Last Night
Picture the East Room of the White House with the chandeliers lit and the silverware polished, as Chinese President Xi Jinping, the strongest authoritarian on the planet, sits down at an American state dinner and looks around the room to find out who we are. You hold the guest list. Every chair you fill sends Beijing and the largest communist party in the world a message about what America is all about.
Donald Trump filled it with tech billionaires. The biggest names in American tech were all over the invitations. Fox News hosts Bret Baier and Laura Ingraham got seats. Jesse Watters got one too. American democracy never made the list.
What Happened on the Colonnade
When an American president mocks another American president to amuse a dictator, the dictator wins the evening.
The day went sideways hours before dinner. Trump walked Xi down the Presidential Walk of Fame, the row of presidential portraits in gold frames that Trump installed along the colonnade last September, and stopped at the spot where an image of an autopen hangs in place of Joe Biden’s portrait so he could point at it and tell the leader of Communist China that the machine was Biden. Xi laughed. His entourage laughed with him.
Conservatives winced. Philip Klein of National Review called Xi the head of a key American adversary and reminded readers that Biden was a lifelong civil servant and served to the best of his ability, during difficult times, as an American president. He got that one right.
Money Got the Invitations
Here is who Trump chose to show off. Elon Musk runs SpaceX and Tesla, and Tesla builds a large share of its cars at its Shanghai factory. Jeff Bezos chairs Amazon and owns The Washington Post. Mark Zuckerberg leads Meta, whose Facebook platform stays blocked inside China. Jensen Huang runs Nvidia, and his AI chips sit at the center of every American export control fight with Beijing. Tim Cook recently stepped down as Apple’s CEO and now chairs a company that still leans on Chinese factories. Sam Altman runs OpenAI as its CEO, and Greg Brockman, who cofounded OpenAI, serves as its president. Sergey Brin cofounded Google, and Sundar Pichai runs Google today.
Satya Nadella serves as Microsoft’s chairman and CEO. Michael Dell runs Dell Technologies, and Lisa Su runs the chipmaker AMD. Sanjay Mehrotra runs Micron, the memory chipmaker Beijing barred from key Chinese infrastructure in 2023. Cristiano Amon runs Qualcomm, which sells heavily to Chinese phone makers. Eric Yuan founded Zoom and still runs it. Brad Gerstner runs the tech investment firm Altimeter Capital. David Sacks serves as a cochair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Trump and Xi spent part of the day talking about working together on artificial intelligence, so this crowd came ready to deal, and every one of those deals runs through the same small circle of people who already own most of the future you and your kids are going to live in. That’s the whole message. A state dinner exists to show a visiting autocrat what your country values, and tonight’s list told Xi that America values money and the people who make it.
The Guests Democracy Deserved
The strongest thing America shows the world is a room full of people who disagree and still show up.
Now let me hand you the list I would have written. Every person on it answers to voters, members, donors, or the law. I’m not a fan of many of these people but that’s not the point. There’s more to the story. Keep reading.
Start with the Senate. John Thune, the Republican from South Dakota, runs the Senate majority, and Chuck Schumer, the Democrat from New York, leads the minority. Put House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries next to Speaker Mike Johnson, who made the guest list. China’s legislature seats eight small parties, and every one of them accepts Communist Party leadership. Let Xi watch rivals who fight on the floor raise a glass together over dinner.
Governors come next. Maryland Democrat Wes Moore chairs the National Governors Association, and Indiana Republican Mike Braun serves as vice chair; a blue state governor and a red state governor running their own states on their own terms is federalism in the flesh. China’s provincial chiefs answer to the party.
The Supreme Court belongs here too. The White House invited Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh got seats of their own. Add Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, and seat Ketanji Brown Jackson beside them, because those justices make up the Court’s liberal wing. Judges who rule against a sitting president are a thing Beijing has never once built.
Jacqui Heinrich deserved a chair, and hers is the story I would tell Xi first. She works as the senior White House correspondent for Fox News, and she serves as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. This week CNN and MS NOW sued the administration after losing their White House access. Politico sued as well. The TV networks that share pool coverage stopped covering the president in solidarity. Under Heinrich, the association joined a court brief arguing that the government has no right to remove journalists over reporting it dislikes. A Fox reporter, of all people, stood up in court for her competitors. That is a free press at work, and Xi’s government forbids it.
Celina Stewart runs the League of Women Voters, and days ago the Supreme Court denied the administration’s request to stay a preliminary injunction the League and its partners secured, which keeps new Postal Service mail ballot restrictions blocked for the 2026 election. That matters. Ordinary citizens took the president to court and held their ground. Seat her, and seat her close, to the man from Beijing.
Derrick Johnson has led the NAACP as president and CEO since October 2017. The civil rights movement proves Americans are free to protest in the streets and change their own laws. In 1989, China answered protest in Tiananmen Square with troops and tanks.
Liz Shuler won reelection as AFL-CIO president in June, after the federation grew to 65 unions and 15 million workers. China allows one union federation, and it answers to the Communist Party. Here, workers elect their own leaders.
Jim Clark leads Boys and Girls Clubs of America, a congressionally chartered network of more than 5,500 local clubs that volunteers and donors built block by block with no party official signing off.
Cliff Holtz runs the American Red Cross as president and CEO, and the organization counted 325,000 volunteers in 2024. Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach, who made tonight’s list, sits on the Red Cross board of governors. Seat the two of them together and let Xi hear what Americans give when nobody orders them to.
Finally, invite a former president. Pick any living one; Joe Biden would send the loudest message. In 2018, with Xi’s backing, China’s legislature removed presidential term limits from its constitution. The peaceful transfer of power stands as the rarest thing America exports, and the man whose portrait became a punchline this afternoon belonged at the head table tonight.
Your Move
Guest lists outlast the menu. Tonight’s list told Beijing that American strength lives in a handful of boardrooms. You know better than that, so the next time you build a guest list for a fundraiser or a town hall, or you walk into the voting booth this November, invite the people who disagree with you and pick leaders who will do the same.
Send this to one friend who thinks a dinner seating chart means nothing, and tell me in the comments who you would have put across from Xi instead of Trump’s usual suspects.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
Here at Uncensored Objection, I always save a seat at the table for well-meaning people who bring different opinions to the conversation, because that’s how democracy wins the room. If you want facts, fire, and a voice that refuses to stay quiet while this administration hands our country’s future to billionaires, subscribe today. Become part of the paid community so this independent voice keeps objecting, loudly and on the record, every time our democracy gets left off the guest list.
American culture, not just Trump and his ilk, does value money too much. And that, what I consider, misplaced prioritisation helped land us in our current predicament.
Only after Trump has been removed from office will this stain on our Democracy be judged, hopefully many now in power will be judged and face perpetual prison time, through the judicial process.