Trump plans lavish welcome for Xi at summit focused on spectacle over solutions

President Donald Trump will meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping this week in a tightly choreographed summit aimed at preserving a fragile truce between the two superpowers.

Amid a grinding Middle East war and a sober midterm outlook, the lavish three-day state visit offers a president increasingly focused on his legacy something different: a moment of pure pageantry.

Unusually, Trump is set to welcome the Chinese leader on the runway at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Wednesday for an arrival ceremony, setting the stage for what is expected to be a brief but lavish summit.

Both leaders are seeking spectacle and stability over concrete deliverables as more fundamental issues driving their long-term rivalry remain beyond reach.

“We’re going to talk about a lot, it’s going to be a great meeting. … We have a very good relationship,” Trump told press on Tuesday from the U.N. General Assembly in New York, where he teased the upcoming state dinner and lamented the fact that his ballroom project is not ready for the Chinese leader’s visit.

“Everyone wants to be there … I wish we had the ballroom, if we had the ballroom we could have 2,000 people,” he said.

The tarmac welcome is a particularly striking overture to Xi who, under strict Chinese protocol, has never met a foreign counterpart at the airport as president. Trump has never traveled to Joint Base Andrews to greet a visiting leader. He did welcome Russian President Vladimir Putin at a U.S. military base in Alaska last year before the two rode together to talks on the base in the presidential limousine.

“To the extent that this summit is about anything, it’s about optics,” said Evan Medeiros, professor of Asia studies at Georgetown University. “They want to buy time to reduce vulnerabilities and to build up their strength and resilience. Both leaders also want the summit for deeply political purposes, stature and validation,” he said.

Trump will preside over a White House ceremony on Thursday involving almost 480 service members, renditions of the Chinese and U.S. national anthems beneath their respective flags, and a flyover by a B-2 Spirit bomber and four F-22 Raptor fighter jets.

It is unclear how the spectacle will play out on American television, after major U.S. networks announced they would curtail coverage of presidential events following Trump’s decision to bar reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House.

In the absence of a network pool reporter at a Monday unveiling of the White House’s new helipad — a project expedited in advance of Xi’s visit — recordings of Trump’s comments were garbled amid helicopter noise.

After a Thursday bilateral meeting, Trump will host Xi for a state dinner attended by senior White House officials and the top figures in U.S. business, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Michael Dell, Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Jane Fraser and Tim Cook. (Amazon Executive Chairman Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Who the Chinese leader will bring to Washington remains unclear. One Chinese official told The Post as recently as Friday that a delegation of Chinese business leaders had not been finalized.

Trump’s grand welcome also has important optics for Xi. The Chinese leader is seeking to cement his legacy as the man who stared down Washington in last year’s tariff fight.

“He wants to demonstrate that he’s Trump’s peer and that China is the United States’ peer, that they have arrived as the second superpower,” said Jon Czin, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who ​previously served as China director on the National Security Council under the Biden administration.

The optics of a favorable U.S. relationship are particularly valuable to the Chinese leader as Xi, 73, enters a highly sensitive political period that will culminate in the 21st Party Congress late next year, when he is expected to take a fourth term, granting him another five years.

Over the past year, Xi has purged the highest ranks of his government and military to cement loyalty while aggressively promoting Beijing’s diplomacy abroad as a counterweight to a volatile Trump administration.

Trump and Xi have held a succession of high-profile meetings since striking an economic truce in Busan, South Korea, last year, ending a bruising trade standoff in which U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods climbed as high as 145% and Beijing sought to throttle U.S. supplies of rare earth minerals.

With the potential for two further meetings this year, the intensive leader-level summitry has helped temper overt U.S. support for Taiwan, contained fallout over China’s backing of Iran, and allowed Beijing to quietly expand its military reach in the Indo-Pacific region with few public repercussions.

At the top of the agenda for Thursday’s summit is a possible extension of a yearlong trade truce due to expire in November, which would preserve limits on U.S. tariffs and export controls and codify U.S. access to Chinese critical minerals. The two leaders are also expected to discuss semiconductor licensing, export control arrangements and artificial intelligence, senior U.S. officials said ahead of the summit.

But analysts, as well as Chinese and U.S. officials, say that expectations are low for major breakthroughs on the rivalry-defining issues that underpin the relationship.

Two U.S. officials, a Chinese official and an Asian diplomat familiar with plans for the summit, described a highly abbreviated preparation period, with the U.S. agenda driven largely by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and his team rather than the State Department or National Security Council. They also described little consensus on major issues but a strong appetite on both sides for a high-profile meeting.

“The Chinese side has definitely become more comfortable [since the May meeting in Beijing] with the Trump administration’s style … of last minute preparation,” said the Asian diplomat, who was briefed on Chinese discussions. “There’s a better understanding that he will be respectful of Xi.”

The U.S. and foreign officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive summit preparations.

Trump has often spoken effusively of Xi and praised the spectacle of Beijing’s pageantry and military displays.

“I was over in China two months ago and we saw the Great Hall of China. Well, now we’re going to have a great hall, too,” Trump said in August of his ballroom project.

The grandeur of China’s tightly controlled Communist Party architecture has become a fixation for Trump, whose efforts to create similar monuments in Washington have been repeatedly frustrated by delays.

“Trump sees in Xi the kind of the power to get things done domestically that he also wants, and is increasingly frustrated with … the courts getting in the way of his building projects and other parts of his domestic agenda,” said Neil Thomas, senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington.

“It’s important for Xi to get the full state visit treatment as to make it worth him coming to the U.S. to begin with and to ensure that he’s not embarrassed,” Thomas added.