Dem
47
GOP
53
Donald Trump is in China now and President Xi Jinping is going to play him like a fiddle. Just look at Trump at the arrival ceremony, grinning from ear to ear, with him as the center of attention and hundreds of Chinese students waving American and Chinese flags at him. He just eats this up:
Of course, the real buttering up (fattening up for the kill?) will come today when Trump meets the exceedingly savvy and well prepared Xi.
Trump just loves loves loves all the pomp and ceremony with himself at center stage. There will be more, with Trump
feted with a no-holds-barred state banquet today. For the sake of the U.S., one can only hope his staff keeps reminding
him that he is there to defend the interests of the United States, not to see the trip as an early 80th birthday party. After
he came down the steps from the plane. he was followed by Elon Musk, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of
Defense War Pete Hegseth, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and
other CEOs.
Huang might have been useful if he spoke fluent Mandarin, but he doesn't (he speaks Taiwanese Hokkien). Rubio is the
only one of the bunch that might try to look out for the best interests of the U.S., but how much influence Rubio
really has remains to be seen.
Reuters' headline sums up the trip well: "Trump lands in China for Xi summit with Nvidia CEO in tow." Trump sees the trip as making deals for the handful of cronies and other CEOs, like Huang, he took with him. Huang is exactly the wrong person to take along. Nvidia makes the chips China needs so its AI can beat America's AI. Congress is wildly against the sale. Here is Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) quoting Karl Marx on this:
Trump will gladly sell China Marx' proverbial rope with which to hang America. All he cares about is getting a good price for it, which China will happily pay since it needs the chips badly. This is one point of leverage the U.S. has over China. A Democratic president could take a different view, something like: "We don't want to sell you Nvidia's chips, but we will barter them with you. One chip = [X] kg of rare earths," for some appropriately large [X]. Then the haggling would be over the value of X. In this deal, the U.S. government would buy the chips from Nvidia and then barter them for rare earths. With Trump, don't count on that, let alone a discussion of Taiwan, the Chinese expansion into the South China Sea, Iran, tariffs, and other issues that actually matter.
The Independent's headline is even worse than Reuters': "A humiliated Trump will be played by China." U.S. media are afraid to show what foreign media like Reuters (Canadian) and The Independent (British) clearly see. This is the best The New York Times can muster:
Yes, expectations are modest. Got it. Trump is negotiating from a position of weakness, and Xi knows that in great detail. Trump doesn't know how to get out of Iran, inflation hit a new 3-year high yesterday, and gas is averaging $4.53/gal., up from $2.87/gal. when the Iran War started. The Donald feels he needs something to crow about, and he thinks Americans will love it if at the end of the summit he announces a few billion-dollar deals. But even here, the deals have to involve China buying products manufactured or grown in America. Getting permission from China to allow Apple to sell a bazillion iPhones there made in India won't cut it. Nor will China agreeing to buy 100 tankers full of Texas oil. To have any effect on voters, the deals have to result in jobs being created in America or farmers selling more agricultural products to China.
The key to understanding Trump is that he is vain, peevish, grossly uninformed and completely unaware of actual reality. Xi probably thanks whatever higher power he thanks that he is facing Trump, not Kamala Harris, who is far better informed than Trump. China is the main supplier of weapons to Iran and Russia (for use in Ukraine). Is Trump going to demand that Xi stop the flow? He is probably not even aware of it. And speaking of weapons, one thing Xi wants is for the U.S. to stop supplying them to Taiwan. Will Trump agree? Hold onto your hat. And what about China building artificial islands in the South China Sea, complete with airstrips and military bases and then claiming the sea around them as Chinese territorial waters to create a choke point for trade? Does Trump even know how to read a map (other than to use a sharpie to move a hurricane)?
Although Trump doesn't understand the details, what he does understand is his vision of the world. It is Russia gets to dominate Europe, China gets to dominate Asia and Africa (for its resources), and the U.S. retreats from being a world power and becomes a regionally bully to boss around North and South America, Rubio understands this and so do Senate Republicans, but Trump listens only to his gut. May 14, 2026, may go down in history as the day the U.S. surrendered being the world's preeminent power to China for a mess of soybeans. (V)