Xi Jinping lands outside Washington on Wednesday, and Donald Trump is going to the airport to meet him. Presidents do not usually do that. The guest comes to the White House.
What the welcome looks like
Trump will greet Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, at Joint Base Andrews. Meeting a foreign leader planeside is a gesture American presidents hold in reserve. Trump normally receives people at the residence.
Thursday is the bigger production. The First Lady’s office laid out the schedule:
- A State Arrival Ceremony on the South Lawn, the State Floor and the Rose Garden.
- 479 military personnel, drawn from every branch of the armed forces.
- A review of the troops with Xi before the two men go behind closed doors.
- A state dinner in the East Room Thursday night, with Xi and Peng as guests of honor.
A state visit is the highest-grade welcome the United States gives. Most allies never get one.
What Trump has said about China
The tone has not always been this warm.
From the start of his second term, Trump blamed China for the American fentanyl crisis and used it as a stated reason for sweeping tariffs on Chinese goods. Those tariffs set off a trade war that ran most of last year before a negotiated truce brought the rates down.
He has kept the tariff line going right up to this week, telling reporters that China is paying the United States a lot of tariffs. He also said this about Xi ahead of the visit:
It’s nice that we get along very well. We’ve had a good relationship. He’ll be here next week… We’re going to have a very good meeting.
President Donald Trump
The last summit and what it settled
The two met in Beijing in May. Trump called the results fantastic trade deals, great for both countries. China agreed to order 200 Boeing jets.
Trump also told reporters afterward that tariffs never came up.
Then the accounts split. Washington and Beijing published different descriptions of what had been agreed, a gap reported at the time by Al Jazeera and NPR. Xi used the same meeting to warn that mishandling Taiwan would put the relationship in great jeopardy.
So the last summit produced a Boeing order, a public disagreement about its own contents, and a warning about Taiwan. Negotiators have been working on tariff cuts for energy and farm goods in the run-up to this week.
What is on the table now
Trade stability is the headline, but three harder items are sitting underneath it.
- Tariffs. The truce lowered rates. It did not settle them.
- Rare earths and AI chips. China controls processing for the minerals that go into almost every advanced device the US builds.
- Iran. China buys Iranian oil. Trump spent his UN speech asking other countries to squeeze Iran economically. Xi is the country that matters most on that ask.
The BeezLoop Take
Hosting an adversary is not weakness. Nixon went to Beijing. Reagan hosted Gorbachev. Sitting down with a rival government is ordinary statecraft, and a president who refuses to do it is not tough, just useless.
The problem is not the meeting. It is the distance between how this president talks and what he does. He built a trade war on the argument that China is poisoning Americans with fentanyl. That argument has not been withdrawn. It is simply not mentioned this week, while the same government gets a planeside greeting, 479 troops on the South Lawn and dinner in the East Room.
Both things cannot be true at full strength. Either China is the country flooding American streets with fentanyl and the honors are unearned, or the fentanyl line was always a tariff justification and the tariffs were always a negotiation. Voters were sold the first version. This week looks like the second.
There is also the matter of what got bought last time. The May summit produced an aircraft order and two governments describing the same deal differently. That is not a deal. That is a photo with a press release attached. If this visit ends the same way, with fantastic called from the podium and no text anybody can read, then the ceremony was the product.
And Trump is arriving with less leverage than the staging suggests. He needs China on Iran, on rare earths and on soybeans. Xi needs chips and calm over Taiwan. The side that wants a signing ceremony before a midterm is not the side setting the price.
The question
What does the United States get out of the highest honor it can hand a foreign leader, beyond the pictures? And if the fentanyl charge that justified the tariffs still stands, how does the same administration explain the troop review on Thursday?
Sources: The White House · ABC News · CNBC · Washington Times · Al Jazeera
