Trump’s trip to China exposed the corruption in plain sight

Air Force One came to a stop on the tarmac at Beijing Capital International Airport. Three hundred Chinese children in matching blue and white uniforms lined the red carpet, waving American and Chinese flags. The President of the United States walked down the steps first. Behind him came Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and filmmaker Brett Ratner. These are the people who are now the face of the United States of America. They were not there for diplomatic agreements. They were there to broker deals for themselves, at the expense of American taxpayers.

Based on the events of 5-14-2026

The Breakdown:

• Air Force One arrived in Beijing carrying a delegation of billionaires whose combined net worth approaches one trillion dollars
• Among the CEOs brought along: Larry Fink of BlackRock, Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, Jane Fraser of Citigroup, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, Kelly Ortberg of Boeing, and many more
• Boeing's CEO openly told the press he expected the trip to "include some aircraft orders"
• Xi Jinping told the CEOs that China's door would "only open wider" and that "U.S. companies will enjoy even broader prospects in China"
• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent flew separately and met privately with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng for three hours at Incheon Airport with all press access blocked
• Pete Hegseth became the first U.S. Secretary of Defense to ever accompany a president on a state visit to China, breaking 54 years of precedent
• Why a Defense Secretary's presence at a state visit blurs a line that is supposed to stay clear
• Why we can never forget who the Chinese government really is: the Uyghur genocide, the surveillance state, the crushing of Hong Kong, the threats against Taiwan
• Marco Rubio has been under Chinese sanctions since 2020. China reportedly changed the Chinese transliteration of his name to get him through the door
• How Jensen Huang got added to the trip after Trump saw CNBC report that he had been left off the list
• How Citizens United built the legal architecture that made this moment possible
• Why this is no longer corruption through dark money channels, it walks down the steps of Air Force One on television
• New polling shows Trump's net approval at a new second-term low of negative 18.9 points
• Pew Research found Republican approval of Trump has slipped from 73 percent in January to 68 percent now
• Why finances getting harder for so many Americans is making it harder for people to think about the person standing next to them

When the days feel overwhelming, stop. Remember why you are doing this. Our job is to leave this country, this world, and this planet better than we found it for the generations that come after us. To encourage kindness and humanity. We are six months from the midterms. The most important elections of our lifetimes. And the country sees him for who he is.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

And remember, no matter how dark the days get, I will be here every single day, and together we will always find hope for America. I'll see you tomorrow. Three hundred Chinese children in matching blue and white uniforms lined the red carpet, waving American and Chinese flags. A military band played. An honor guard stood at attention, and then the door of the plane opened. The president of the United States of America walked down the steps first. Behind him came his son Eric Trump, then his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, then Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, with a personal fortune Forbes estimates at over $800 billion. Then Jensen Wong, the CEO of Nvidia, who makes the chips powering nearly every artificial intelligence system on Earth, with a fortune of roughly $183 billion. Then Secretary of State Marco Rubio, then Defense Secretary, or as he likes to pretend, the Secretary of War, Pete Heggseth, and somewhere in the cabin behind them was filmmaker Brett Ratner, the man who directed the Melania documentary that Amazon paid $40 million for, and who appears in the Epstein files. These are the people who are now the face and decision makers of the United States of America. It was the delegation strategically chosen for one of the most consequential state visits in nearly a decade. They are not diplomats or career national security officials. They are not even the people we elected. Instead, they are a handful of officials, members of the Trump family, and a cluster of billionaires whose combined net worth approaches one trillion dollars. They were not there for diplomatic agreements. They were there to broker deals for themselves at the expense of American taxpayers. This is what diplomacy looks like now with Donald Trump as president, not negotiations between nations on behalf of citizens. A presidential trip turned into a corporate sales call with the president of the United States acting the part of the closer while the real decisions are made by the people who financed his re-election. And as bad as this initial image is, the full delegation is even more staggering. Across the various meetings, Trump brought Larry Fink of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, Stephen Schwartzmann of Blackstone, with a net worth of roughly $50 billion, according to Forbes, Jane Fraser of Citigroup, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, Michael Mybach of MasterCard, Ryan McHenry of Visa, Kelly Ortberg of Boeing, who openly told the press he expected the trip to include some aircraft orders, Brian Sykes of Cargill, Chuck Robbins of Cisco, Jim Anderson of Coherent, Larry Culp of GE Aerospace, Jacob Dayson of Illumina, Dina Powell McCormick of Meta, Sanjay Morotra of Micron, Cristiano Aman of Qualcomm. These are not government officials or even official advisors. They are principals of for-profit businesses with everything to gain by being there. When Trump introduced them to Xi at the Great Hall of the People, he called them distinguished representatives from the American business community, who all respect and value China. The CEOs told Xi back that they highly value the Chinese market and hope to do more business in the country. Xi, sensing exactly what was happening, told them China's door would only open wider and that U.S. companies will enjoy even broader prospects in China. This was billed as a state visit, but once again, we saw what it really was: a deal-making summit, with Donald Trump doing favors for his friends and making sure he isn't left out of any of those deals. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant was also in attendance, but he did not fly on Air Force One. He flew ahead of this group, first to Tokyo to meet with the Japanese Prime Minister, then to Seoul, where he was received by South Korean President Li Zhongmy at the Blue House. From there, he went to Ishan Airport, where in a private VIP lounge with all press access blocked, he sat for three hours with Chinese Vice Premier He Lai Feng, the 70-year-old longtime confidant of Xi Jinping, who was served as Beijing's lead trade negotiator since 2023. The two of them coordinated the agenda for the summit, and it's hard not to imagine that during that time they must have worked out which deals would be announced, which concessions would be made, and which framing would be used. By the time Trump's plane touched down in Beijing, much of the negotiations might have already been completed in a closed room at a Korean airport. The summit itself was more of a show for Xi Jinping to exhibit dominance and show the world his hold on Trump. And then there is the part that needs to be mentioned. Defense Secretary Pete Hagseth was there and attended the welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People, standing alongside the billionaires, Hagseth is the first U.S. Secretary of Defense to ever accompany an American president on a state visit to China. Going back to Richard Nixon's historic 1972 trip that even opened relationships between the two countries. No defense secretary has done this in 54 years. And there is a reason for that. The Secretary of Defense represents the part of the government that is military, sovereign, and adversarial. They go on separate trips with separate agendas because their presence at a state visit blurs the line that is supposed to stay clear. Hegseth blurred it on purpose. He stood in formation with the billionaires, negotiating private deals with the country he is supposed to be preparing the military to deter. Because even though we can push for economic trade between our two countries, between our two nations, we can never forget who the Chinese government really is, even if Trump and his billionaires want us to. China is an authoritarian regime that surveils its own citizens at a scale never seen before in human history. It is a country that has perpetrated what the United States itself has formally declared a genocide against the Uyghur people. It is a country that crushed Hong Kong's democracy movement and disappeared its own billionaires when they stepped out of line. It is also the country our own intelligence agencies have named as the most significant long-term threat to the United States, the country actively threatening Taiwan, and the country running the most aggressive cyber espionage program against our own government and our companies. None of that goes away because Trump wants to do business with Xi or because the billionaires want access to the Chinese market. We can never forget who we are dealing with, even when our own president has, so that he and his enablers can enrich themselves. And because this was so important to Donald Trump, he even had Marco Rubio there. The Secretary of State has been under Chinese sanctions since 2020, when, as a senator, he criticized China's human rights record. To get him into Beijing, China reportedly changed the translation of his name using a different character for one symbol of his last name so it would not match the sanctioned version. They literally laundered his identity to get him through the door. Beijing wanted this meeting badly, enough to fake the paperwork. One other notable addition was Jensen Wang. The story of how he caught an Air Force One for this meeting is very telling as well. The original White House list of business leaders accompanying Trump did not include Wang. CNBC reported it, and Trump saw the report, he could not stand the optics of the most important ship CEO in the world being left out of his club. So he personally invited Wong, who flew separately to Alaska and boarded Air Force One during the refueling stop in Anchorage. Then Trump went on True Social and attacked CNBC. He wrote that CNBC incorrectly reported that the great Jensen Wang of NVIDIA was not invited to the incredible gathering of the world's greatest businessmen/slash women, proudly going to China, and called the original reporting fake news in all capitals, of course. Everything we are seeing play out with this trip and Trump's whole administration is what Citizens United built. Sixteen years ago, the Supreme Court ruled, five to four, that corporations and unions could spend unlimited amounts on independent political expenditures, on the theory, as Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, that independent expenditures, and I quote, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That single sentence is the foundational lie of modern American politics. Sixteen years later, the corruption is out in the open for all to see. It is no longer something that happens through dark money, channels, or undisclosed donors. It walks down the steps of Air Force One on television in broad daylight in front of 300 Chinese children waving flags. Citizens United did not just permit this, it manufactured it. It built the legal architecture that made it possible for a handful of billionaires to fund the rise of a president, fly with him to a foreign capital, sit behind him in his meetings with that capital's authoritarian leader, and walk away with deals signed in their names. The American people did not vote for any of them to negotiate with Xi Jinping or use the office of the presidency to grow their businesses in this way. The American people did not vote for Elon Musk to sit at a state banquet or for Brett Ratner to fly on Air Force One. The American people elected a president, expecting that president to be surrounded by career diplomats and confirmed cabinet officials whose loyalty was to the country and the Constitution. Instead, they got a man who treats the office as his personal company and a regime that treats the country as inventory to be liquidated for the benefit of the people on his plane. They walked off Air Force One and Beijing as representatives of the United States, but they were not there for us. They were there for themselves. And if all this feels overwhelming and insurmountable, I want you to know that you are not alone. The past couple of weeks have been hard. I've written about that here, and I've been hearing from more and more people who do this work every day that they are feeling the same. And I know that if we are feeling it, those of us who have dedicated ourselves to this work, then I know you must be feeling it too. It feels like a nonstop assault, like so much is being thrown at us constantly. And it's on purpose to break us and make us stop asking questions, to start thinking about our own survival rather than our country's. For a long time I tried to cover as many of the daily attacks on our constitution and our country as I possibly could in a single session or in a single writing, a single post, a single video. And it became too overwhelming even for me. When I sit down to write, I am compartmentalizing a lot of what is actually happening. But what I'm seeing in my daily life is harder to process. People are forgetting their humanity. People are forgetting that we share an existence. I'm seeing it online and now I'm seeing it in person too. And part of me has to imagine it is because finances are getting harder for so many Americans. The income and wealth gap keeps growing. The squeeze on the middle is real. And when people are in survival mode, asking themselves how they will get through this week, it gets harder to think about the people standing next to them. That's what I'm seeing. And unless you are one of the billionaires walking off Air Force One in Beijing, you might be feeling it too. When I struggle, this is what I do, and maybe it'll help you too. I stop. I remind myself why I am doing this, why I chose to speak up at this pivotal point in time and when I was not nearly as politically outspoken before. I look at my daughters and I think about what our job actually is as parents, as grandparents, as people of this world. Our job is to leave this country, this world and this planet better than we found it for the generations that come after us. That's it. To encourage kindness and humanity. At the end of the day, I just want to know that I did everything I possibly could in these moments. That's what reignites me and what keeps me grounded. Hopefully that helps you too. I also hold on to the good still in the world and the signs that the resistance is building. Like how new polling released just yesterday shows Trump's net approval rating is at a new second term low of negative 18.9 points. 48% of Americans strongly disapprove of his performances. That is still too low. Now, among U.S. adults overall, his net approval is a negative 20.6, and even within his own party, he is becoming increasingly more and more unpopular. Pew research found that Republican approval of Trump has slipped from 73% in January to 68% now. He is one of the most unpopular sitting presidents in modern history. The country sees him for who he is. Right now I am reminding myself that we are six months from the midterms, the most important election of our lifetime, and that the polling numbers are largely in our favor, or more importantly, the country's favor for a Democratic majority in Congress. And that is why I still have Hope for America. And you should too. I'm Heather Tlaney Reese, and you're listening to Hope for America, where every day I bring you the truth about our politics, our country, and the forces trying to destroy them. Together, we cut through the noise, expose the lies, and stay focused on what really matters, fighting for the survival of our country.