Xi Jinping couldn’t have choreographed a more picture perfect display of the decline of the American empire than showed up in Beijing today. True to form, Trump didn’t miss an opportunity to sing Xi’s praises while ignoring the harsh realities that his host was aiding an abetting Iran - the very enemy that has locked his presidency into freefall since the war he began more than 60 days ago. 5️⃣ Day Two in Beijing Xi opened with cooperation, partnership, the “Thucydides trap.” He also opened with a threat: handle Taiwan wrong, the Chinese Foreign Ministry readout said, and “the two countries would collide or even enter into conflict.” The threat was in the official Chinese readout. Trump’s response was a hymn. “You’re a great leader. I say it to everybody. Sometimes people don’t like me saying it, but I say it anyway.” He praised the children — “They were happy. They were beautiful” — the same beat the Epstein files have taught us to listen for. He praised the delegation he had dragged across the Pacific with him. He bowed Xi through the door first on the way out. Please, sir. After you. Please. Dean said it on air and we’ll say it again here: this was not a summit. It was a surrender, choreographed by Beijing, accepted by a president too broken by his own Iran war to refuse. Xi got 200 Boeing jets and a working assumption that Taiwan is now his to take when he wants. Trump got a sentence. China will stop arming Iran. We have heard this sentence before, in 2019 and again in 2023, and each time the shipments resumed through front companies, Gulf transit hubs, and the same secret routes the Joint Staff was mapping when it wrote this week’s assessment. 4️⃣ The Pentagon Already Knew A confidential intelligence assessment landed on Gen. Dan Caine’s desk this week. Washington Post‘s John Hudson broke it at 12:10 AM ET. The Joint Staff intelligence directorate ran it through the DIME framework — diplomatic, informational, military, economic — and produced one conclusion in four colors of ink: China is winning the war Trump started. Since the Iran war launched February 28, Beijing has sold weapons to the Gulf allies the United States is sworn to defend, kept the world’s energy moving after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, watched the Pentagon burn through the Patriots, THAADs, and Tomahawks Washington would need to defend Taiwan, labeled the war “illegal” in its messaging, and pulled Thailand, Australia, and the Philippines closer. Trump carried the assessment to Beijing in the same plane as Elon Musk and Jensen Huang and Marco Rubio. He did not let the report change the script. Beijing has no incentive to stop arming Iran. Beijing has every incentive to keep the war bleeding. 3️⃣ The Men on the Epstein Tape Yesterday Narativ published the enhanced audio from Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, dated February 2013. Ehud Barak — former Israeli prime minister, former defense minister, named only as a “former prime minister” by Virginia Giuffre in her book and described as one of the most violent men inside the network — sat with Larry Summers and Epstein and asked, on tape, to be bought. He did not want to end like Gerhard Schröder, he said. He wanted a quiet five million a year and a useful job and a friend in the Kremlin. Weeks after the dinner, Barak flew to St. Petersburg and met Vladimir Putin. A million-dollar wire from oligarch Viktor Vekselberg — sanctioned by the United States since 2018 for facilitating malign Russian activity — arrived in Barak’s Hyperion E.B. account. One name on Barak’s books that surfaced in the reporting today: Scott Bessent. Half a million dollars a year. The Treasury Secretary who is sitting on the unreleased Treasury files on Jeffrey Epstein is in a financial relationship with a man Putin paid to do whatever Putin asked. 2️⃣ Lutnick Lied Eight Times Howard Lutnick sat in Room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building on May 6 and answered ninety-six pages of questions under penalty of 18 U.S.C. § 1001. The Oversight Committee released the transcript last night. Narativ’s reporting catches him in eight contradictions. The seven-million-dollar townhouse that transferred from Epstein’s trust to Lutnick for ten dollars. The “four emails in one day” that the DOJ files show were closer to two hundred and fifty, one of them listing the names, ages, and sexes of the children coming to the island. The AdFin stock purchase Lutnick signed five days after a lunch on Epstein’s island. The nanny resume Epstein’s accountant sent for a man who had no children of his own. The Maxwell parties two whistleblowers independently described. The October 2025 statement that Epstein was “the greatest blackmailer ever” — walked back under oath, and in walking it back, confirming the regime is sitting on the proof. The FBI’s January 2025 Cabinet screening returned twenty-six hits on Lutnick. A closed money laundering case. A RICO violations case. Three Suspicious Activity Reports. The note in the processing file: Queries were not conducted on Epstein and Maxwell due to the sensitive nature of the case. Nineteen days later, the Senate confirmed him fifty-one to forty-five. The committee asked him about the massage table, the mask collection, the scaffolding, the Frick Museum. The committee did not ask about Tether — the foreign stablecoin that lent Lutnick’s dynasty trust an undisclosed sum a day after he sold Cantor to his children, secured by everything the trust owns. Senators Warren and Wyden’s deadline for Lutnick to answer eight Tether questions is today. 1️⃣ The War China Runs Through We opened with Beijing. We come back to Beijing. The summit Trump went to Beijing to ask for help at is the summit Beijing planned around the war Trump started. The Pentagon already knew Xi would not stop arming Iran because Xi has no reason to stop and every reason to keep bleeding the United States dry. China and Russia have both vowed to veto any UN resolution to clean up the Hormuz blockade. Pakistan, India, Turkey are reaching for the only oil left to reach for. Allies are rerouting around Washington. Trump told reporters before takeoff he didn’t need anyone’s help. He landed asking for it anyway. Trump promised America would humble Iran. Iran is humbling America. China is the bank. THE PATTERN Ehud Barak’s multi-million dollar deal with Vladimir Putin, as described by Barak himself on a recording made at Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse in 2013, and Trump’s supplication to Xi in Beijing happening in real-time are a decade and a world apart, but they are products of the same malign forces that have corrupted our politics and defiled what America’s founders had demanded. We, the people, are greater than just one man, and we, the people, determine the course of American destiny—not a worn-out casino owner well past his best before date. This president may have bowed in surrender to Xi, but we, but the people, stand strong for the America we know we can be. The choice in front of us is not the choice Donald Trump is making for us. It is the choice we make for ourselves, in our neighborhoods, our cities, our states, in the oath we take in November. \ Narativ is reader-supported. The Lutnick investigation, the Barak tape, the Bessent connection — all of it is paid-subscriber work. If you can subscribe, you keep this reporting going. Subscribe to Narativ → Watch The Fivestack — Thursday, May 14, 2026. Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev. Full episode → Read Dean’s companion piece: Nero on the Potomac Thank you Ellie Leonard, Amy Gabrielle, Cat: Poli-Psych, Robin Payes, Iulia Huiu, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
