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Last night, I joined The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle once again for a full-hour powerhouse Nightcap panel alongside the brilliant Antonia Hylton, Basil Smikle, and Tim O’Brien. We covered three things I want to make sure don’t get lost in the noise: China’s long-game strategy and how Trump is accelerating it, the coordinated assault on Black political and economic power happening in real time across multiple fronts, and a $10 billion act of self-dealing that should be one of the top stories in the country.
Trump flew to Beijing this week, and the framing from the White House is that he’s there to make deals. What I see is a president walking into a summit with leverage he already surrendered, in a country that has spent decades preparing for exactly this moment.
Trump had Project 2025. But China has a Project 2049 to become the world's superpower, and Trump is playing into China's hands. He's eroded America's soft power. He's ceded the renewable energy industry to China. He's weakened US global leadership, and China will exploit that.
At home, the gerrymandering rulings, the federal layoffs, the DEI rollbacks, they are not separate stories. They are a coordinated plan playing out across multiple institutions simultaneously, hitting Black political power and Black economic power at the same time. And while that is happening, the White House is being treated as a line item on a family balance sheet.
You can watch key clips from my appearance above and read key takeaways below.
Project 2049: China’s Long Game
While everyone has been focused on Project 2025, I made the case last night that China is running its own blueprint, what I’m calling their Project 2049. China has explicitly stated its goal: global superpower status by mid-century. Trump is contributing to that vision on almost every front.
China’s core argument against the United States has always been that we are volatile, unreliable, that we claim ideals and do the opposite. Trump validates that argument daily. He is unilaterally handing Beijing its most effective propaganda without them having to do a thing.
The renewable energy scoreboard is not close. China manufactures 80% of the world’s solar panels, 75% of lithium-ion batteries, over 70% of electric vehicles, and 60% of wind turbines. Trump is clinging to fossil fuels, relics of the past, while we cede the industries of the future entirely.
Trump also authorized the sale of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China. We already saw what they did with lesser chips when DeepSeek shocked the world. Now they are demonstrating they can do more with fewer transistors. Trump walked into that summit weakened. China walked in ready to exploit it.
And what I didn’t get to mention on the panel is the fact that the Trump Admin needs China’s help with opening the Strait of Hormuz, and it needs China’s rare Earth minerals.
The Most Openly Anti-Black President in Modern History
Stephanie asked whether what we’re watching says more about America than it does about Trump. My answer: Trump has spent decades exploiting the moral rot at the center of the American psyche, appealing to the lower impulses of everyday Americans. But what he’s executing right now is something more specific than opportunism. It’s a plan.
No clearer case has been made for the necessity of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 than how fast Southern states moved the moment SCOTUS gave them the green light. Within hours, DeSantis signed off on seats designed to dilute Black majority districts. Tennessee wiped out a Black majority district. Louisiana is set to do the same. Alabama just got greenlit. This is happening simultaneously, not incrementally.
Nearly 20% of the federal workforce was Black before Trump walked into office. The mass layoffs that followed did not happen in a vacuum. They coincided directly with the DEI assault, not just in the federal government but in the private sector, with executive orders designed to pressure corporations to stop hiring Black people under the banner of anti-DEI policy. The Black unemployment spike is directly tied to this.
Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society’s legal pipeline and the Heritage Foundation’s policy playbooks - They put this plan in place. What we are living through is the culmination of decades of institutional infrastructure built precisely for this moment. Trump is the delivery mechanism. The plan predates him.
The White House As An Asset On Trump’s Balance Sheet
Todd Blanche was never going to stand up and call any of this unethical. The White House has been treated as just another asset on the Trump family balance sheet from day one, and the grift has only gotten more brazen.
Trump is pulling in untraceable crypto money at a scale we still don’t fully understand. He’s already made billions. The corruption is not hidden. It operates in the open because no one with the power to stop it is willing to.
Breaking the night of the show: CNN and the New York Times reported the DOJ is interested in settling a lawsuit for $10 billion. Taxpayer dollars. Money Trump would, in his own words, pay himself, suing the IRS, the agency he oversees. If it goes through, it is the most transparently corrupt act of self-dealing in American history. And frankly, the single biggest robbery in American history.
Bottom Line
Trump is in Beijing trying to make deals. The question is who those deals are for. China has a plan and a timeline. Trump is handing them both the future economy and the propaganda to go with it. At home, Black political and economic power is being dismantled across multiple institutions at the same time, and the White House is being looted in broad daylight. These are not isolated stories. They are the same story, and it is moving fast.
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