Democrats, ex-diplomat say pageantry overshadowed 90-minute meeting

Trump greeted Xi on arrival with a red carpet laid on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews — the first time a U.S. president has welcomed a foreign leader there since Barack Obama met Pope Francis in 2015. A B-1 bomber flew over the ceremony. Chinese flags adorned the roof above the Oval Office alongside U.S. flags, even as Trump has spent months deriding Democrats as “communists.”

The closed-door meeting ran roughly 90 minutes and did not produce an immediate public readout from the White House. Afterward, Trump gave Xi a tour of a new helipad he had recently constructed on the White House South Lawn. “He loves good granite,” Trump told reporters, calling the meeting “great” without elaborating.

Danny Russel, a former U.S. diplomat who served in the Obama administration, expressed concern that the two leaders spent more time on social and ceremonial events than on the actual meeting. “Pageantry and protocol don’t add up to progress,” Russel said. “Pandas are cute, but what America needs are rare earths. What we’re seeing isn’t diplomacy so much as ‘diplotainment,’ which won’t do much to solve the serious problems in the U.S.-China relationship.”

On the trade front, both governments agreed to extend their truce until January 10, though analysts said there were few other obvious tangible outcomes. Xi once again invoked the “Thucydides Trap” — an academic theory that competition between a rising power and an established one often results in war — and said the risk “can be overcome,” urging cooperation between the two countries.

On artificial intelligence, the two leaders offered competing framings. Trump wrote in a Thursday morning Truth Social post that he and Xi would discuss “super intelligence” — his newly coined term for AI — but signaled little appetite for new regulation, despite concerns from industry leaders that AI could eventually pose a threat to humans. “Super Intelligence (SI) will be a big topic of discussion, but I want to leave it exactly where it is,” Trump wrote. “That is China’s position also.” Xi, in remarks on Thursday, said both countries must “ensure that the development of AI is always under human control.” Analysts said intense U.S.-China competition in AI is likely to limit any agreement on the issue to the symbolic.

According to a Xinhua readout, Xi urged Trump to oppose “Taiwan independence” during the afternoon session. Xi was expected to press Trump to halt arms sales to Taiwan. After his visit to China in May, Trump said he was holding in abeyance an arms package to Taiwan worth about $14 billion and called it a “very good negotiating chip” — a comment that reportedly rattled some U.S. allies in Asia. China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has not ruled out using force to gain control over the island.

In a statement signed by at least 19 of the 47 members of the Senate Democrats caucus, seen by Reuters, Democrats on Thursday called on Trump to immediately deliver the security assistance package Congress has approved — $1.3 billion in funds and the $14 billion arms sale.

The day’s events drew fresh attention to the White House’s restrictions on media access. Trump and Xi’s remarks during the trip were not carried live by any U.S. television networks, which refused to provide footage in protest of the White House’s ban on CNN, MS Now, and Politico. CNN and MS Now reporters were barred from attending the state dinner; outside the gate, protesters shouted slogans including “China out of Hong Kong” that were audible to the leaders as they posed for pictures on the red-carpeted White House steps.

The state dinner drew leading U.S. technology executives. Attendees included Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. First lady Melania Trump’s menu featured yellow squash velouté, sesame-crusted sea bass, and a vanilla crémeux with sour cherry confit.