Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann.
This morning, Trump is in Beijing with bruised, foundation-covered hands trying to project dominance in a handshake with Xi Jinping while Xi warns that Taiwan could push the two countries into open conflict. Marco Rubio used the flight over to trash NATO on Fox News and question the entire purpose of the alliance. A former State Department official is warning that Trump may be preparing to use secret presidential directives, never reviewed by Congress or any court, to interfere in the midterm elections. And Xi told Trump directly that Taiwan is the most important issue in U.S.-China relations.
We strive to bring you stories like these, because the handful of billionaires that own most of the news only want you to know so much. Obscenely rich men like Jeff Bezos, the Ellisons, the Murdochs, and Mark Zuckerberg are acquiring media outlets and digital platforms at a dizzying pace. They’re killing accountability journalism and firing anyone that doesn’t play along.
That’s why Raw America exists. We are reader-supported, editorially independent and not for sale. We don’t answer to a billionaire backer, but you, the reader. And none of our on-the-ground coverage from the Capitol or exclusive interviews with expert authorities would be possible without our paying subscribers. If you’ve thought about subscribing and haven’t yet, the best time to do it is right now.
Rubio Questioned the Purpose of NATO on the Way to Beijing
Marco Rubio boarded Air Force One for Beijing on Wednesday and used the flight to publicly question why NATO exists.
Speaking to Sean Hannity, Rubio said his longstanding support for NATO had been based on the basing rights it provided the United States to stage military operations in Europe, particularly for contingencies in the Middle East and Africa. When European allies declined to allow their bases to be used for Trump’s Iran war, that core premise, in Rubio’s telling, fell apart.
“When you have NATO partners denying you the use of those bases, when the primary reason that NATO is good for America is now being denied to us by Spain, then what’s the purpose of the alliance?” he said.
Spain closed its airspace to all U.S. aircraft involved in the Iran conflict and refused to allow Washington to fly out of the jointly operated Rota and Morón bases. Italy has imposed similar restrictions. France has been characterized by Trump as “very unhelpful.” During the same remarks, Trump took a personal jab at Emmanuel Macron referencing an incident involving his wife, saying Macron was “still recovering from that right to jaw.”
European leaders have been unmoved. Macron responded in April: “This is not a show. We are talking about war and peace and the lives of men and women. When you want to be serious, you don’t say every day the opposite of what you said the day before.” Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez said, “You cannot respond to one illegality with another, because that’s how humanity’s great disasters begin.” British Prime Minister Starmer said plainly, “This is not our war. We will not be drawn into the conflict.”
NATO’s Article 5 commits members to collective defense against attacks on any member state. The overwhelming consensus among European governments is that Trump’s unilateral strikes on Iran do not trigger Article 5, and that no alliance obligation requires them to join a war they were not consulted about and did not sanction.
Rubio was himself sanctioned by China twice for his human rights advocacy as a senator and had been barred from entering the country. China appears to have resolved this diplomatically by simply changing the Mandarin transliteration of his name, technically bypassing the original sanctions order.
The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949 because two World Wars in thirty years taught the architects of the postwar order that isolated nations get picked off one at a time. When your Secretary of State tells Sean Hannity that eighty years of collective defense was only ever a parking lot for American warplanes, folks, you’re watching the Atlantic Charter get tossed in a dumpster in real time, and the only people cheering are sitting in Moscow and Beijing.
Trump Arrived in Beijing with Bruised, Foundation-Covered Hands
Trump has been masking what appears to be chronic hand bruising with visible layers of concealer throughout this week’s overseas trip, and the effort to project physical dominance in Beijing did not go entirely as planned.
Photos from his arrival at Beijing Capital International Airport showed veins bulging from his hands. In his now-standard power handshake with Xi outside the Great Hall of the People, Trump raised his elbow higher than his counterpart’s in an apparent attempt to assert dominance, despite the purple bruising visible beneath the makeup on his right hand. He used the same move on King Charles last month.
The more substantive blow came from Xi’s opening remarks. The Chinese president warned Trump that the Taiwan issue could push their two countries toward “conflict” if mishandled, framing it as the most important issue in the bilateral relationship. Trump appeared subdued after the two-hour meeting. Standing with Xi outside the Temple of Heaven, he was asked how talks went. “It’s great,” he said. “A great place. Incredible. China is beautiful.”
The White House, asked about the president’s bruised hands, provided its standard response: “President Trump is the sharpest, most accessible, and energetic president in American history.”
The trip is the first of up to four expected presidential meetings with Xi this year. The two countries are trying to stabilize a trade relationship while disagreeing sharply on Taiwan, Iran, and Ukraine. Climate cooperation, a focus of previous administrations, is not expected to feature meaningfully in the discussions.
There’s something almost too on the nose about a president caking concealer over his bruised hands while trying to muscle a handshake with the leader of the country whose economy is now powering right through the chaos his own war started. Ronald Reagan walked into Reykjavik from a position of strength because he had Western Europe lined up behind him. Trump walked into Beijing weakened by a war his own allies refused to join, and Xi knew it before he sat down.
A Former State Department Official Warns Trump May Use Secret Directives to Interfere in the Midterms
Jonathan Winer, a former U.S. special envoy who reviewed declassified materials at the National Archives, is warning publicly that Trump may be preparing to deploy Presidential Emergency Action Documents, known as PEADs, to interfere in November’s midterm elections.
PEADs are secret presidential directives designed to authorize emergency actions during a national security crisis. They have never been reviewed by Congress. No court has ever examined them. They can be rewritten by any administration at any time. And critically, they can only be legally challenged after they have already been carried out.
Winer pointed to the White House’s newly released counterterrorism strategy, which identifies Antifa alongside foreign terrorist groups as a primary domestic threat. Combined with other Trump executive orders, he said the legal architecture closely resembles the framework J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI used to justify mass surveillance and detention planning in the 1960s.
What makes this moment uniquely dangerous, Winer said, is that the officials who would be ordered to implement such directives have already demonstrated they will comply. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is Trump’s former personal criminal defense attorney. FBI Director Kash Patel has used the bureau to target Trump’s perceived enemies. The structural safeguards exist on paper. The people who would be asked to enforce them have a different track record.
“The key thing about PEADs is they’ve never been reviewed by Congress or anyone outside the administration,” Winer said. “They can be rewritten based on any administration’s point of view as to what’s necessary in an emergency. And they would be tested legally and constitutionally only after they’re used.”
The midterms are six months away.
James Madison wrote in Federalist 51 that you have to first enable a government to control the governed and then oblige it to control itself. Presidential Emergency Action Documents are the part of our government that controls nothing and is controlled by no one, and when you combine that with an Attorney General who used to be Trump’s personal criminal lawyer and an FBI Director who treats the bureau like a political weapons system, folks, you’ve got the legal architecture of every authoritarian transition in modern history sitting in a drawer, six months out from an election.
Xi Warned Trump That Taiwan Could Lead to Conflict. Trump Said China Is Beautiful.
The summit in Beijing produced one clear message from Xi Jinping and one notably muted response from Donald Trump.
Xi told Trump directly that Taiwan is the single most important issue in U.S.-China relations and warned that mishandling it could push the two countries toward “clashes and even conflicts.” The language was sharper than the typical diplomatic framing and was published immediately by China’s foreign ministry after the meeting, a signal that Beijing wanted the warning on the record.
China wants Trump to reduce U.S. support for Taiwan, shift U.S. rhetoric on the island’s status, and reduce arms sales. Many in Beijing concede that major movement on any of those fronts is unlikely. What they are seeking is a stable foundation for managing the relationship going forward at a moment when Trump’s Iran war has complicated global energy markets that China depends on.
The two leaders also discussed the Iran conflict, Ukraine, and the Korean peninsula. Trump has promised to raise the case of imprisoned Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai, whose cause Rubio has long championed. Human rights are not expected to feature meaningfully in the discussions.
The air quality in Beijing on the day of Trump’s arrival registered above 150 on the air quality index, well above World Health Organization guidelines, shrouding the city in heavy smog. In 2017, during Trump’s first presidential visit, China ordered factories to halt production and banned heavily polluting vehicles from the roads to clear the skies. No such effort was made this time.
Taiwan is the most dangerous flashpoint on this planet, the kind of trigger Graham Allison warned could pull a rising China and a declining superpower into the same war that Athens and Sparta couldn’t avoid. Xi laid that warning down in language Beijing made sure was on the record before the room cleared. Trump’s response was that China is beautiful, folks, and that isn’t diplomacy. That’s a man treating the most consequential foreign policy meeting of the decade like he’s walking through a Mar-a-Lago listing.
This Is Why Raw America Exists — and Why We Need You
Secret presidential directives that no court has reviewed. A Secretary of State questioning the value of the alliance that has kept the peace in Europe for 80 years. A summit in Beijing where the most powerful nation on earth is negotiating from a position weakened by a war it started without telling its allies.
The press that is supposed to cover all of this is being bought by the people who benefit from keeping it quiet. CBS is under Ellison control. CNN is next. And local newsrooms across the country are disappearing into portfolios controlled by people who have made their intentions plain.
Raw America was built to be the thing that doesn’t get bought.
Every week we are bringing exclusive interviews with the most important voices in this fight, directly to you. We are joining the D.C. press pool. We are going after the interviews that hold power accountable and bringing them directly to you, unfiltered and unbought.
That coverage requires your support. We have no corporate backer, no billionaire pulling our strings. We rely entirely on our readers to deliver the independent reporting this country needs. We have bold plans to hold this administration accountable, but we cannot do it without you.
If you’ve been meaning to subscribe, today is the day.
This is Thom Hartmann for Raw America. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Racist Influencer Charged with Attempted Murder After Shooting. 28 year-old Dalton Eatherly — who goes by “Chud the Builder” — has been charged with attempted murder after allegedly shooting a man and himself outside a courthouse in Tennessee. He is also facing charges of employing a firearm during a dangerous felony, aggravated assault and reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon. Eatherly is known for recording videos of him shouting racial slurs at Black people in order to provoke a confrontation so he can use a gun or mace.
Mississippi’s Republican Governor Cancels Redistricting Special Session. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) has called off a planned special session to redraw the state’s congressional districts in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision. While plans to eliminate Rep. Bennie Thompson’s (D-Miss.) majority-Black district remain on the table, Reeves said doing so could trigger a significant backlash against Republicans in the future.
JD Vance Tries to Walk Back Trump’s Own Words. After President Donald Trump said he didn’t think about Americans’ finances “even a little bit” in how it affected his talks with Iran, Vice President JD Vance attempted to clean up his remarks. Vance admitted that the White House has “a lot of work to do” on the economy. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) also intervened, saying he talks to the president multiple times a day and that they discuss the economy “constantly.”
Trump-Supporting Podcaster Slams CNN MAGA Pundit Scott Jennings. Podcaster Andrew Schulz — who hosted Trump on his show in 2024 and admitted to voting for him — spent time on a recent episode of his show tearing into Scott Jennings, who is CNN’s resident pro-Trump commentator. Schulz observed that Jennings had a “hard job” to “cap” for Trump constantly, and argued he should simply admit that the president is “f—ing up everything.”
Trump Official Tries to Clean Up Epstein Relationship to Congress. New details from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s closed-door testimony to Congress about his relationship with convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein are coming to light. Lutnick minimized and downplayed his years-long friendship with Epstein, whose notorious Manhattan townhouse was in close proximity to the billionaire’s own home. Lutnick had previously said in an interview that he cut off all contact with Epstein after a 2005 visit to his townhouse, though it was later revealed that Lutnick traveled to Epstein’s private island in December of 2012 and that the two bought a business together.
