13 MAY 26 SITREP

• President Trump arrived in Beijing on May 13, 2026, accompanied by tech CEOs including Elon Musk and Tim Cook, marking the first time a United States president has visited China since Trump’s own trip in 2017 and the first presidential visit to China since before COVID.
• The summit, originally planned to address trade and AI, became overshadowed by the Iran crisis, specifically Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has disrupted global trade, spiked energy prices and commodity costs, and directly affected economies including the United States, Taiwan, and China itself, which remains the largest consumer of Iranian oil.
• Trump is expected to press Xi Jinping to use China’s leverage as Iran’s top oil buyer to pressure Tehran into reopening the Strait of Hormuz, raising questions about whether Beijing will demand concessions on Taiwan’s status, arms sales, or economic terms in exchange for cooperation.
• The Department of Justice is separately investigating $2.6 billion in suspiciously timed oil trades connected to the Iran war, with at least four cases involving traders who bet on price drops immediately before they occurred, prompting investigators to probe whether inside information was received.

• Taiwan produces 60 percent of global semiconductors by revenue and over 90 percent of the world’s advanced chips at seven nanometers and below through Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), making the island indispensable to global technology supply chains and a high-value target for the Chinese Communist Party’s ambitions to dominate AI development.
• President Trump signed an $11 billion arms sale to Taiwan in late 2025, the largest in history, consistent with the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which legally binds the United States to provide Taiwan with sufficient arms for self-defense against threats from the People’s Republic of China.
• Taiwan’s Ambassador to the United States Alexander Tah-ray Yui stated that Chinese aggression against Taiwan has persisted for nearly 77 years since the PRC’s founding and argued that United States military actions in Iran and Venezuela serve as a warning to Xi Jinping, demonstrating that American forces are battle-tested and that this president is willing to deploy them.
• At the SelectUSA event earlier this month, a Taiwanese delegation of 113 companies and 207 participants announced $35 billion in new investments from 20 Taiwanese companies flowing into the United States, while TSMC continues its $165 billion semiconductor manufacturing campus in Phoenix, and Taiwan’s state-owned petroleum company signed a long-term LNG purchase contract with American firm Cheniere.

• Vice President JD Vance announced that the federal government is deferring $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements from California, citing the state’s failure to take fraud seriously, and warned that states including California, Hawaii, New York, and Minnesota face further funding cuts if they refuse to cooperate with the Anti-Fraud Task Force.
• Andrew Ferguson, executive director of the Anti-Fraud Task Force, identified that states receiving tens of billions of dollars designated to fight Medicaid fraud have failed to prosecute cases and have neglected their legal obligation to police elder abuse within the Medicare system, effectively enabling abuse of elderly citizens in those states.
• Dr. Oz stated that approximately half of all fraud in the federal government may originate from health care services, with foreign governments, syndicated criminal organizations, and smaller operators exploiting the system using nothing more than a stolen Medicare beneficiary number, which functions as a de facto credit card for defrauding the system.
• A California psychotherapist who had treated patients for 40 years discovered her Medicare benefits had been shut off because a fraudster stole her identity and enrolled her in services she never requested, and separately, a mother on SNAP benefits was unable to feed her children after a gang in California stole her identity and maxed out her EBT card.