Alan Zendell,  May 12, 2026

A normal person approaching a critical summit with the leader of our most powerful and dangerous adversary, knowing they have no trump cards to play might be nervous. They might suffer extreme anxiety attacks and even cancel or postpone the meeting again. But people who suffer from serious narcissistic personality disorders don’t react or behave like normal people. They have such exaggerated, grandiose images of themselves, they don’t realize they’re mired in quicksand until it’s too late.

I fear that is the fate of our impetuous, out of his depth president. He is so fundamentally unlikable that I have no sympathy for him, but I hope that having billionaires Elon Musk and Tim Cook with him, along with an entourage of people who understand Chinese and have a clue about the way Xi thinks will mute Trump’s worst tendencies. Despite self-promotion as the Master of the Deal, Trump is anything but that. In business, he never negotiated fairly on a level playing field. He always used money and an army of lawyers to intimidate the opposition.

I doubt that Trump has any idea what a fair deal would mean with either China or Iran. He understands neither fairness nor what it takes to be a real dealmaker. All that motivates him is winning, or at least convincing himself that he’s winning, even when everyone around him can see that he’s lost. And that, to our great misfortune as Americans, is exactly the situation as Trump prepares to depart for Beijing.

We’re all aware of the debacle that Trump’s war in Iran has become, and equally aware that he was warned by experts that bringing the Iranian regime to its knees would not be as easy as sending in a few commandos to kidnap Nicolas Maduro. Instead he listened only to Benjamin Netanyahu, who convinced him that the interests of Israel and the United States were perfectly aligned, and undoubtedly played upon his ego. The truth is that Netanyahu, who understands Iranians as well as anyone, was focused on what he believed was Israel’s survival. The fate of things like the Strait of Hormuz were far lesser priorities for him than for Trump and the rest of the world.

Trump allowed himself to be drawn into a war that drastically weakened our ability to confront China. Thanks to 24/7 worldwide news channels, Xi can see everything we see in real time. He sees that our ability to fight effectively on multiple fronts is far more fragile than anyone, especially Trump imagined. He sees that Trump’s trade war is a total disaster, and that in the sixteen months of Trump’s second term he has driven our allies away and forced them to cozy up to China and each other rather than do business with us.

MAGA Republicans continue to live in their oblivious bubble, drinking Trump’s Kool Aid and supporting his attempts to undermine our electoral system to assure that Trump remains in power. Like Trump himself, they are narrowly focused on power and wealth to the exclusion of what’s good for the rest of America and the world.

All that might still be salvageable, except for some realities that Trump and MAGA seem to have overlooked. China is forging ahead of the United States in the production of alternative energy sources, while Trump is spending billions to kill them in the United States, creating a perfect storm of bad outcomes when oil becomes scarce and expensive. China is also on the verge of leaving us in the dust with respect to AI. It wouldn’t surpise me if bringing our most powerful tech executives on this trip actually benefitted Xi in the end. The unpredictable and uncontrollable Elon Musk could turn on Trump in a second if he saw more profit in throwing his lot in with China.

But the thing that may be the determining factor in Trump’s meeting with Xi has mostly fallen under the radar. The demand for rare earth minerals increases every day, and America depends on them to support AI, the IT industry in general, and our strategic weapons systems. The United States is relatively poor in rare Earth ores, while China possesses enough to hold the rest of the world hostage if Xi decides that’s to his advantage. In 2025, China accounted for more than 70% of the mining and 90% of the processing of rare earth elements. The United States was a distant second, with Europe having almost none. Those numbers portend a very negative future if China chooses to use rare earths to dominate his relations with Trump.

I doubt that many American leaders would want to be in the position Trump finds himself, but then, it’s unlikely that anyone but Trump would have managed things so badly that they would find themselves in such a position. Thanks to Trump, the rest of the world sees us as a declining empire. They also note that the U. S. has been the loser in every military venture we’ve engaged in since World War 2, except Ronald Reagan’s heroic invasion of the island of Grenada.