On This Day: May 13, 1607 — English colonists established Jamestown, Virginia — the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. They arrived in three ships after a four-month voyage, chose a marshy peninsula on the James River for its defensive position, and began building a fort in a swamp that would nearly kill them all within the year. By January 1608, only 38 of the original 104 settlers were still alive.
What saved Jamestown — barely, and repeatedly — was not comfort or resources. It was the willingness of enough people to endure conditions that would have broken most, adapt to an environment they didn’t understand, and keep building anyway. John Smith’s leadership, Powhatan’s food supplies, and three subsequent supply missions bought them the time they needed to figure out how to survive.
The republic built 169 years later on that continent inherited something from Jamestown: the understanding that new things are built in adversity, not in comfort, and that the gap between a great idea and a functioning reality is filled with unglamorous, painful, often nearly fatal hard work. This week, the President of the United States is heading to China, the FDA commissioner is resigning, and a war that was supposed to be over by now is still very much not over. The republic endures.
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🇨🇳 Trump Heads to Beijing Seeking Wins — But the Iran War Has Weakened His Hand
President Trump departed Tuesday for Beijing, where he will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on May 14 and 15 — his second visit to China as president and the first US presidential trip to Beijing since his own 2017 visit — bringing 16 chief executives including Elon Musk and Tim Cook to negotiate on trade, Taiwan, AI, and fentanyl, even as the Iran war that was supposed to be resolved before this trip has instead “significantly diminished the US military’s ability to project its combat power,” leaving Trump without the leverage he had originally expected to bring, according to Yahoo News.
The administration hopes to broker a deal including Chinese agricultural purchases, investment agreements, AI guardrail commitments, and orders of US commercial aircraft — with broader talk of a potential $1 trillion Chinese investment in American factories, though experts say that grand bargain is unlikely given current conditions. China has weathered the Iran-driven energy crisis better than expected, has declined to pressure Tehran, and has made clear it wants the US to ease technology restrictions and pull back on Taiwan arms sales in exchange for any major concessions, Time reported.
The Founders who negotiated the Jay Treaty and the Louisiana Purchase understood that diplomacy conducted from weakness produces worse outcomes than diplomacy conducted from strength — and that a president who arrives at a summit needing wins more than his counterpart does is already negotiating at a disadvantage. The question for Beijing is the same as it always is: how much does China actually need from this meeting, compared to how much the US does?
💊 FDA Commissioner Marty Makary Resigns — Clashes Over Abortion Drug, Fruit Vapes, and “Dysfunction” Did Him In
FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary announced Tuesday that he is resigning effective Thursday, with Deputy Commissioner Kyle Diamantas stepping in as acting head — ending a 14-month tenure that began with enormous promise for health reformers and collapsed under the weight of sustained clashes with pro-life groups over mifepristone, battles with pharmaceutical companies over drug approvals, a standoff with Trump over fruit-flavored vape authorization, and a Wall Street Journal editorial board that ran more than half a dozen op-eds calling his leadership a source of “continuous drama and dysfunction,” according to ABC News and the Washington Times.
Trump acknowledged the resignation before leaving for Beijing, calling Makary “a great guy” who was “having some difficulty” — a notably muted send-off for a commissioner who had positioned himself as the face of the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement, phased out artificial food dyes, pulled COVID vaccines from the pediatric schedule, and pursued a more aggressive FDA modernization agenda than any commissioner in a generation. Pro-life groups had pressed for his removal over the abortion pill mifepristone remaining available by mail; Trump had grown frustrated that a campaign promise on fruit vapes wasn’t moving fast enough, Fox News reported.
The Founders who designed the executive branch with Senate-confirmed agency heads understood that the people running powerful regulatory agencies serve at the pleasure of the president — but also that rotating leadership produces institutional instability that ultimately harms the public those agencies exist to protect. The FDA regulates a quarter of everything Americans buy. Its third leadership change in three years is not a sign of a healthy regulatory state.
🎙️ Biden Fights to Block Release of 70 Hours of Ghostwriter Tapes — The Clock Is Running Out
Former President Joe Biden has moved to intervene in federal court to block the Trump Justice Department from releasing approximately 70 hours of audio recordings of his 2017 conversations with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer — tapes that formed the factual core of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s conclusion that Biden had “willfully retained” classified material, including reading classified notebook passages about Situation Room meetings aloud to Zwonitzer verbatim on at least three occasions — with Biden’s legal team arguing the recordings were provided under an agreement they would never be made public, according to Axios and Newsmax.
The DOJ, which intends to release the recordings to Congress and to the Heritage Foundation — which sued under FOIA — has set June 15 as a fallback deadline if Biden intervenes legally, as he is expected to do. The Heritage Foundation accused Biden of waiting “well over a year” to act and said it would oppose intervention, noting that he objected even to releasing portions of the transcript where the exact words had already appeared verbatim in the published Hur Report. Biden’s spokesman framed the fight in political terms, noting that the administration has not released Volume 2 of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on Trump’s own classified documents handling.
The Founders who wrote the republic’s transparency principles — open government, public accountability, and the right of citizens to know what their leaders did in office — would have recognized the core question here immediately: does a former president have the right to permanently seal evidence from a federal investigation that found he mishandled classified documents? Hur decided not to prosecute. He did not decide the public had no right to the record of what happened.
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📊 Betting Markets: Iran Peace Deal Odds (Polymarket)
- Peace deal before Trump visits China (by May 14): 2% — traders say virtually impossible (Polymarket)
- Peace deal by May 31, 2026: 13.5% — deadlock continues; Trump called Iran’s latest proposal “totally unacceptable” (Polymarket)
- Peace deal by June 30, 2026: ~25% — requires major breakthrough in Beijing talks or Pakistani back-channel (Polymarket)
- Peace deal by December 31, 2026: 78% — traders believe a deal eventually happens, just not soon (Polymarket)
Context: The April 8 ceasefire remains technically in effect but “on life support” per Trump. Iran has rejected the US one-page peace framework. Pakistan and Qatar are serving as back-channel mediators. The Beijing summit is the next major diplomatic opportunity.
🗳️ Trump Exacts Indiana Revenge, Democrats Overperform in Michigan — The Midterm Picture in One Night
Tuesday’s primaries delivered two sharply different signals about the political environment heading toward November: in Indiana, Trump-endorsed challengers defeated at least five of the seven Republican state senators who had voted against his redistricting demands in December — spending $8.3 million to do it — demonstrating that his grip on the GOP base in reliably red territory remains iron-tight, while in Michigan, Democratic nominee Chedrick Greene coasted past Republican Jason Tunney in a state Senate special election in a district where Kamala Harris had won by less than a percentage point in 2024, according to PBS NewsHour/AP and CNN.
In Ohio, former Sen. Sherrod Brown easily won the Democratic Senate nomination and will face Republican Sen. Jon Husted in a special election to fill JD Vance’s old seat — a race Brown, who lost by less than 4 points in 2024 even as Harris lost Ohio by 11, is considered a legitimate threat to win — while Vivek Ramaswamy won the Republican gubernatorial primary decisively, having largely ignored his opponent to focus on the general election matchup against Democrat Amy Acton, who also won her primary, NBC News reported.
The story of Tuesday night in one sentence: Trump’s base in the reddest places is as loyal as ever, but swing districts keep swinging toward Democrats — and the Senate seat JD Vance left behind may be the one that decides which party controls the chamber in January.
🇧🇷 Brazil’s Election Is a Dead Heat — Flávio Bolsonaro Is Leading Lula for the First Time
Two separate Brazilian polls released in late April show the October presidential election is essentially a coin flip between incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro — son of imprisoned former President Jair Bolsonaro — with AtlasIntel/Bloomberg showing Bolsonaro leading 47.8% to 47.5% in a simulated runoff, and a Datafolha poll showing Bolsonaro at 46% to Lula’s 45%, the first time Flávio has led the senior incumbent in any major poll, according to Reuters/US News and Bloomberg.
Markets are watching the race closely: Flávio, 44, is running on his father’s endorsement and conservative economic credentials in Latin America’s largest economy, while the 80-year-old Lula is seeking a fourth non-consecutive term and faces headwinds from inflation and governance frustrations. In Brazil’s system, if no candidate clears 50% of valid votes in the first round — which no candidate has since 2002 — the top two advance to a second-round runoff, and current first-round polling shows the race heading exactly that direction, according to Polymarket, which shows Flávio Bolsonaro at roughly 41% in its betting market on the winner.
Brazil is the world’s sixth-most-populous nation, the largest economy in Latin America, and a country whose political direction — left or right — shapes trade, security, and democratic norms across the entire Western Hemisphere. The Founders who understood America’s role in demonstrating that republican government can work would have recognized the stakes: another major democracy is deciding, in real time, whether to continue left-wing governance or return to a conservative alternative. The betting markets say it’s genuinely too close to call.
🇭🇹 Haiti’s Prime Minister: Country Is Too Unstable for Elections — No Elected Officials Since 2023
Haitian Prime Minister Garry Conille said Monday that the country is too unstable to hold the presidential elections scheduled for August — what would have been Haiti’s first election in nearly ten years — citing the displacement of more than 1.4 million people by gang violence, key roads between Port-au-Prince and the provinces that remain blocked or unsafe, and Doctors Without Borders’ suspension of hospital operations due to gunfire safety concerns, with Haiti having had no nationally elected officials since January 2023 and a parliament that has been inactive since 2019, according to Democracy Now!.
Haiti is 90 miles from Florida. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. A multinational security mission backed by Kenya has been operating for over a year and has made only limited progress against the criminal gangs that now control much of the country, including large portions of the capital. The United States has provided significant funding but has declined to deploy troops directly.
The Founders who built this republic understood that self-governance is not a default condition of human societies. It is an achievement — one that requires security, rule of law, functioning institutions, and a population that has enough stability to participate in the process. Haiti has had none of those things for years. What is happening there is not a political failure. It is a humanitarian catastrophe, and it is ninety miles away.
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🔍 A President in Beijing, a War That Won’t End, and the Art of the Deal That Isn’t
There is a line from the Yahoo News piece on Trump’s China trip that deserves more attention than it will probably get: “The chance of anything of substance emerging from these talks is little more than zero.”
That was Allen Carlson of Cornell University, a China expert who has been watching US-China relations for decades. He was not being partisan. He was doing math. China has leverage. The US, at this moment, is in the middle of a war that has cost it significant diplomatic capital, driven gas prices to $4.48 a gallon, and produced three assassination attempts on the president. Xi Jinping does not need a deal. Trump does.
And yet the president is going anyway — with Elon Musk and Tim Cook in tow, with promises of spectacle and military parades and the biggest display Beijing has ever put on — because the alternative is doing nothing, and doing nothing is not in his nature.
There is something genuinely admirable about that instinct. The Founders who shaped America’s early foreign policy — Jay, Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams — were not men who avoided difficult negotiations because the odds were against them. Jay negotiated a treaty with Britain in 1794 that was widely mocked as a capitulation and was nearly torpedoed by the Senate. Hamilton championed it anyway because a flawed deal was better than war with a nation that could have strangled American commerce. Adams avoided war with France in 1798 at the cost of his own reelection. These were acts of political courage, not political success.
But there is a difference between a difficult negotiation that produces a less-than-perfect deal and a negotiation that produces theater. The concern with Beijing is not that Trump will get a bad deal. It is that he will get a deal that looks good in a press conference — agricultural purchases, a joint statement on AI, a photo in front of soldiers all the same height — and come home declaring victory over a conflict that has not actually been resolved.
Meanwhile, back at the Strait of Hormuz, the ceasefire is on life support. Iran has called the US peace framework “totally unacceptable.” The prediction markets say there is a 2% chance of a deal before this summit even ends. The war that was supposed to be a quick demonstration of American resolve has now outlasted the administration’s original timeline by months, consumed a navy secretary, cost American families hundreds of dollars in gas, and positioned China as the indispensable mediator — which is exactly where Beijing wants to be.
The Founders who designed the republic’s foreign policy architecture gave the Senate treaty ratification power and Congress the war power precisely because they feared what happens when a single executive pursues a foreign policy vision without institutional checks. They were not naive about the world. They knew that sometimes a president must act quickly. But they also knew that speed without strategy produces commitments the republic cannot sustain.
As Proverbs 15:22 says: “Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed.” Trump has the largest economic delegation of any presidential trip in modern memory. What remains to be seen is whether the advisers are there to give counsel — or to provide props for a deal that was already decided before the plane left the ground.
Whatever comes out of Beijing, the republic is watching. And so is the rest of the world. Proverbs 20:18: “Plans are established by counsel; by wise guidance wage war.”
“It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.”
— George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796
The Prayer Before Bunker Hill
Question: On May 13, 1607, English colonists established Jamestown — the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. The colony nearly failed multiple times and was saved in part by the leadership of one man who imposed martial discipline and forced the settlers to work. He also famously negotiated with the Powhatan Confederacy, in a story later romanticized in American popular culture. Who was he?
A. Sir Walter Raleigh
B. John Rolfe
C. John Smith
D. Sir Francis Drake