasses emoji. He reposted a graphic declaring him ranked among the top three presidents in American history, without specifying who did the ranking. He reposted a car bumper banner reading “Trump is without a doubt the greatest president we have ever known.” Then a split image of himself and Joe Biden labeled “The Greatest vs. The Worst.” He posted a golden-script image reading “The Greatest of All Time” against a sunset White House backdrop that has fully completed the transition from political content to devotional iconography. A saint’s card. Available at the gift shop.
This is not vanity in the ordinary political sense. The grandiosity dial and the paranoia dial do not operate independently. They are both symptoms of the same underlying process, and both were fully operational within twelve hours of each other on the day before the Beijing departure.
The daytime public schedule was its own document. At a White House maternal healthcare event, attended by Katie Britt, Dr. Oz, RFK Jr., and a pharmaceutical executive who goes unnamed because the president jovially described him as “a very fat slob” but a “brilliant man,” Trump informed the assembled medical professionals that he had become “the father of fertility” after a thirty-four-minute learning curve. He explained that drug prices were down by 500%, or 600%, or 80%, or 75%, depending on “the way you phrase the question,” and that he preferred the 500. He mused at length that junk food might actually be the secret to longevity, while surrounded by the nation’s foremost health officials. Then he riffed about renaming ICE to NICE so that news coverage would be confused. He polled the room on the 2028 presidential ticket at a maternal health event, before clarifying that the polling “does not mean you have my endorsement under any circumstance.”
At the Rose Garden police appreciation event, he described the ceasefire with Iran as being on “massive life support” with a “1% chance of living,” solicited Dr. Oz’s concurrence on the prognosis, announced he would “set aside the Iranians for an evening,” and delivered an extended meditation on how the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was refinished with industrial-grade pool coating, not paint, he is emphatic on this point, in American flag blue, selected personally from among 70 color options, at a cost of $3 million rather than the $350 million the deep state had apparently planned to spend. The coating will last fifty years.
This is the cognitive register the president is bringing to Xi Jinping: impulse, grievance, and whatever sentence fragment happened to survive the walk from the television to the Resolute Desk.
Let us be precise about what awaits him. Xi Jinping has been preparing for this meeting for months. His team has read every American court filing. They have war-gamed every leverage point. They know the tariff authority has been judicially neutered; the Supreme Court’s February ruling invalidating the president’s “liberation day” emergency powers was immediately visible to every counterparty in the world, and the global response was swift. Where Trump’s January threat of tariffs against NATO allies over Greenland rattled European capitals into emergency meetings, his April announcement of 50% duties on countries selling arms to Iran was, according to the Financial Times, “quickly brushed aside.” The world recalibrated in real time. The ability to threaten tariffs on a Friday and impose them on a Monday, Trump’s signature move, his superpower, is gone, at least for now.
China knows the 10% replacement tariffs expire in 150 days, landing squarely in the heat of midterm election season. They know congressional Republicans are quietly restive, and the midterm math, Democrats hold a five-point generic ballot advantage. They know that only 30% of American voters approve of Trump’s economic management. Very importantly, they know, as a Shanghai professor put it publicly at a late-2025 media event, that “only China can save Trump,” and that the president needs visible wins in the form of Chinese agricultural purchases that play well in the swing states he needs.
They know the ceasefire is fragile and the Strait of Hormuz situation has elevated oil prices by more than 50% from pre-war levels, driving American inflation to 3.8%, its highest in three years, reported this morning. Gas nationally averaged $4.50 a gallon today. Diesel is approaching its all-time high at $5.64. Airfares are up 20.7%. Fruit and vegetables are up 6.1%. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas projects that if Hormuz remains closed through September, crude could hit $167 a barrel and gas $5 a gallon, with recession risk. Consumer sentiment in May fell to its lowest level on record. Fifty-eight percent of voters disapprove of the president’s handling of inflation.
Xi holds agricultural purchases, Boeing aircraft orders, and Hormuz mediation as simultaneous levers over a president who needs all three before November.
And sitting unsigned on the president’s desk is a $14 billion arms package for Taiwan. It has been sitting there for months. Xi urged Trump in February to handle Taiwan arms sales with “extreme caution.” A bipartisan Senate letter went out Friday urging approval. Xi’s ask in Beijing will not be dramatic — he does not need it to be. He simply needs Trump to continue not signing what he has not signed. Inaction is the easiest concession in the world to extract. It looks like nothing happened.
The New York Times reports this morning that use of the phrase “American decline” in official Chinese sources nearly doubled in 2025. A Beijing think tank published a triumphant report titled “Thank Trump,” arguing that his tariffs, attacks on allies and assault on American institutions had “inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States,” calling him “an accelerator of American political decay.” The report described what it called “the heavy and haunting toll of an empire’s evening bell.”
Such language, the Times notes, once confined to nationalist corners of the Chinese internet, has entered mainstream political discourse. Xi is not meeting Trump as a nervous supplicant seeking accommodation. He is meeting him as a man who believes, with measurable statistical support, that history is moving in his direction and that the man across the table is evidence of it.
Accompanying the president are sixteen chief executives representing a combined market capitalization that dwarfs the GDP of most nations. Tim Cook of Apple, whose entire manufacturing supply chain runs through China. Elon Musk of Tesla, whose Gigashanghai facility depends on Chinese goodwill and whose company is being systematically out-competed globally by BYD, the one Chinese EV manufacturer that cannot enter the American market because of the 100% tariff wall that is the sole reason a BYD does not sit in American driveways at half the price of a Tesla. Larry Fink of BlackRock and David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, whose Chinese market access depends on the outcome of these talks. Kelly Ortberg of Boeing, which desperately needs Chinese aircraft orders. Brian Sikes of Cargill, which needs Chinese agricultural purchases.
Jensen Huang of Nvidia was not invited. His absence is loud. The world’s most valuable company awaits approval from both governments to ship AI chips to China. That negotiation is apparently too live, too sensitive, too valuable to have its CEO in the room. Whatever is being offered or withheld on the chip question, it is not being offered or withheld by Huang.
These sixteen men and women are not disinterested advisors. They are the most powerful corporate lobby ever assembled for a bilateral summit, each with billions of dollars of Chinese market access to gain or lose from whatever is agreed behind closed doors. They have direct access to a president who has always genuflected to concentrated wealth, who will process whatever they want as patriotism because they are rich and they are telling him it serves America.
The government officials nominally providing guardrails are: a Secretary of State who was initially reluctant to come because the agenda is trade, not his domain; a Treasury Secretary who ran a hedge fund that significantly underperformed before his political elevation and whose primary demonstrable skill as Treasury Secretary has been going on television and sounding calm; and a Chief of Staff whose job is managing the principal, not the negotiation. Against Xi’s unified, disciplined, meticulously prepared team.
The president will be told by the men on the plane that what is good for Apple’s supply chain is good for America. He will believe it, because he always has, because the logic of trickle-down is the universal justification that requires no evidence and survives no scrutiny but remains perpetually available to anyone with enough money to deliver it with conviction in a private setting.
The average American, the Uber driver in Charleston whose fill-up went from $25 to $40, the working poor woman in New Jersey who cannot avoid driving to her medical appointments, the lower-income households the New York Fed describes as cutting back on gasoline while higher-income households drive unchanged, is not on the manifest.
This morning, while the inflation numbers were landing, Pete Hegseth was testifying before the House Appropriations defense subcommittee. The war on Iran, he confirmed, has now cost $29 billion, up from the $25 billion cited two weeks ago, because of “updated repair and replacement of equipment costs.” Democratic Senator Mark Kelly said on Sunday that American inventories of Tomahawk cruise missiles, Army Tactical Missile Systems, SM-3 interceptors, THAAD rounds and Patriot missiles had been severely drawn down during the conflict, and that replenishment could take years. As in years.
Hegseth described the munitions concern as “foolishly and unhelpfully overstated,” which is what you say when the concern is accurate and you do not want to say so in public. He described the mission as “sacred.” He said the Pentagon has “a plan to escalate if necessary.”
Xi’s team reads congressional testimony. The president who arrives in Beijing Thursday does so with drawn-down munitions stocks, a judicially constrained tariff regime, 3.8% inflation, a fragile ceasefire, an unsigned arms package for Taiwan, and a delegation of CEOs whose interests are not America’s interests. He arrives in Xi’s physical environment, in a schedule that puts the state banquet at what his body will register as 6 in the morning after crossing thirteen time zones. He arrives having spent the night before departure posting Obama coup theories from an account called Cat Turd.
Polymarket this morning puts the probability of the visit happening at 99%. The market has priced in the visit. Nobody can price in what happens inside it.
What is remarkable about this particular moment in American history is how thoroughly it is documenting itself. The Truth Social posts are timestamped and archived. The Rose Garden transcript is public. The fertility event transcript is public. The Hegseth testimony, inflation data, the delegation list is public. The Beijing schedule, with its revealing time zone annotations, is public. The FT on the tariff superpower. The NYT on Chinese perceptions of American decline. The letter from thirty-six medical professionals to Congress. All of it is public, permanent, and searchable.
Future historians will not struggle to reconstruct what was happening in May of 2026 or what condition the president was in or what interests were represented on Air Force One or what awaited him in Beijing. The record is complete. The subject assembled much of it himself, voluntarily, on a platform he created specifically so that no one could stop him.
At 1:12 in the morning, on the eve of the most important diplomatic trip of his presidency, he posted about the reflecting pool.
At some point today, he boards the plane.
