MAJOR BREAKING: Donald Trump has arrived in China to find that President XI did NOT greet him at the airport.
MAGA is in spin mode heralding the “red carpet treatment,” but the visit is already at a rocky start.
Instead of a presidential welcome, Trump was greeted by US Ambassador to China David Perdue; Xi’s vice president, Han Zheng; China’s Ambassador to Washington Xie Feng; and Executive Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Ma Zhaoxu.
I’m sure Trump would hate if you shared this and rubbed it in all day long.
Oh, Donald, bless your tiny, fragile heart. You jet off to China, bragging about your “very good friend” Xi and how he respects you more than anyone else ever has… only to get greeted by the diplomatic equivalent of the intern who draws the short straw?
No red carpet, no strongman handshake for the cameras—just the B-list bureaucrats side-eyeing the guy who spent years calling China a “bankrupt” enemy while secretly begging them for deals.
MAGA’s out here spinning “historic welcome” like it’s not the most obvious airport snub since your last rally crowd.
How’s that “Art of the Deal” working out when even dictators won’t pretend to like you? 😂
Keep coping, folks. Trump’s day is officially ruined.
Xi Jinping, then vice-president of China, visits the Santa Claus Village in Rovaniemi, Lapland ("The Hometown of Santa Claus") while traveling to learn more about Finland's logging industry, 2010.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
An amazing thing happened this week: a whopping bipartisan Senate majority (89:10!) passed Elizabeth Warren's housing bill, which severely limits private equity companies' ability to buy single-family homes to turn into rental properties:
It's a big deal. Since the Great Financial Crisis, US home ownership has fallen sharply, while corporate landlordism has skyrocketed. Rents are through the roof, and private equity bosses boast about gouging their tenants, with the CEO of Blackstone's Invitation Homes ordering the lickspittles to "juice this hog" with endless junk fees and calculated negligence:
The corporate takeover of the housing market didn't fall out of the sky. It was a policy of the Obama administration, which directed the mass selloff of homes (foreclosed on by bailed-out banks) to corporate buyers:
Sunsetting the American dream of home-ownership is the final straw. After all, once America killed off labor rights, the only path to wealth accumulation left for working people was assuming crippling debt to buy a house in hopes that its value would go up forever:
The affordability crisis isn't solely a matter of high shelter costs (we see you, grocery greedflation, health care and education!), but housing costs are totally out of control. Mamdani's earth-shaking mayoral campaign centered affordability, with housing taking center stage:
Trump – whose most important skill is his ability to sense vibe-shifts in his base – noticed, and started to make mouth sounds about tackling the affordability crisis, specifically blaming private equity landlords for high rents:
But this isn't just a story about a stopped clock being right every now and again. It's a story about boss-politics anti-corruption, in which anti-corruption is pursued to corrupt ends.
From 2012-2015, Xi Jinping celebrated his second term as the leader of China with a mass purge undertaken in the name of anti-corruption. Officials from every level of Chinese politics were fired, and many were imprisoned. This allowed Xi to consolidate his control over the CCP, which culminated in a rule-change that eliminated term-limits, paving the way for Xi to continue to rule China for so long as he breathes and wills to power.
Xi's purge exclusively targeted officials in his rivals' power-base, kneecapping anyone who might have blocked his power-grab. But just because Xi targeted his rivals' princelings and foot-soldiers, it doesn't mean that Xi was targeting the innocent. A 2018 paper by an economist (Peter Lorentzen, USF) and a political scientist (Xi Lu, NUS) concluded that Xi's purge really did target corrupt officials:
The authors reached this conclusion by referencing the data published in the resulting corruption trials, which showed that these officials accepted and offered bribes and feathered their allies' nests at public expense.
In other words, Xi didn't cheat by framing innocent officials for crimes they didn't commit. The way Xi cheated was by exclusively targeting his rivals' allies. Lorentzen and Lu's paper make it clear that Xi could easily have prosecuted many corrupt officials in his own power base, but he left them unmolested.
This is corrupt anti-corruption. In an environment in which everyone in power is crooked, you can exclusively bring legitimate prosecutions, and still be doing corruption. You just need to confine your prosecutions to your political enemies, whether or not they are more guilty than your allies (think here of the GOP dragging the Clintons into Epstein depositions).
14 years later, Xi's anti-corruption purges continue apace, with 100 empty seats at this year's National People's Congress, whose former occupants are freshly imprisoned or awaiting trial:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78xxyyqwe7o
I don't know the details of all 100 prosecutions, but China absolutely has a corruption problem that goes all the way to the upper echelon of the state. I find it easy to believe that the officials Xi has targeted are guilty – and I also wouldn't be surprised to hear that they are all supporters of Xi's internal rivals for control of the CCP.
As the Epstein files demonstrate, anyone hoping to conduct a purge of America's elites could easily do so without having to frame anyone for crimes they didn't commit (remember, Epstein didn't just commit sex crimes – he was also a flagrant financial criminal and he implicated his network in those crimes).
It's not just Epstein. As America's capital classes indulge their incestuous longings with an endless orgy of mergers, it's corporate Habsburg jaws as far as the eye can see. These mergers are all as illegal as hell, but if you fire a mouthy comedian, you can make serious bank:
And once these crooks merge to monopoly, they embark on programs of lawlessness that would shame Al Capone, but again, with the right podcaster on your side, you can keep on "robbing them blind, baby!"
The fact that these companies are all guilty is a foundational aspect of Trumpism. Boss-politics antitrust – and anti-corruption – doesn't need to manufacture evidence or pretexts to attack Trump's political rivals:
Trump Embarrassing the United States in Asia and Tariff Round Up: Published 11/1/25
The US president says he has a "great relationship" with the North Korean leader and is "open" to a face-to-face chat.
He said South Korea has agreed to invest $350 billion in the United States.
During his state visit to Japan, US President Donald Trump met Emperor Naruhito on Monday but did not bow – a gesture of respect typically e
During a visit to Japan, Trump claimed that Toyota was going to invest "over $10 billion" to build new auto plants "all over the United Stat
The president said the meeting with the Chinese leader exceeded expectations, and he lowered the tariff rate.
The Senate has passed a resolution that would undo many of President Donald Trump’s tariffs around the globe.
Mike Johnson has already announced a sixth week of paid vacation for the US House of Representatives as part of his scheme to steal health care from 15-20 million American workers and to cover up CSA, so don't hold your breath.
Still, it might be worth while calling your Congress Critter anyway in case Mike Johnson ever ends his vacation, and has anyway blocked voting on the illegal tariffs until March because he is in favour of destroying the Us Economy long term as are most republican politicians.
If any of these are your Senator, please call to thank them for voting to stop the tariffs as it's important to reward good behavior: Rand Paul of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
If you can’t safely contact them in person, here are some other options for contacting your Congress Critters:
Five Calls to your critters: https://5calls.org/
Here is one that will send your reps a fax: https://resist.bot/
"Not theory and theory alone, but theory and practice. The two go together. We not only thought about the Marxist-Leninist theory—we put it into practice." - Fred Hampton
