Red China’s Red Carpet. Toasts, Taiwan & Thucydides. Massive Medicaid Fraud. Death Row Porn. RIP: Liberal Patriot. Why GOP Should Love AOC. And More

The Reds rolled out their red carpet for President Trump.

Behind the toasts and pomp, the Trump-Xi summit is a defining test for America in the new Cold War, according to an opinion piece at Fox Digital. This cold war “is being fought with chips, data and AI.” Which brings us inevitably to Taiwan.

“Taiwan Is the Key to AI Dominance,” write Doug Feith and Alexander Benard in the Wall Street Journal. That is why, as a Free Press headline on a Niall Ferguson story puts it, “Trump Wants Détente. Xi Wants Taiwan.” An editorial in the Wall Street Journal takes note of Taiwan’s advance in defense spending:

President Trump arrived in Beijing on Wednesday hoping for big deals in China, but the truth is that more of America’s economic and strategic future depends on Taiwan. Chinese President Xi Jinping will rehearse his shibboleths about the island as a rogue province, so it’s worth noting Taiwan’s progress on self-defense. …

While Taiwan practices the politics of persuasion, Mr. Xi’s police state is arresting defense officials and giving them suspended death sentences. President Trump sees the world mainly through a lens of brute power politics. While such realism can be an asset, it may mislead him about the U.S. balance sheet in Asia. Taiwan is a technology powerhouse with a rule of law that will never exist in China as long as Mr. Xi rules. (See David Feith and Alexander Benard on the tech nearby.)

Taiwan is showing that it understands the free world has to be defended. Mr. Trump can reward the democracy’s defense boost by unlocking an arms-sale package that’s been held up amid mood setting for this week’s China summit. All the pageantry is in Beijing, but America’s most profound interests to protect are across the windy strait.

Many of us, I am sure, are rooting for President Trump to gain the release of Jimmy Lai, the heroic Hong Kong newspaper proprietor who now languishes in a Chinese prison. The Wall Street Journal’s Jillian Kay Melchior writes about the Lai family, which has been “cursed by communism.” Kim Strassel interviews her colleague Bill McGurn (who is Mr. Lai’s godfather) on the situation.

Xi said something to President Trump that got my attention (even if I had to Google the term): Xi asked whether the U.S. and China could avoid the “Thucydides Trap.” The “Thucydides Trap” is a term coined by an American political scientist to describe the tensions between a rising and dominant power. One way to avoid the Thucydides Trap is for the dominant power to acquiesce and fade, and one can assume that this is exactly what President Xi prefers. Lee Smith writes in the Tablet that, contrary to the MSM’s conventional wisdom, the U.S. war against Iran hasn’t ushered in American decline but, paradoxically, has exposed China’s weakness.

The UK Telegraph highlights Xi’s economic woes. Noah Smith writes that the economic “decoupling” of China and the U.S. proceeds slowly but surely. Fox Digital has frequent updates on the summit.

Vice President J.D. Vance may be stuck in the U.S. while Marco and other cool kids are in China, but Vance made good use of the time yesterday. As the latest in his quest to combat massive fraud in federal programs, Vance announced that the federal government will suspend $1.3 billion in Medicaid funds to California. The beneficiaries will not be affected. Other states were warned that this could happen to them. The Federalist covered the presser:

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, vice chair of the anti-fraud task force, said states allowing fraud are a “result of decades of corruption, particularly in blue states,” noting that many of them “have taken tens of billions of dollars to pay lawyers” to prosecute fraud, but have little or nothing to show for it.

“When the states just take this money and turn it into a jobs program for blue state lawyers, they are effectively participating in the elder abuse in those states, because the American people turn over their money to these state programs to protect their parents and their grandparents from elder abuse, and if you aren’t doing it, you are effectively participating in that process,” Ferguson said.

The scale of this brand of fraud is almost unimaginable. Obtaining more money for entitlement programs is practically the entire program of the Left. But Real Clear Politics reveals that billions were spent on Medicaid expansion that Congress never approved. Even Russia and Cuba found ways to rob the U.S. Medicaid program.

“Watching Porn on California’s Death Row.” That’s the arresting headline on Christopher Rufo and Haley Strack’s latest City Journal piece. Under Governor Gavin Newsom, taxpayer-funded tablets are being turned into “personal sex machines” by inmates:

In reality, taxpayer-funded tablets have also been used for more lurid endeavors. In this exclusive City Journal investigation, we contacted dozens of death-row inmates, who told us that prisoners in the state system use such devices to watch pornography and have explicit sexual conversations. Some prisoners, according to a former high-ranking California corrections official, use their tablets to groom minors. Though the state has claimed to regulate explicit content, the inmates told us that users can easily evade detection. …

But inmates told us a different story. For some, the devices have become personal sex machines. In the words of one inmate, California’s death row is populated with desperately “horny” criminals who see the tablets as a way to satisfy their basest fantasies and desires—all thanks to the California taxpayer.

Another Inmate Update: Convicted of killing his wife and son, Alex Murdaugh will get a new trial:

A juror who helped convict Alex Murdaugh in the killings of his wife and son was left stunned by the South Carolina Supreme Court’s “crazy” decision Wednesday to overturn the verdict.

Juror Ami Williams insisted she was never swayed into convicting the disgraced legal scion in the grisly 2021 murders of his wife, Maggie, and 22-year-old son, Paul, after the state’s top court unanimously found that a court clerk improperly influenced his dramatic six-week trial.

Judges ruled that Colleton County court clerk Becky Hill tainted the 2023 trial by meddling with the jury.

Liberal Patriot, RIP. “I was saddened to learn a few weeks ago that The Liberal Patriot (TLP) had closed up shop,” writes Daniel Stid of AEI. Well, that makes two of us, and I imagine many, many other TLP fans.

The iconoclastic TLP, cofounded by John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, was a delight and always provocative.  Stid writes:

The fall of TLP sheds light on a strange disequilibrium in American democracy, one driven in no small part by the self-defeating logic of polarization….

There is an inescapable, small-“d” democratic calculus animating the faction that TLP helped rally: in a country where fewer than two in five adults hold a four-year college degree, it will be difficult to build an enduring governing coalition without winning substantial support from the majority of voters who are not college graduates.

AOC is a college grad, and I bet she wasn’t a fan of populist-oriented Liberal Patriot.

Wall Street Journal politics guru Karl Rove writes in “AOC Could Turn Back the Blue Wave” that “bumptious radicals like her are the GOP’s best hope in a tough midterm election.” Meanwhile, another politics guru, Henry Olsen of the Washington Post, writes that “the map is becoming so tilted that a four-point Democratic win might not be enough for a majority.”