Wednesday, May 13, 2026 · 159 newsletters

Trump in Beijing, Jensen in Tow

china-trip · inflation-fed · iran-war · redistricting · ai-infrastructure · ai-labor · markets · lifestyle

Pulled from 159 newsletters sent to read@madho.net yesterday. Today the inbox basically had one news cycle and a lot of footnotes. Here's the signal organized by trend.

The Big Story: Trump Goes to Beijing, Jensen Huang Hitches a Ride

This swallowed every business and politics newsletter today. The image is striking: a Republican president flying into Beijing as an arguably weakened figure, asking Xi to "open up" China, with a planeload of billionaire CEOs in tow. Techmeme led with the 11th-hour news that Jensen Huang met Air Force One in Alaska after CNBC reported he'd been left off the manifest. Bloomberg framed it as "Nvidia CEO Joins Trump's China Trip as Last-Minute Addition." Matt at Crooked used his daily to ask "The Vroom of Doom?", a piece on how Trump might inadvertently open the US market to cheap Chinese EVs, which already make up two-thirds of global EV sales.

The China-watchers were sharp. Bill Bishop at Sinocism ran "10 Questions and Modest Expectations" linking to FT's "A weakened Trump arrives at Xi's court." ChinaTalk had Julian Gewirtz and Matt Sheehan on "Xi-Trump to talk AI Safety, Huh?," arguing the Anthropic Mythos moment forced the administration to take frontier risk seriously after JD Vance had spent a year mocking it. Noahpinion used the trip to publish "Trump actually started to decouple America from China," scoring the last decade. Foreign Affairs ran four pieces, the headliner being Henrietta Levin's "America Has Lost Its Leverage Over China."

The skeptics had a field day. Paul Krugman called it "The Apotheosis of Willful Ignorance," noting Trump is "traveling to Beijing as a supplicant, in effect begging China for help getting out of his Iran mess." Semafor DC had bipartisan senators warning Rubio against "unilateral changes" to Taiwan policy, while Pirate Wires ran a tangential but striking item: the mayor of Arcadia, California just admitted to running a pro-CCP propaganda outlet at Beijing's direction.

Inflation, the Fed, and the Iran Tab

The macro picture got worse, and the political response got more honest about who caused it. Matt at WTF Just Happened Today? led with PPI rising 1.4% in April and 6% year over year, and the Senate confirming Kevin Warsh as Fed chair 54-45 (Day 1940). The kicker, from Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger at The Bulwark: Trump "Admits He Wrecked the Economy," recounting on camera at least fifteen times in five weeks how he told his economic team the Iran war would tank markets and started it anyway.

The Iran war powers vote failed again, but cracks are showing. Semafor DC reported Lisa Murkowski joined Susan Collins and Rand Paul, leaving the resolution one vote short for the seventh time. Gov Brief Today put the running price tag at "$29 billion as inflation reaches highest level since 2023" with gas still up 50% since the war began. News Items by John Ellis flagged a New York Times scoop that classified assessments show Iran has regained access to 30 of 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, which directly contradicts the administration's "shattered military" line.

The economists are aligned. Matt Klein at The Overshoot argued in "The U.S. Job Market is (Still) Inflationary" that locally-produced services prices are running 1 to 1.5 points hotter than pre-pandemic and accelerating. Lincoln Square had Justin Wolfers on with Susan Demas (Platypus Economics is his new Substack worth bookmarking). The Daily Joe ran a smart piece on the second-order effects: Iran's Hormuz closure has triggered a "global packaging crisis" via polyethylene shortages, with PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and P&G warning of margin compression.

AI: Defensibility Moves Down the Stack

A surprisingly cohesive theme today. The conversation has shifted from "what can agents do" to "what's actually defensible when the UI disappears."

The headless thesis. a16z published Seema Amble's "Is Software Losing Its Head?", a sharp read on Salesforce's headless launch and what defensibility looks like when humans no longer live in the UI. Linas made the parallel argument in fintech: "Anthropic is coming for RegTech". Claude's Dun & Bradstreet integration positions Anthropic as the compliance layer for regulated finance, not another SaaS vendor. Ben Thompson at Stratechery framed OpenAI's new $4B "Deployment Company" the same way in "The Deployment Company, Back to the 70s, Apple and Intel". The labs are vertically integrating because top-down implementation is now the bottleneck.

Builder-level practitioners pushed in the same direction. Nate argued vector search is getting demoted from "the architecture" to "one component inside a knowledge layer" in "Your AI agent is rediscovering 85% of its context every run." Every profiled Noah Brier on using Claude Code as a second brain in "Mining Your Life for Context." GTMnow had Tyler Hogge arguing "the moat moved, it's not the product anymore" and per-seat pricing is collapsing. Linear interviewed Euclid Power's Jacob Sandry on "Building AI for an industry where 99% accuracy isn't acceptable", which boils down to selling into the CapEx of every solar project, not into procurement.

AI as a labor story is getting more pointed. Peter Yang called out "Enough With the 'AI Made Us Do It' Layoff Memo". His point: 80,000+ tech layoffs in Q1 dressed up as "agentic era restructuring" when the real driver is ZIRP-era overhiring (Meta 45K to 86K, Block 3.8K to 12K). Saadiq at Field Notes made the operator's counterpoint in "Jobs Are Fake": the org chart is from before, the lanes were capacity not rules, and AI just removed the capacity. Axios AI+ profiled "tokenmaxxing", the suggestion you should spend as much on AI tokens as you do on rent. The Information reported the House Oversight Committee opened a probe into "Sam Altman's Personal Investments."

One adjacent thread worth tracking. On my Om made the case that "AI is the New Netflix", the killer app of the upload-broadband era, with cloud sync now 15-16% of upstream traffic and IoT/cars/voice queries flipping the old asymmetric model.

Politics & Democracy: The Redistricting Map War Continues

The South had a busy day. Democracy Docket led with "South Carolina revives Trump-backed redistricting push" plus Mississippi and Georgia plans for 2028 redraws, and Louisiana's Senate committee voting at 4:30 a.m. Marc Elias flagged a quiet but real win in Montana, where a state judge blocked SB 490's attempt to cut Election Day registration to a five-hour window ("A win and a warning for the right to vote").

The Bulwark family had a thesis day. JVL via Tim Miller wrote "The Status Quo Needs Shaking Up", using the Epstein-files lesson (degenerate Polymarket bettors gave the release an 11.5% chance last June; it happened anyway) to argue Democrats should run outsiders and fighters. Tim, Sarah and JVL discussed "Should the Next Democrat Punish Red States?" on The Next Level. Sarah Longwell announced The Bulwark crossed 1 million subscribers.

Trump's strength brand is collapsing. Dan Pfeiffer wrote "Trump's Brand Was Strength. It's Gone." arguing this is the emperor-has-no-clothes moment. Rick Wilson hit similar notes in "The Wolves of Fraud Street." Lincoln Square covered Joe Trippi making the case for an "un-stealable" Dem landslide and Frank Figliuzzi connecting the Hantavirus outbreak to CDC cuts in "Hantavirus Is a Wakeup Call."

Markets, M&A, and the IPO Window

The Wrap reported S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 closed at fresh records despite the hot PPI, powered by chip stocks and Big Tech. Notables: Ford had its best day since March 2020 on a Morgan Stanley note praising its battery business, Nebius soared after raising contracted power guidance to over 4GW, and Anthropic is reportedly in talks at a $950B valuation, past OpenAI. Techmeme flagged Anduril raising a $5B Series H led by Thrive and a16z at a $61B valuation, doubled from last June, eyeing a 2027 IPO. The Daily Upside and Term Sheet both noted Alphabet's Isomorphic Labs raising $2.1B for AI drug design. Sacra estimated Muck Rack hit $108M ARR on a pivot to answer engine optimization.

On the more sober side. FreightWaves covered BMO's transportation lending group sold to Stonepeak, so one of trucking's largest credit windows now disappears behind PE walls. Maritime Analytica flagged Hapag-Lloyd's Q1 turning negative on near-identical TEU volume, and warned in "What If Fuel Becomes Shipping's Next Shock?" that global oil stocks could hit critical operating levels by August or September if Iran drags on. Snacks detailed Hims' "strategic pivot" away from compounded GLP-1s after the Novo lawsuit, with a $33M Q1 write-down.

Tomatoes, Naming, and Other Useful Footnotes

Chartr noted fresh tomato prices surged 40% in April, an eight-year high, plus Netflix has spent $135B on content over the past decade (down to 40 cents per revenue dollar from 73 cents at the 2021 peak). The Daily Skimm flagged something underrated: after 14 years of patient advocacy, PCOS is being renamed PMOS (polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome) per a Lancet paper, finally reflecting that most patients have no ovarian cysts and the metabolic and cardiovascular risk has been dangerously under-prioritized.

Lifestyle / Culture Grace Notes

Casey Lewis at After School covered the cursive comeback and Princeton ending 133 years of unproctored exams after academic dishonesty cases tripled. Emily Sundberg at Feed Me wrote "Husbands: Beware of Hot Divorcee Summer" plus the Klimt drawings show opening uptown. Consuming Collective covered the NYT 100 Best fallout and the week's NYC restaurant calendar. Gothamist flagged a possible Knicks-finals-meets-World-Cup commuter meltdown at Penn Station, plus an LIRR strike looming. Stat Significant returned to its 2024 "6 Reasons to Be Cautiously Optimistic About Movies" thesis. Culture Study had Sara Petersen on the momfluencer industrial complex. dynomight asked, sincerely, "What's with all the slide decks?", a great essay on why we communicate through presentation software for things that aren't presentations.

Three Takeaways for You

The Beijing trip is the through-line for almost everything else in the briefing. Inflation, the Iran war tab, the Senate war-powers vote, the Boeing tribute, the EV anxiety, the Foreign Affairs cluster: it's all downstream of a single regime question, which is whether Trump arrives at Xi's court with leverage or as a supplicant. Multiple non-political newsletters now treat the answer as obvious. That convergence is itself the news.

The AI conversation has clearly moved past "agents work" into "what's left to own when the UI disappears." a16z, Linas on Anthropic, Stratechery on OpenAI's deployment company, GTMnow on per-seat collapse, and Nate on the knowledge layer are all making variations of the same argument from different angles. If you're building, that's the question to be sitting with this week.

If you only read three pieces, I'd suggest: Paul Krugman's "The Apotheosis of Willful Ignorance" (the cleanest macro-political frame for what's actually happening this week), a16z's "Is Software Losing Its Head?" (the cleanest take on AI-era defensibility), and Mike Fisher's "There Are Always More of Them Before They Are Counted" (a useful corrective on prematurely declaring SaaS dead, anchored in the 10,000-carriage-makers analogy).