Trump Flies to Beijing as Supreme Court Strips Tariff Authority

Donald Trump began the most consequential foreign trip of his second term on Tuesday, departing Washington for a two-day Beijing summit with Xi Jinping — his first visit to China in nearly nine years, originally scheduled for April and delayed by the US-Israel war on Iran. He flies in seeking Beijing's leverage with Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the war; Xi, who hosted Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi a week earlier, is expected to demand US restraint on Taiwan, including a declared US opposition to Taiwanese sovereignty and limits on arms sales. Trump confirmed Taiwan's defence would be on the agenda — "President Xi would like us not to, and I'll have that discussion" — and is travelling with a 17-member CEO delegation including Apple's outgoing Tim Cook, SpaceX and Tesla's Elon Musk, Meta president Dina Powell McCormick, Micron's Sanjay Mehrotra, Cisco's Chuck Robbins and Qualcomm's Cristiano Amon. The pointed absence is Nvidia's Jensen Huang.

Trump heads east with his tariff instruments visibly weakened. A US Supreme Court ruling against his "liberation day" tariffs strips him of unilateral trade authority and follows a separate decision earlier in May striking down his 10 percent global tariffs as an unconstitutional invocation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Congressional Republicans are growing restless ahead of the midterms, and Beijing — which retaliated to the February 2025 tranche with 15 percent tariffs on US coal and LNG and 10 percent on oil and agricultural machinery — knows the legal ground under any new Trump tariff has shifted.

The domestic price line is moving the other way. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put April CPI at 3.8 percent year-over-year, the highest reading since May 2023, with gasoline up 28 percent and energy accounting for more than 40 percent of the monthly increase; core inflation came in at 2.8 percent and real wages fell 0.3 percent year-over-year, the first decline in three years. The data lands as the Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh to a 14-year term on the Fed Board on a 49–44 vote (Democrats Fetterman and Coons crossed over, no Republicans defected) and prepares a cloture vote that could put him in Powell's chair as early as Wednesday — Jerome Powell's term as chair ends Friday.

The war driving those prices is now expensive on the books. Pentagon CFO Jules Hurst III told the House defence subcommittee on Tuesday that the cost is "closer" to $29 billion, up from the $25 billion he reported on April 29, citing equipment repair and replacement plus general operational costs in theatre. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told the same hearing the department has plans "to escalate if necessary", "to retrograde, if necessary", and "to shift assets" but would not detail next steps. Trump described the Iran ceasefire as "on massive life support" after dismissing Tehran's latest proposal as a "piece of garbage" he did not finish reading; the administration also imposed sanctions on firms accused of helping route Iranian oil to China — the same Beijing he was simultaneously flying to court.

The political ground is matching the economic one. The Atlas National Poll put Democrats ahead of Republicans 54.6 to 40.1 percent in the generic congressional ballot, with 60 percent of respondents holding a negative view of Trump and 62.8 percent saying his fiscal policies worsened the economy; the survey of 2,069 adults ran May 4–7. Inflation and the economy were the top concerns. Partisan map-drawing is accelerating in parallel — Republicans pushing aggressive new maps in Texas to defend the House, Democrats moving in Virginia after the state Supreme Court rejected a voter-approved measure to redraw the lines, with the case now sent up to the US Supreme Court. A weakened Voting Rights Act could cost Democrats up to twelve seats.

On the Hill, Hegseth's hearings were not the only line of friction. House oversight Democrats held a Palm Beach field hearing into Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, releasing a report — "The Price of Non-Prosecution" — alleging that the 2008 sweetheart deal struck by then-prosecutor Alex Acosta let Epstein build a global trafficking network. Survivors testified, including Sky Roberts on the death of his sister Virginia Giuffre and Dani Bensky on being recruited as a teenager; Robert Garcia accused the administration of withholding half of the documents required under the Epstein Transparency Act, and a survivor identified only as Roza said her name had appeared unredacted hundreds of times in justice-department releases.

The day's other political flash point was Virginia. Representative Jen Kiggans, a Republican, agreed on air with conservative host Rich Herrera's call for House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries to "get your cotton-picking hands off of Virginia". She later distanced herself from the language; the DNC labelled her one of the most vulnerable House Republicans and pledged to defeat her in November. Separately, Virginia Democrats asked the US Supreme Court to revive the congressional map blocked last week by the state's top court.

The administration also reshuffled a senior comms-and-media role: Trump nominated former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake as US ambassador to Jamaica. The move ends Lake's tenure at the US Agency for Global Media — where a federal judge ruled in March she had been unlawfully serving without Senate confirmation and voided her mass firings at Voice of America.