Yesterday, US inflation jumped to 3.8%, which is the highest it has been since 2023. This has wiped out all wage gains since October 2024, representing wage growth since Trump returned to power and then some. When asked yesterday by a reporter about the extent to which Americans' financial straits are motivating him to make a deal with Iran, as he often does, he said the quiet part out loud:
‘I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation’
Trump is not noted for his sophistication when it comes to responding to questions; he just can’t help himself, no more than he can help berating those asking him totally legitimate, if uncomfortable, questions, especially if they are women. When asked about the ever-rising cost of his ballroom, which he previously falsely claimed would not cost taxpayers a dime, he snapped:
“I doubled the size of it, you dumb person..Double the size. You are not a smart person.”
When asked by another female reporter about the impact of rising inflation on Americans, he retorted:
My policies are working incredibly. If you go back to just before the war, inflation was at 1.7%. If you want to let these lunatics have a nuclear weapon, then you're a stupid person, and you happen to be.
Aside from being the most nonsensical ending to a sentence this week, the whole of his answer was just a bare-faced lie delivered with an insult and a straight face. It goes to the very heart of the fantasy world he has now withdrawn into to escape the truth. He’s not even attempting to throw a grain of truth into the lies to polish the turds he delivers daily; he just makes shit up.
It really is time to stop listening to this nonsense. The truth is that the Trump presidency is now beyond life support. It’s as dead as the parrot in the clip from Monty Python below.
He has tried operating his extortion and protection rackets from the Oval Office and has been exposed for the fraud he has always been. His tariffs have to be refunded; he can’t find a way to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling, but guess what? Corporate America don’t care because they just got another cash windfall ‘double dip’ opportunity from the IEEPA tariff refunds. They passed on the original tariffs and now get their original stake back, with no obligation to refund the costs that were passed on to the public. You really can’t make this stuff up, yet they do, each and every day.
The whole fairytale, which led to the extortion of the Venezuelan oil being painted as a liberation campaign to free the Venezuelan people from the grasp of a dictator, is pure fantasy. Trump simply wanted to get his hands on their oil and skim off a cut for himself. Nothing has changed in Venezuela other than they now have a new American dictator working from home, controlling their economy. There has been no attempt to encourage Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado to return to the country to prepare for democratic elections, even after she gifted her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump, who bizarrely accepted it as his own. There’s about as much chance of him getting the prize in his own name as there is of those who placed a deposit on a Trump golden phone receiving one.
Trump is more than happy with his newly installed acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, who does as she’s told. However, it appears she’s not very happy at the suggestion that Venezuela should become the 51st State of America. The same regime is in place as on the day of Maduro’s abduction, and it has not eased its grip on the population. Marco Rubio is suggesting that elections can’t feasibly take place until 2029, which is nonsense. The US has no interest in democracy returning to Venezuela; it would be an impediment to the stealing of its oil and minerals. The US is already selling its oil at market value, with little chance that the revenue will be reinvested in Venezuela. Meanwhile, Trump is already working with US oil companies on a plan to gang rape the country’s resources, because that's what pimps do.
You can dice it and slice it however you like. Trump is a kleptomaniac and a geopolitical bully on a forced acquisition tour of the world, next target Cuba. You will note that he has attempted to go for soft targets, which he considered low-hanging fruit. That was until the fruit became prickly in Iran. Now he finds himself in a hole that he is powerless to escape from without a negotiated settlement. This will unquestionably prove expensive not just in economic terms but also politically, not just for himself, but for the wider Republican Party. It’s no coincidence that Iran sought to prevent Trump from travelling to China after securing a deal.
To be honest, I’m struggling to see any wins for Trump in any area of his wider policy agenda. Tariffs are in the trash, global trading partners are realigning trade routes, with Europe looking to Mark Carney to help in the geopolitical alignment process. China is now seen as a necessary partner to insulate American allies from reliance on fossil fuels. It’s the only country capable of supplying hardware at scale. If you add to this the shift by Europe and Canada away from military procurement from the US, choosing instead to move towards a revived European Military-Industrial Complex. The US is clearly not as ‘hot’ as Trump loves to tout.
This brings us nicely to Trump’s trip to China, on which he’s taken along his tech titan buddies. Had it not been for the Iran war, the atmosphere for the visit would have been much different. Despite Trump declaring, as he left the US, that he doesn’t need China’s help on Iran, you can rest assured that there will be a focus on trying to get President Xi to put pressure on Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. Xi will be more than aware that Trump will be desperate to take home some kind of win, and that, in many ways, simply gives them more leverage.
The US has tried every tactic in the book to slow China's economic and technological progress. The longstanding use of sanctions and tariffs has unquestionably hurt China, but they have equally hurt the US by limiting access to rare earth minerals. As I have said so many times before, the Chinese were fully prepared for having to deal with Trump in his second term, and this is largely why they have proved resilient in the face of tariffs, etc.
Trump’s war in Iran, in some respects, has been a gift to the Chinese despite causing them significant inconvenience. They have watched the world’s military superpower struggle to conquer one of its key allies. What you have to remember is that China is like a sponge when it comes to knowledge. They will have been in close dialogue with Iran’s leadership throughout, and Chinese military planners will have fully assessed the depletion of US interceptor missiles, etc. They will have studied how Iran managed to inflict the scale of damage they have inflicted on US assets in the Gulf region. NOTHING will have been missed as they assess the capabilities of the US military in a real combat situation.
The US has been forced to draw back the curtain on their offensive tactics, logistical support and their ability to deal with asymmetric warfare strategies, or rather, its inability when it comes to extracting a successful geopolitical outcome. Despite his outward bravado, Trump can’t hide his declining domestic popularity and the peril his party is facing in the midterm elections. Not to mention the shifting global trade landscape. When it comes to playing the game of geopolitics, Xi is a master of the dark arts of statecraft. Trump will get no wins without beneficial wins for China, which will be thinking in terms of dealing with Trump as a lame-duck president for two years after November.
For the US regime, they now have all their eggs in a basket containing seven eggs, the US tech companies; that’s it, that’s all they’ve got. As noted by Fortune in an article by Nick Lichtenberg:
Without data centres, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025, Harvard economist says
The economist in question was Harvard economist Jason Furman. The piece notes:
Furman’s findings, shared online and echoed by financial analysts including Robert Armstrong of the Financial Times‘ Unhedged (the same writer who coined the term “TACO trade’), echo several months of observations on the remarkable surge in data-center infrastructure. In August, Renaissance Macro Research estimated, to date in 2025, the dollar value contributed to GDP growth by AI data-center buildout had surpassed U.S. consumer spending for the first time ever. That’s remarkable considering consumer spending is two-thirds of GDP.
I would highly recommend reading Nick’s full piece to get a broader understanding of the risks. It has always been assumed that the US was way ahead in AI, but even with restrictions on NVIDIA's Blackwell chips, Chinese chip makers have simply innovated to overcome the obstacles the US has placed in their way.
I have long spoken of the difference in approach to AI between the US and China. As you would expect, the US is all about short-term gains, just as it ever was. This is a product of a system built around an unreliable cycle of ever-changing political ideology. It leads to profit-driven shortcuts: as we see in US Communities, the environment, and anything else getting in the way of free-market profit. All are considered acceptable collateral damage in a race the US can’t afford to lose.
In China, there is a different mindset. Given that there is no shareholder class, objectives are set by a well-informed state system that can prioritise and invest, even at a loss, to achieve its long-term strategic goals. Xi is very aware of the disruption that making its AI technology open source can cause. China understands that the US aggressively uses coercion to ensure trading partners and allies are locked into US technology, but Trump has changed that. Allies have come to realise that the US is no longer a reliable partner, making Chinese open-source technologies a very attractive proposition in a rapidly evolving geopolitical landscape.
I’m pretty sure that Trump will not walk away from this summit as top dog, not that this will stop him from declaring victory and huge deals. Just as with Iran, there will be agreements made on the understanding that any US concessions are never made public; that’s how it works in Trump’s world of alternative reality.
China is being kind calling the USA a superpower with a limp. I would have phrased it "one a former superpower which is currently a sinking ship, sinking unusually fast and getting closer to the bottom every single day.
Considering who trump took with him to China, the trip seems to be more about business than any sort of diplomacy, or world interest - and from what I’ve been reading, things started to tank immediately after arriving.