Notes From Hong Kong. The world is going mad, and we’ve got front row seats.

by Rick Wilson - Sep 16

I am writing this from a hotel room twenty-odd floors above Victoria Harbour, in a city that feels electric and vital and wild. You cannot imagine its scale. The skyline has over 900 skyscrapers, and feels almost unreal.

Money crackles in the air. For MAGAe obsessed with screaming about the CCP, it strikes me that a city with 5 Louis Vuittons and a crackling entrepreneurial culture is hardly a commie hellscape. Part of that is that Hong Kong is still a Special Administration Region. I’m here for a speech and a conference, with the beautiful Renee along for the adventure.

It’s been a busy few days, as you can imagine, but poking my head back into the world 13 times zones aways was a shock. The world is off the damn rails.

My tolerance for crazy is calibrated on a logarithmic scale most people never have to use.

This week seemed determined to break the upper boundary of the scale. This morning, catching up on news I joked with Renee that all that’s missing is the death of Archduke Ferdinand.

First, here in Hong Kong…

One rumor breaking this morning discussed in a lowered voices, is Xi Jinping’s health after a quick disappearing act from the BRICS conference. Rumors are cooking.

Nobody outside a very small room in Beijing knows if any of it is true. I certainly don’t. But rumors of a change at the top are flying in whispered conversations at this conference and in the city, and the fact that people here are trading them at all tells you something.

No one seems to want to say who would follow Xi, but whatever comes after, and whatever comes after reminds me of how closely we’re all waiting for Trump’s inevitable meeting with the Reaper. If the most powerful man on the planet is sick (and for y’all playing at home, that’s Xi, not Trump), the world is about to get a lot less predictable, and predictability is the one thing nobody in Washington is producing right now.

Which brings me to home, because thirteen time zones away is not nearly far enough to escape it.

I have been doing this a long time. I have watched a president get impeached over a blue dress, watched another one invade the wrong country, watched a reality show host take over my old party and turn it into a cult of personality. I’ve watched conservatism be transformed into a kleptocracy.

Start with Canada. Our neighbor, our biggest trading partner, the country that took in our diverted planes on 9/11 and has fought beside us in every war worth fighting for a century, is moving toward associate membership in the European Union. Reasonable people can argue about whether that is smart for Canada, but I happen to think it’s brilliant on Mark Carney’s part.

Trump’s hissy-fit reaction was not an argument. It was a tantrum. He wants to cut off all trade with Canada and with Europe if they go through with it.

Not a tariff. Not a negotiation. A blockade of two of the largest economies on earth because a sovereign country made a decision he didn’t like. Auto parts, oil, lumber, wheat, the entire integrated supply chain that runs from Windsor to Detroit, all of it hostage to Mad King Donald’s delicate ego. Every farmer in Iowa, every plant worker in Ohio, every auto worker in Michigan and lobsterman in Maine, every family at the grocery store would pay for it.

Trump does not care. He has never cared. The destructive instinct is the whole personality. Everything else is set dressing. He doesn’t understand that no one is buying the bluff.

Then the Middle East, where the wheels have not merely come off but have been sold for scrap.

We are in a shooting war with Iran. American forces are being targeted. The intelligence is not ambiguous about who is helping Tehran aim: the Russians are feeding them targeting data on our people. The response from Washington to Moscow’s direct participation in attacks on American troops has been, as far as anyone can tell, nothing. No sanctions with teeth. No expulsions. No consequences. Vladimir Putin helps Iran shoot at Americans and the Commander in Chief shrugs, because the one thing Donald Trump will never do is cross his lord and master, Vladimir Putin.

Donald Trump, as you’ve heard everyone tell you for a decade, is a Russian asset. If he isn’t, how could you tell?

At the same time, this administration cut a secret deal with the Houthis. Iran’s proxy militia in Yemen. The people who have spent two years lobbing missiles at commercial shipping and at U.S. Navy ships. We are making a side arrangement with the junior varsity of the regime we are fighting, and we did it behind the back of the Saudis, who have been at war with the Houthis for a decade and whose crown prince Trump has spent years flattering as his best friend in the region. MBS found out the way everyone finds out about Trump’s promises, which is after they are broken. Jared Kushner likely has an appointment with a bone saw in his future, after all the cash the Saudi’s shoved down his mouth to keep Trump’s favor.

There is no strategy in any of this. There is a man who makes deals with whoever last told him he was wonderful, and a national security apparatus hollowed out until nobody is left to say no. We’re making a deal with Iran’s lead proxy in the region while we’re at war with Iran. Make it makes sense.

Meanwhile the FBI keeps rolling up Russian nationals planning murders on American soil in cases that would have led every newscast in any other year. No, it’s not a Lioness plot point; it’s a Tuesday story.

Then the AI industry, which has discovered that the way to slow down a capital expenditure race it started is to scare everyone about the thing it is building. Every earnings projection is full Underpants Gnome Theory. The same executives who spent three years promising the machines would cure cancer and write your emails are now warning about bubbles and overbuilds and, oh…yeah, maybe the end of all human life on Earth…and the warnings happen to land right as the bills for all those data centers come due. I spent thirty years in the persuasion and crisis communications business. I know a managed narrative when I see one. This one is not subtle.

And today, if the reports are right, the wrecking crews are at the Kennedy Center. The monument to a murdered president, the place where this country staged on of its best argument that we are more than a shopping mall with an army, is being torn down so Donald Trump can put his name on whatever gilded replacement he has in mind. He could not keep a casino open. He could not keep a football league alive. But he can knock down a building. Destruction is the only thing he has ever been good at.

Here is where I am supposed to tell you it is hopeless. I am not going to, because the one piece of this week that does not fit the pattern is the political weather at home.

The Democratic wave is building, and it is building fast.

The national polling picture and the state polling picture, even in states and districts Republicans used to win in their sleep all points the same direction. I talk to operatives every week, people who have been in the trenches for decades, and the mood runs from grim to actively packing boxes and planning goat farms after their safe incumbent bosses get BTFOed in November.

There is no good news for them anywhere. Not on Trump’s numbers, or theirs. Not on voter intention, where Democrats are furious and headed to the polls in a tidal wave.

Not on gas or diesel prices. Not in farm country. Not in the suburbs. Not in the Deep South or the Midwest or the great state of Texas. Not in Congress or in the Senate. Not on trade, not on prices, not on the war.

And most certainly not with independents, who are absolutely opposed to Trump and all his minions being within a million miles of elected office. Not with the Hispanics or the young men they spent 2024 crowing about.

When the dubious return of zombie Mitch McConnell, who seems as predicted to be unable to speak or engage in any kind of actual cognition is the good news of the GOP’s week…it’s a bad week.

The chaos is not an accident. It is the product.

And the product is proof of the Bad Dog Food theory. You can run the greatest marketing campaign in history, but if the dog food is poison, the dogs won’t eat it. The political dog food of the Trump MAGA party is bitter, rancid poison for the vast majority of Americans today.

We’re not dogs. We know that everything from Trump and his party is poison. All of it.

The difference is that we still get to vote on it.

Fifty days. Go vote.

And hold on tight.