There are certain sensations you don’t realize belong to an era until they’re gone: the modem’s electronic shriek as it connected to the internet, the satisfying clack of a landline receiver, the little metallic weight of an arcade token in your palm. Lately, I’ve been wondering if the basket of free chips and salsa — dropped almost ceremonially onto the table before anyone has ordered a thing — might eventually join them.

At El Nopal, a regional Mexican chain my family has frequented for years, the opening minutes of dinner follow a familiar choreography. We slide into a pleather booth beneath burnt-orange walls and televisions playing Spanish-language fútbol. Half the table orders Diet Coke, the other water with lemon; someone requests a skillet of molten white queso. Then come the chips: hot, sturdy, generously salted, piled into black woven baskets alongside ramekins of fire-engine-red mild salsa and a darker, spicier version flecked with onion and jalapeño.

For our family of six, there are always two baskets, dividing the table into loose territories. Those seated in the middle are expected to choose a side; reaching from both feels vaguely lawless. Everyone has a salsa ritual. Mine is two-thirds spicy, one-third mild. My sister mixes the mild with queso until it turns a muted pink. One of my brothers splashes vinegary house hot sauce into the spicy. Soon the menus are stacked, the pebbled Coke cups are sweating rings onto the table and somebody is pointing with a chip while saying, “No, no, tell her the part about —”

The Trump administration has made that little ritual more expensive to maintain.

In July 2025, the administration withdrew from a long-standing agreement governing fresh tomatoes imported from Mexico and imposed a 17.09% antidumping duty on most of them. The Commerce Department said the move was intended to counter Mexican tomatoes being sold in the United States at unfair prices and protect domestic growers.

Then the weather got bad.

Poor conditions in Mexico and Florida further reduced supplies, and tomato prices climbed to their highest level in roughly two decades. Dante Galeazzi, president of the Texas International Produce Association, told Houston Public Media that at one point the fresh tomato market had jumped to about $80 a box. Grocery stores began backing away from tomatoes earlier in the year; restaurants, he said, held on longer.

There is only so much a restaurant can absorb.

“The challenge is for our Texas restaurants, they operate on very narrow profit margins in what I would call good economic times,” Kelsey Erickson Streufert, chief public affairs officer for the Texas Restaurant Association, told the publication.

These are not, she continued, particularly good economic times for running a restaurant. Food is more expensive, but so are labor, utilities, insurance and credit card swipe fees — virtually everything required to keep the doors open. Eventually, the arithmetic gets down to the ramekin.

“You have restaurants that are simply saying, ‘Look, I can’t afford to put salsa on the tables anymore,’” Galeazzi said. “What are consumers going to do? Where are consumers going to find this relief?”

The tragedy of a $4 basket of chips is obviously not the $4. It is the moment someone at the table inevitably says, “Eh, do we need these today?” Sometimes the answer will be yes. Some days undoubtedly call for acid, salt and crunch. On other days, maybe you skip them. You wait patiently for the entrées. The stories still get told. Someone finds a plastic straw to point with instead.

It’s fine.

But the texture of the wait is different.

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That small decision — chips or no chips — moves the diner almost imperceptibly from guest to customer. The thing that once arrived as part of the welcome now joins the same mental ledger as everything else: Drinks? An appetizer? Queso? Dessert? Do we need it? Is it worth it? Should we just save the money?

People sometimes joke online about whether you grew up in an “appetizers and drinks” family or an “entrées and water” family. It is a joke, mostly, about the invisible financial rules children learn at restaurants: what counts as normal, what counts as a treat and what you know better than to ask for.

Part of the appeal of the neighborhood Americanized Mexican restaurant has long been that it offers a particularly accessible kind of abundance. You can order an inexpensive combination plate and a soda, or water with a squeeze of lime, eat something hot and filling and deeply flavorful, and be out the door in 45 minutes without anybody making you feel strange about any of it.

And while you wait, you get the same chips as the table ordering margaritas.

Free chips briefly flatten the distinction between the appetizers-and-drinks family and the entrées-and-water family. Everybody gets to start with something.

Of course, restaurants cannot run on symbolism.

The “free” things on the table have never actually been free to them. Somebody bought the tomatoes. Somebody fried the chips. Somebody washed the ramekins and refilled the baskets. Hospitality has always had scaffolding beneath it; ideally, the guest simply doesn’t spend much time looking at it.

Lately, that scaffolding has become harder for restaurants to hide.

One of my favorite Chicago breakfast spots recently changed the way it serves Texas toast. Two slices had been the default for years. Now the waiter asks: Do you actually want two, or would one be enough? They were happy to bring two, he explained. But a lot of second slices were coming back uneaten, and they simply couldn’t afford to keep throwing them away. It is difficult to begrudge a restaurant that calculation. In fact, the question struck me as a rather thoughtful solution: Have as much toast as you want. Just tell us you want it first.

But it also made visible, for a moment, the financial scaffolding behind the plate.

That is what interests me about the chips and salsa, too. Not that restaurant owners are becoming less generous, but that the economic forces pressing on them increasingly require them to show their work.

Trade policy tends to arrive in public dressed in abstraction: percentages, agreements, investigations, duties, markets. Then someone opens an invoice. A tomato costs more. A batch of salsa costs more. The complimentary appetizer that was once cheap enough to disappear into the cost of doing business becomes expensive enough to notice. Eventually, somebody has to decide whether hospitality can continue to absorb it.

And then, one night, a server has to ask if you would like to add chips.

This is a mundane outcome of economic policy — almost comically so. No one’s dinner is destroyed. No one sits staring mournfully at the bare lacquered table. There is simply a small patch of negative space where something automatic used to happen.

But small gestures are often where hospitality lives.

The loss of free chips and salsa isn’t really about chips and salsa. It is about what happens when policy decisions force restaurants to make the scaffolding of their hospitality more visible — when a gesture designed to make guests forget about the transaction becomes part of the transaction itself. At El Nopal, when the baskets arrive, nobody asks who is paying for this round. Nobody pauses to determine whether everyone wants enough chips to justify them. Nobody calculates how hungry they are with their entrée still twenty minutes away.

Someone tells a story. Someone interrupts to improve the punchline. Someone else points across the table with a tortilla chip. And everyone reaches into the basket without asking.

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Certain obvious questions arise from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington this past week, a spectacle that one observer has described as “diplotainment” rather than actual diplomacy. Exactly how much did Donald Trump abase himself in service to a temporary and transactional friendship with the dictatorial leader of a nation that is, at least by conventional standards, America’s principal strategic enemy? 

No one knows; I am tempted to surmise that Trump doesn’t know himself. The man who in sunnier times for his regime enjoyed calling himself “your favorite president” does not seem to be his own favorite president these days. Trump almost visibly glowed with delight when Xi praised the quality of service and attention to detail of his White House visit. “Everything is done to the highest order of perfection, and there is thought in every little detail,” the Chinese president said through a translator. “And it’s greatly appreciated.”

You could describe that as the meaningless courtesies of routine statecraft, but it also suggested a high-flying hotel guest offering his compliments to the concierge: The eggs this morning were entirely delicious. And the way your people turn down the sheets at night: exquisite!

If we could somehow remove ourselves from the anguish and destruction caused by Trump’s improvised policies (which resemble comic-book versions of Big Brother’s “Two Minutes Hate” from the film version of “1984”) and his aggressively stupid public persona, we might be able to perceive some pathos in his predicament. He cannot escape from a situation he believed he had created and felt he could control: He is the massively unpopular elected leader of a rapidly collapsing superpower, whose downward slide he promised to reverse but has only accelerated, perhaps to the point of terminal velocity.

Trump visibly and hungrily longs for things he cannot have: the alleged greatness of the mythological American past, rendered as white supremacist schlock inherited third hand from the more vigorous fascist movements of the last century; the enforced adulation and obligatory public spectacle of a totalitarian regime such as Xi’s China or Kim Jong-un’s North Korea; most of all, perhaps, his own youth as a brash Manhattan philanderer and unstoppable political renegade, when he didn’t fall asleep in public or stumble around awkwardly with an unexplained contraption under his clothing.

To consider such matters is not a distraction; it begins to point us toward the larger and more painful questions behind the Xi-Trump pseudo-summit. It surprised literally no one that the two leaders negotiated no new agreements on regulating A.I. (or “Super Intelligence,” in Trump’s self-parodying rebrand), the status of Taiwan, the sporadic trade war between the two nations or ending the war with Iran and restarting the global flow of Middle East oil. No mention was made of Trump’s vaporware claims last May that the Chinese had agreed to buy hundreds of Boeing aircraft and $10 billion worth of U.S. beef and soybeans, but Xi promised to send two pandas from China’s breeding facility to the Atlanta zoo. So much winning. It’s impossible to calculate.

In large part, the absolute nothingness of this summit reflects the fact that China is already winning across the board and Xi needed nothing from Trump beyond the legitimation provided by a diplotainment spectacle “to the highest order of perfection.” As China scholars Nicholas Bequelin and Yaqiu Wang write in a Foreign Policy analysis published before the summit, over the first 19 months of Trump’s second term, the geopolitical “balance of power has shifted in Beijing’s favor”:

China has weathered the trade war, narrowed the technology gap, tightened its leverage over critical supply chains, increased pressure on Taiwan, and deepened ties with Russia and much of the global south.

Contrary to more Sinophobic commentators, they argue that China’s ruthlessly pragmatic leadership is not interested in dominating the world, or at least not in the same way postwar America did. But it does have a long-term agenda, they write, which includes breaking the global dependence on U.S.-centric financial institutions, discrediting democracy and furthering a historical process Xi has described as “the rise of the East and the decline of the West.”

I don’t disagree with any of that, but the most important aspect of Bequelin and Wang’s analysis gets a little buried beneath a forest of impeccably organized policy details. Xi has no need to strike an overtly aggressive posture and can afford to cosplay friendship with Trump because “the West,” or at least its greatest military and economic power, is doing a terrific job of declining all on its own. To borrow the nostrum attributed to Napoleon, the Chinese president is smart enough not to interrupt an opponent while he’s making a mistake. 

It may take generations — if there are any future generations — to measure the scale of America’s self-inflicted damage, which goes well beyond material issues into the realm of psychology or perhaps spirit. (If it’s pretentious to use the Hegelian term Geist, it still fits.) It remains astonishing, not to mention upsetting and enraging, that in the face of a global climate crisis that has already caused millions of deaths and is obvious to nearly everyone on the planet, the U.S. has deliberately chosen to double down on fossil fuels while “China is consolidating its worldwide dominance in batteries, solar, and EVs,” as Bequelin and Wang write. 

Chinese solar panels and batteries, often offered at steeply discounted prices, are revolutionizing transit and energy issues in many poorer countries, beginning to break the expensive and damaging addiction to foreign oil. Meanwhile, the U.S. has largely abandoned or dismantled its foreign aid programs aimed at fostering economic development, public health and education, while doing its level best to destroy its own reputation as a multiracial secular republic rooted in the rule of law. Faced with America’s spectacular self-own (which didn’t start with Trump, to be clear), who can blame people in the Global South for beginning to suspect that the tradeoff between “democracy” and “authoritarianism” was never as straightforward as they were led to believe?

Despite the widespread anger and disillusionment of Trump’s second term — an encouraging trend, to be clear — it’s still too easy for Americans to duck the biggest and most glaring question of all: To paraphrase one of the greatest works of postmodern angst, how did we get here? It no longer feels remotely adequate (if it ever did) to suggest that angry, vicious people accidentally elected an angry, vicious president who is pursuing a self-destructive and nihilistic agenda, and that at some future date our national sanity and our “indispensable” role in world affairs will be reasserted. 

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We tried that, remember? It didn’t work. Perhaps, from some great historical remove, Joe Biden’s presidency will appear noble and tragic. But it was also doomed, trapped in a vision of the past every bit as delusional as the MAGA fantasy, and nearly as damaging. The Biden regime’s self-appointed mission of enforcing a “rules-based order” involved pretending that the world had not changed, that America was still widely beloved and admired, that our so-called republic had not bred and nurtured Donald Trump and that he did not embody its bottomless greed, its gleeful ignorance, its wounded and flatulent national pride.

And so we arrive at the final conundrum of the Trump-Xi summit, and our president’s stopped-clock tendency to stumble upon hard truths. In his inimitable ass-backward fashion, Trump has discerned that the “free world” has become a meaningless abstraction and liberal democracy is in a state of systemic failure. He is correct about that, at least to a point. But he can provide no answer beyond prostrating himself before dictators and building monuments to himself in imitation of their grandiosity. If China’s repressive techno-state makes a distinctly unappealing candidate to lead the world into the future, America can only offer competing versions of an imaginary past. Hey, at least we got those pandas. 

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