🇨🇳 🇺🇸 Donald the ‘Pussycat’ Prepares to Head to China

The leader of the free world is set to meet one of his favorite brutal autocrats, the lone Democrat on the FCC wants Disney to fight for its rights, and it's nap time again in the Oval.

On this day in 1975, the SS Mayaguez, an American freighter, was captured by Cambodia. President Gerald Ford ordered an assault. The crew were released, but 41 Americans died.

Good morning! It’s Swin, again. If you’re living in the United States today, it is hard to get around how boring it is that our ruler, Donald Trump, is just a bully. He’s not an interesting bully, or even a sympathetic one. He’s just a stereotypical bully, the kind of coward we’ve all met on the playground who only ever seems to pick fights with those he thinks he can easily topple.

It’s why our commander-in-chief talks a big game when he grins about potentially invading Cuba, but why he sounds like such a limping loser about his war on Iran failing to quickly go his way. And as he prepares to head to China – a massive world power that can properly defend itself – which Trump do you think is showing up: the phony tough guy, or the simpering “pussycat?” More on that, in a moment…

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Trump prepares to meet Xi Jinping, the only Democrat on the Federal Communications Commission issues a stark warning to Disney and ABC about what the administration wants to do to them, and the president takes another nice little snooze.

Mr. Trump Goes to Beijing…

Donald Trump talks to China’s Xi Jinping in Busan on Oct. 30, 2025. Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

Late last year, President Trump had a message for several of his confidants: “We’re not fucking doing that,” the US president, sitting in the White House, privately said, one source with direct knowledge of his outburst tells me.

According to several people familiar with this matter, Trump had recently been briefed by senior US officials on draft papers for his new, then-unfinished National Defense Strategy – and the president wasn’t happy. The draft for the China-related section of this Pentagon strategic document had been helmed largely by Defense Department official Elbridge Colby, one of Team Trump’s preeminent China hawks. The section was notably hawkish on China as a national-security danger, because of course it was: Trump has long campaigned on this idea that he’s The One Guy who can be genuinely “tough” on the Chinese, that he’s America’s one true savior from the menace of the East. Trump appointed Colby specifically to be substantively, if not performatively, tough on the People’s Republic.

But at that moment, Trump apparently didn’t want to hurt China’s feelings too much – or, the feelings of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, a fellow brutal authoritarian on the global stage who Trump affectionately refers to as his “friend” and a great negotiator. President Trump, the sources tell me, personally intervened and ordered the China-related passages of the soon-to-be-released National Defense Strategy to be torn out, to have much softer, friendlier language swapped in. (In January, when the thing was released, people started noticing the conspicuous vibe shift.)

“Donald Trump is a pussycat in many ways,” one senior US official tells me. “He clearly respects Xi a whole lot… [and] he’s a lot rougher on NATO than [he is on] Beijing.”