Xi Jinping had Donald Trump in front of him, the state cameras positioned to give viewers the optical illusion of a powerful ascendant Xi lording over a supplicant. Trump delivered, performing the role he reserves for strongmen. Head tilted. Voice softened. The American president — leader of what is still, on every measure, the most powerful country on earth — looking like a dog scolded for chewing the remote control. Xi held the cameras. Xi held the audience. Xi held the leash — the one around Trump’s neck.
That’s the image Beijing wants you to keep on your phone. A photo Beijing paid for. The narrative of American decline is the most aggressively-marketed Chinese export of the last decade, with a billion-dollar budget — state media, embedded influencers, friendly academics, foreign politicians on the payroll, useful idiots on editorial boards from Cape Town to Caracas. The performance Xi staged with Trump was not a bilateral summit. It was propaganda.
Strip the advertisement away and the numbers refuse to cooperate. American GDP in 2025 ran past $29 trillion. China’s ran somewhere short of $18 trillion, and the IMF has been quietly walking that figure down for two years. The Pentagon spent over $900 billion last year — more than the next eight countries combined, and four of those eight are American treaty allies. The dollar still cleared 58 percent of the world’s reserves. The yuan cleared less than three. America has fifty-plus formal allies. China has one, and that one is North Korea.
The two Trump administrations have hurt this country in ways that will take a generation to repair. Allies have been mocked. Treaties have been torched. Intelligence has been handed to the Kremlin in the Oval Office on more than one afternoon. The Department of Justice has been hollowed and the Department of War has been overtly militarized. The federal scientific enterprise — the engine that built the internet and the vaccine and the GPS in the phone in your pocket — has been gutted by men who could not pass its entrance exams.
And it has not happened by accident. Trump did not stumble into the Oval Office twice on the strength of his ideas. The first time, Russian military intelligence ran an influence operation that the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and a Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee all confirmed in writing. The second time around in 2024, the other players revealed themselves — Riyadh, Jerusalem, and Beijing - partners in an attempt to weaken the American empire by electing its weakest president, twice. The dog routine Xi staged in Beijing was the deliverable.
Dean Blundell, who shares the Fivestack desk with me and is one of the sharpest political minds I work with, disagrees. He thinks the empire is over. He thinks the institutions are too rotten and the public too distracted and the cousins in Ottawa, Berlin and Canberra too exhausted to keep paying the protection bill. I love Dean. He is wrong.
He is wrong because the empire was never the point. The aircraft carriers were never the point. The bases in Germany and Japan and Bahrain were never the point. The point was a country that — for all its sins and on its better days — told the world that human beings have rights their governments cannot grant or revoke, that elections decide power, that judges decide cases, that the press writes what it sees and gets to keep writing it. Those ideas do not live in Washington. They live in Toronto and Melbourne and Munich and Taipei and Kyiv and Lagos, and they live in the hearts and minds of every person living in countries whose leaders are watching to see if the American experiment in cheap authoritarianism is the one that wins.
China does not believe in its own people. That is the cold stone fact of the Xi regime — 1.4 billion human beings who are not trusted with a vote, an uncensored search engine, or a child without a permit. Russia does not believe in its people. Pyongyang does not believe in its people. Putin, Xi and Kim are three men who built their power on the mental enslavement of the populations they were supposed to serve. Every person who lives under that enslavement, or is watching the techno-authoritarianism encroach, needs the hope America still provides. We owe it to them. We owe it to the generations coming after us.
There is a lot that must be done, but America remains the greatest nation on Earth and if anyone can do it, it’s us. We need to cast off this evil regime by turning out in our millions in November. We need to honestly assess our real allies based on their alignment with our core values, and we need to isolate those that don’t. And we must only elect a government that is committed to cleaning up the corruption that put Trump in the White House twice — SCOTUS, the corporate money, the state captured media, the gerrymandered maps, the Electoral College — all of it must end.
We must recommit ourselves to our grounding principles and, as King Charles reminded us, to the Magna Carta. The corrupters get banished back to Beijing and Moscow and Jerusalem and Riyadh — along with every asset and operative who colluded with Jeffrey Epstein. America gets returned to its bedrock values, and serves its people. Now, with America’s values reinforced by even stronger allies who have re-invested in the defense of freedom, the alliance of the free will be stronger than before.
We can create an AI that serves the people, and does not replace them. And build digital currencies that protect our values. Give future generations what they need to thrive, and give every human being in the world something to hope for.
Those are high hopes but each is an attainable goal. We can begin today by understanding what we saw in Beijing. A dictator expert in enslaving a population held his puppet by a leash. China and Russia have shown us they can corrupt an American president and install an American puppet regime, but they shouldn’t believe their own propaganda. The leash is not around America’s neck. It is around Trump’s.
America derives its power from its people — not its presidency.
And when the time comes, the American people will remember.
Thank you, Zev. If our democratic leaders realize and are ready a new beginning, we will prevail. The old way of doing things will not succeed.
Well done, sir! You are Canadian but you speak for democracy which knows nothing of boarders.
"We all may have come here on different ships, but we're all in the same boat now." - John Lewis