If you watched today’s video on my Power Pundit Youtube channel, you already know the headline. Xi Jinping sat across from Trump in Beijing on Thursday and gave him three things: Boeing planes, soybeans, and a quiet line about wanting to buy American oil to reduce China’s dependence on the Middle East. The chip approval was the price Trump paid. The oil-axis crack was what he came home with.
Then Trump sat down with Sean Hannity, and what came out went well beyond the trip readouts. Xi went past the oil-purchase line. He explicitly offered to help Trump open the Strait of Hormuz and broker an Iran deal.
Trump’s quote, on tape: “Xi would like to see a deal. He said, ‘If I can be of ANY help at all, I would like to be of help.’” And then the line that actually matters, where Trump added: “anybody that buys that much oil has obviously got some kind of a relationship with them.”
That is Trump telling the audience, in plain language, that Xi has just offered to lean on the Iranian regime he has spent twenty years propping up.
The video walks through the surface of the trip. This briefing is for the layer underneath. What Xi is actually offering, why he is offering it now, what Iran has just lost, and where the receipts will show up first.
The first question worth sitting with, before anything else, is this:
