We Have Met The Enemy, And He Is Us

Trump: We did discuss Iran. We feel very similar. We want the straits open. We’re closing it now. They closed it and we closed it on top of them—but we want them open. pic.twitter.com/NiVZMu4zfP

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 15, 2026

"We want the same thing. Iran closed it, but we want it open, so we closed their closure. Now we want it open. Them open. Something.”

Who is “we” in that statement?

Trump: Nice place. I could get used to this. pic.twitter.com/1vHgYYLm9P

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 15, 2026

The only reason he’s there is to pleasure himself.

Trump: Ask the president… other prime ministers and presidents—does he bring them here? pic.twitter.com/hD4my4xmyO

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 15, 2026

"Am I special? Am I really special? Am I his BFF? Tell him 🩷🫶”

XI: I've chosen this place especially to reciprocate the hospitality extended to me in 2017 at Mar a Lago. pic.twitter.com/b1jqKFj0ea

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 15, 2026

So this is the Chinese version of tacky?

There's something wrong with the President. https://t.co/vpdSxYtjdb

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) May 15, 2026

Laser focused on what matters.

NOW - Trump says it's good to have 500,000 foreign Chinese students in the U.S. and for China to purchase U.S. farmland; otherwise, colleges and farm prices would collapse: "I frankly think that it's good that people come from other countries and they learn our culture." pic.twitter.com/3vQDXpjchz

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) May 15, 2026

If that caused Stephen Miller to stroke out, it would almost be worth it.

Thucydides Trap?

While Donald Trump was distracted by pageantry and spectacle, Xi Jinping delivered some of the most ruthless statements a Chinese leader has ever made directly to a U.S. president.

"He didn't even know that he was being dissed." pic.twitter.com/DEZEyla3rM

— MeidasClips (@MeidasClips) May 15, 2026

Xi:  You’re failing, we’re rising. So watch your ass.”

Trump: “Do you like me? Do you really like me? 🫶”

The Thucydides trap is a bogus analogy and weak concept, but that doesn’t mean Xi is wrong. The cause of the shifting positions between China and America is wholly due to America. The yahoos backing Trump never understood the post war world America created. I’ve been watching “The Man in the High Castle,” and it’s a rather telling reversal of history if the Axis powers had won. They were after establishing a police state that we completely undid in Eastern Europe after the war. In the fiction, that’s all there is in the world, divided roughly between Germany and Japan. It was our post war efforts (some of them humanitarian; some of them stupidly belligerent and imperialistic) that secured a victory for the world. More than less, and I don’t discount the less. China learned from our example, and now we are ceding the stage to them. Not because we are “old,” but because ignorant idealogues have finally gained the upper hand. Two strains of Americanism at work there: racist xenophobia; and the isolationism that kept us out of WWII until Pearl Harbor. I suspect the conceit of the fiction is that we stayed out of that war just a little too long, which in reality we almost did. 

And now we are withdrawing from the world for much the same reasons. Everything old is new again. And that’s where our problems begin. Again. And again.