The Week: Xi Comes to D.C.

• Our bad: When we argued for “school choice,” we thought choosing a good school was implied.

• In a rare gesture, President Donald Trump and his wife greeted Chinese President Xi Jinping on the tarmac as he arrived at Joint Base Andrews for a summit on trade, artificial intelligence, and global security. The president later showed off Joe Biden’s autopen, mocking a sick ex-president for the amusement of a foreign dictator. In return for the lavish welcome and the trademark Trump indignity, what will the U.S. get? Perhaps the two leaders will hash out a more durable trade agreement. Still, their decision to extend into January 2027 a tentative deal that was struck last year in South Korea suggests otherwise. Observers don’t expect much progress on AI either. And Trump is unlikely to dissuade Xi from continuing to support America’s adversaries in the Middle East—Iran and Yemen’s Houthi rebels, specifically—just as Xi will not persuade Trump to block Congress’s efforts to provide arms to Taiwan. Nor do we expect freedom for political prisoner Jimmy Lai. Many photos will be taken, but, beyond the swag and the memories, this summit’s participants are likely to return home all but empty-handed.

• In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Trump said he must decide whether to cut a deal with Iran to end the war or “annihilate” the Islamic Republic and “drive them into hell.” It’s unclear, however, what more Trump could do to Iran that he hasn’t already done. The U.S. military began running out of high-value regime targets after the first month of bombing. A naval blockade has crippled Iranian oil exports, but the isolated economy was already on its knees before the war. Lacking deterrence against an enemy with little left to lose, U.S. forces shifted to covertly escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz. But Tehran has shown that it can still choke traffic by firing on tankers. Meanwhile, the Houthis in Yemen are racing to seize territory along the Red Sea, potentially threatening another critical waterway. Trump considered striking the proxy group last week but ultimately held off. For a long while now in this war, the president’s bark has proven worse than his bite.

• It’s good news, however, that the U.S. has reached a security agreement with Denmark and Greenland. According to Trump, no U.S. adversary will now be able to establish a base or military presence in Greenland without Washington’s approval. Greenland is a key North Atlantic vantage point and a source of valuable mineral resources, including rare earths. Full details of the deal have yet to be disclosed, and its durability seems uncertain. The president insists that the deal will be permanent. But would the agreement still stand if Greenland became fully independent (something that, judging by the polls, most Greenlanders would eventually like to see)? For now, it seems that the U.S. is on track to better secure its position. It seems unlikely that threats of annexation were needed to accomplish this incremental improvement. Regardless, the next step should be to repair the diplomatic damage that this episode has caused.

• Trump announced on Truth Social that he was cutting off access to the White House for CNN, Politico, and MS NOW “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” Correspondents from these news organizations were denied entry to the White House and had their credentials revoked. Trump’s actions raise unresolved constitutional questions. There is no right for media outlets to access the White House, and there are already plenty of restrictions on operating in that secure environment. Once the government agrees to grant access, however, stripping it away from a select few organizations explicitly because the president doesn’t like the way they cover him is muddier territory. Past presidential administrations have favored or disfavored certain outlets. But a targeted ban of hostile journalists is something different. It’s also hard to see what Trump, who has thrived on the political combat that comes with his exchanges with the media, gains from his ban. A federal judge ordered Trump to temporarily reinstate White House access for the affected outlets. The president should rescind the ban altogether.

• When the president’s approval rating hangs around 40 percent or lower and midterm elections approach, members of his party will start to distance themselves from him. Florida Representative María Elvira Salazar ran a commercial criticizing Trump’s deportation campaign. Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers is running an ad that begins, “The war in Iran needs to end, to bring costs down.” Ashley Hinson, an Iowa representative who’s running for the Senate, wrote on X, “Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran.” At this writing, the national average price for a gallon of unleaded is $4.48, and a gallon of diesel is $6.51. Meanwhile, among senators who are not running for reelection this year, Utah Republican John Curtis is calling for the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate Donald Trump Jr. and his ties to Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, while Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker is publicly criticizing the president’s lavish welcome of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. For a decade, President Trump has ruled the GOP with unparalleled dominance. That era appears to be coming to an end.

• Trump and GOP lawmakers are pushing to ban diesel exports as prices shoot to record highs. This policy has cheap appeal ahead of the midterm elections, but it would wreak havoc on energy markets at home and abroad. American refiners produce more than enough diesel and currently export more than a quarter of their output. Proponents of an export ban theorize that, by closing off international sales, consumers would no longer have to bid against foreign buyers to fill up. And, if surplus supply were trapped in the United States, refiners might even have to cut prices to clear their inventories. Lawmakers who are up for election, especially those from farm-heavy states, want to see gas prices drop before November—and they would rather halt refiners’ exports than ease costly biofuel-blending mandates. But most excess diesel would be stuck near major refining hubs like the Gulf Coast, forcing prices down in some regions more than in others. Some parts of the country, including the East and West Coasts, remain dependent on diesel imports. As long as the Strait of Hormuz remains snagged and other wartime disruptions continue, attempting to restrain price increases is like pinching a water balloon. To reduce costs sustainably, tight global fuel supplies must be restored and expanded—not hoarded.

• Trump has threatened that if the courts don’t let him graft his name onto the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, he will refuse to renovate the facility—in the face of a law ordering the renovation. This kind of lawlessness is becoming ordinary. Trump is smoldering over the sound ruling by Judge Christopher Cooper (an Obama appointee to the District Court for the District of Columbia) that because Congress directed that the facility be named after Kennedy, only Congress can change the name. And by refusing to faithfully execute the law that prescribes the renovation project, Trump would flout Congress’s directive that the center be maintained as a “living memorial” to Kennedy. He has even floated the notion of demolishing it. The president calculates that the High Court’s 2024 immunity ruling shields him from legal jeopardy for official acts—even patently illegal ones. The Republican-led Congress, again, is AWOL. The Kennedy Center may not matter much, but the rule of law does.

• Two of the nation’s largest health-care systems—New York University Langone Hospitals and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center—will no longer attempt to change the sex of minors. Their agreement with the Department of Justice also requires them to pay fines for violating federal law by performing harmful, life-altering procedures on children, though neither hospital has admitted any wrongdoing. The two systems join Mount Sinai Health System, Texas Children’s Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and Connecticut Children’s Hospital, which have reached similar agreements regarding minor patients. The DOJ said that its investigation into other health-care systems remains ongoing, as well it should.

• A Justice Department investigation into the medical school of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), concluded that the school violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating based on race in its admissions process in 2023 to 2025, particularly to the benefit of black and Hispanic applicants. The DOJ stated that the medical school was 4.6 times more likely to admit Hispanic applicants and 12.6 times more likely to admit black applicants than white applicants who had comparable MCAT scores, undergraduate GPAs, and socioeconomic traits. “Not only were the mean test scores and undergraduate grades of admitted black and Hispanic applicants lower than those of admitted white and Asian applicants, but they are also lower than those of rejected white and Asian applicants,” the department said in its letter to UCSF. Once again, the law is nonnegotiable.

• Early voting began in Virginia, and Amendment 1, a brazenly radical abortion measure, is on the ballot. The amendment would preclude future Virginia legislatures from enacting laws that would even slightly restrict late-term abortion or “gender-affirming care.” It would enshrine Virginia’s existing abortion laws, which were expanded in a law signed by Governor Ralph Northam in 2020. Under current Virginia law, a mother may receive an abortion in the third trimester when the continuation of her pregnancy is likely to result in her death or “irremediably” impaired physical or mental health. Multiple doctors must judge the procedure necessary. Amendment 1 would loosen these restrictions while allowing a single physician to make the final and fatal judgment. Under the amendment, medical professionals who have obtained their patient’s “voluntary consent” would also be protected from legal consequences for botched abortions or transgender surgeries, including prosecution, professional discipline by medical authorities, and lawsuits. Not only could this give legal immunity to a future Kermit Gosnell in the Commonwealth; it seems aimed at insulating doctors who perform gender-reassignment surgery on minors from malpractice suits akin to those that have been filed in states such as New York. Amendment 1, although given misleadingly anodyne ballot language, represents a step into dystopia for Virginia. It should be voted down.

• Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) released a video lambasting private equity firms for acquiring restaurant chains such as Jersey Mike’s Subs. She alleges that investors have gotten rich by hiking food prices, reducing portion sizes, and degrading quality. In reality, private equity firms do better when the companies they buy attract more customers, and few industries are more competitive than casual dining. Firms aim to eventually sell a turned-around business for a profit, which can’t happen if sales decline. Consumers are free to reward restaurants with good service and fair prices—or to punish those that offer the opposite—with their wallets. Evidence suggests that if private equity does anything to Americans’ lunch spots, it improves efficiency and cleanliness while modestly reducing prices. Blackstone trimmed some of the C-suite fat and took Jersey Mike’s public this summer. It is doing just fine. If another chain is mismanaged by new ownership, no one has to eat there.

• Speaking at her annual “state of the European Union” address, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, announced that she would like to see Canada become “the first associate member of the European Union.” Canada’s ambassador-designate to the EU, however, said he did not know what associate membership might mean. In that, he was not alone. No EU treaty defines this concept. Von der Leyen has merely invented it, and America’s best response to her move would be a display of polite indifference. The EU does not tend to move rapidly, and many Canadians will understand that Brussels can be tricky to deal with. America’s worst response, however, would be to threaten the EU. The trading relationship between the EU and the U.S. is already fragile, and disrupting it at a time of acute geopolitical tension would increase the temptation for China and Russia to test the unity of the Western alliance. Further bellicosity on Trump’s part would also push Ottawa more toward Brussels. If the administration can refrain from muscling into the dance between Brussels and Ottawa, the EU’s own incompetence and arrogance will ensure that the associate membership fantasy quickly fades.

• The United Kingdom’s Celtic fringe may soon be mussed up again. In an interparty meeting in Cardiff, the nationalist first ministers of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, all of which enjoy—if that is the word—devolved status, talked to Mary Lou McDonald, the leader of the opposition in Dublin. They signed a memorandum designed to signal that the Scots and the Welsh were continuing their long march to independence, as were the Northern Irish to Irish unification. No matter that, on the basis of recent polling, these are not outcomes desired by the people of Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland. The last of whom, meanwhile, along with the London government, have been angered by Trump’s comment that he’d “love” to see a united Ireland, an objective that would not be achieved peacefully anytime soon and would also come at a heavy financial cost to Dublin. An independent Scotland and Wales would struggle economically and would not be welcomed into the EU because its member states have reasons of their own not to reward separatism. Vladimir Putin, however, would be thrilled to see a breakup of the U.K.

• The Pulitzer Prize–winning essayist Nikole Hannah-Jones made a name for herself critiquing American pedagogy. Over the course of her unproductive but accolade-studded career, she has managed to smuggle a revisionist history of America into the nation’s curricula, and she has advised countless educational institutions. But it turns out that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and never has. In a confessional op-ed, Hannah-Jones revealed that her ideological commitment led her to enroll her daughter in one of New York City’s majority-black public schools, despite her daughter’s objections. This resulted in her daughter’s poor education, which Hannah-Jones only began to recognize as the child prepared to enter middle school. But while the author expressed some regret over her choices, she remains committed to a delusional worldview in which American schools are “segregated” and educating children in them is functionally impossible. In the end, Hannah-Jones’s daughter got exactly what her mother wanted for her—a “strong sense of her identity.” But she didn’t get an education. It seems that her mother didn’t either.