Monday, May 18, 2026
Georgia Republicans Grasp for a Contender to Take On Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff - The New York Times
Can Anyone Beat Jon Ossoff? Georgia Republicans Grasp for a Contender.
"On the eve of their primary, Republicans have grown nervous about their prospects in November against Mr. Ossoff, regarded as the most vulnerable Democratic senator in the fall midterms.
Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia is widely regarded as the most vulnerable Democratic senator in the November midterm elections. But on the eve of the primary, there is a creeping anxiety in Republican circles that their party is poorly positioned to challenge him.
Eighteen months after President Trump won Georgia by about two percentage points, Republicans in the state worry about national political headwinds, an extended G.O.P. primary fight, and Mr. Ossoff’s popularity, interviews show. Ben Burnett, a Republican commentator in Georgia, said he could not detect a winning argument among any of the candidates.
“The three Republicans in the U.S. Senate race are all competing,” he said, “to see who is going to be the sacrificial lamb in November.”
Running to challenge Mr. Ossoff are two Trump-aligned Republican congressmen, Mike Collins and Buddy Carter, and the former University of Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley. Each would most likely enter the general election in a fund-raising hole. Each suggest their opponents are not up to task of taking on Mr. Ossoff. None have won a statewide race.
Still, some Republican and Democratic strategists predict Georgia will host one of the hardest-fought Senate races in November, and that a flood of funding will meet with the winner of the Republican primary. Democrats need to gain at least four seats to win the Senate majority, a once far-fetched goal that has looked more realistic in recent months amid growing voter anger with Mr. Trump. Mr. Ossoff’s seat is one of a handful at the center of the fight for control of the chamber.
Republicans will take a first step toward settling their differences on Tuesday, when voters head to the polls in a primary that is widely expected to go to a runoff on June 16. The challenge facing their party this year is clear: The three leading candidates have each sought to put electability at the center of the campaigns.
Mr. Collins, an immigration hard-liner who built a trucking company in central Georgia, has consistently led in the polls. He says he can appeal to working-class voters and points proudly to his work with Mr. Trump on immigration.
“Georgia needs the right Republican to take on Jon Ossoff,” Mr. Collins wrote on social media last week. “Someone who’s delivered, has the conservative record to prove it, and had President Trump’s back when it mattered most.”
Mr. Dooley, running as an outsider, says he can win over voters of all backgrounds by leaning on his experience as a football coach. “You better have somebody who can find some common ground,” he said at a recent campaign stop at a coffee shop in Milton, Ga.
Hanging over the race is Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a popular term-limited Republican set to leave office. Some Republicans had hoped he would challenge Mr. Ossoff this cycle. Instead, he put his weight behind Mr. Dooley, a friend since childhood, and has joined him on dozens of campaign stops around the state in recent months.
“I don’t know if y’all have noticed, but we haven’t done so well in U.S. Senate races here in the state of Georgia in the last several cycles,” Mr. Kemp said at the coffee shop. “We’ve got to have the right person.”
Mr. Carter, a former pharmacy owner whose campaign website brands him a “MAGA Warrior” and outlines no policy positions, says that his rivals are too flawed to have a chance in November.
He said in an interview that Mr. Dooley had “not been engaged at all” in state politics and did not have as close a relationship with Mr. Trump. And he said that Mr. Collins, who has a history of incendiary social-media posts and is facing a House ethics inquiry, would be brought down by his “baggage.” (The ethics inquiry relates to claims that an intern in his office had a romantic relationship with a member of his staff and received pay for no work.)
“If Derek Dooley is our candidate we lose,” Mr. Carter said. “If Mike Collins is our candidate, we lose.”
Mr. Collins’s campaign said in a statement that Mr. Carter was losing in the primary to a “failed and fired Tennessee coach” and that the “only winning occurring in his camp is the consultants taking him to the cleaners.”
Nationwide, Republicans are facing challenges posed by the unpopular war in Iran, Mr. Trump’s low approval ratings, and voter frustration over rising energy prices. In Georgia, Mr. Ossoff, a rising Democratic star and strong fund-raiser who has amassed a large war chest, has impressed voters on both sides of the aisle with his focus on constituent services in state that is growing more diverse.
“Ossoff is a remarkable political talent,” said Joel McElhannon, a retired Republican strategist in Georgia, adding, “It’s going to be very, very difficult to beat him.”
Last month, Republicans in the state received a warning shot in a special House election in former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district: Republicans kept the seat, but a Democrat running on his opposition to the war shifted the district 25 points to the left compared with the 2024 presidential election.
Although Republicans performed well in the state in 2024, their history in recent Senate races is filled with disappointment. Mr. Ossoff and Raphael Warnock both won runoffs in early 2021, and Mr. Warnock was re-elected in 2022 after facing Herschel Walker, a first-time candidate and former star football player at the University of Georgia who was widely seen as a flawed nominee.
For now, the leading Republican candidates are more focused on outshining each other. Each has, in their own way, angled for the endorsement of Mr. Trump, a potent political kingmaker who has stayed out of the race.
Mr. Kemp and Mr. Trump have had a tense relationship ever since the governor refused to join Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse the 2020 presidential election result in Georgia. The mention of Mr. Kemp’s name has in the past drawn jeers from crowds at Trump rallies.
But in August, Mr. Dooley met with the president in the Oval Office, discussing sports and politics, according to his campaign.
Mr. Carter said in the interview that he was regularly in touch with Mr. Trump and had been asking the president to endorse him. “I don’t know that he will,” Mr. Carter said.
Mr. Collins has often raised his role in passing the Laken Riley Act, a law targeting undocumented immigrants that was the first piece of legislation Mr. Trump signed after returning to office.
In recent days, Mr. Collins has appeared to turn his focus on Mr. Dooley. “You don’t beat Jon Ossoff by having no record,” he wrote on social media last week.
The attacks could sharpen in a runoff, bruising the candidates and draining resources that could otherwise be used in the general election. Already the “prolonged, protracted primary has hurt all three,” Stephen Lawson, a Republican strategist, said, though he predicted the general election would still “get tight as we get closer to November.”
Mr. Ossoff, for his part, will not have to worry about the primary or any runoff. He is running unopposed."
Trump’s Taiwan Gambit is Already a Gift to China
Trump’s Taiwan Gambit is Already a Gift to China
“President Trump’s willingness to use a $14 billion arms package to Taiwan as a bargaining chip with China is seen as a win for Beijing. This move undermines Taiwan’s confidence in U.S. support and strengthens China’s position, potentially delaying or scaling back the arms sale. While the U.S. maintains its policy on Taiwan, the situation raises concerns about the reliability of U.S. deterrence and Taiwan’s security.
President Trump’s open willingness to hold up a $14 billion Taiwan arms package is a win for Beijing. Now China could be weighing how to keep the weapons on ice for as long as it can.
By laying out U.S. arms sales to Taiwan as a bargaining chip with China, President Trump has handed a gift to China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in his efforts to undermine the Taiwanese government.
On Monday, China’s state media used Mr. Trump’s comments to send a message at home and to Taiwan: that the United States cannot be relied on to defend Taiwan, the island democracy that Beijing claims as its territory.
President Lai Ching-te of Taiwan, a frequent target of Beijing’s vitriol, and his Democratic Progressive Party can no longer rely on “unconditional indulgence” from the United States, said the Global Times, a Chinese newspaper, citing a Chinese researcher.
“Security cannot be bought with military purchases; if you become a pawn, you will only be squeezed dry,” said Col. Jiang Bin, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of National Defense, on Monday, referring to Taiwan.
The American president’s comments had been released over the weekend, after Mr. Trump left a summit with Mr. Xi in Beijing on Friday. He said he was keeping on hold a decision about a package of weapons to Taiwan worth around $14 billion, and described it as a “very good negotiating chip” that could be used with Beijing.
“I’m holding that in abeyance and it depends on China,” he said in an interview with Fox News. It was not immediately clear what Mr. Trump wanted China to do in return.
Pressure on Iran?
The United States went into the summit hoping to persuade China to do more to get Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Trump later said he had discussed Iran with Mr. Xi but the details of their discussions have not emerged.
China has pushed Iran to negotiate with the United States, and has called for the Strait of Hormuz to be open.
But Beijing has strong strategic reasons to avoid siding explicitly with the United States and Israel against Iran, its partner in the Middle East, in a war it has repeatedly said should not have happened.
Even if China were willing to use its influence over Tehran, it would not want it to be seen as an explicit quid pro quo for U.S. concessions on Taiwan, said Bao Chengke, a researcher of Shanghai Cross-Strait Research Association, an organization in Shanghai.
“He tends to act like a businessman, understanding issues through the lens of deal-making,” Mr. Bao said of Mr. Trump. “But tying the two issues so tightly together really isn’t feasible.”
More Purchases of U.S. Goods?
If Mr. Trump were to suspend the $14 billion package, or scale back the number and sophistication of the weapons, China could respond in a few ways, said Xin Qiang, the director of the Center for Taiwan Studies at Fudan University.
For instance, China could buy more American farm produce and Boeing planes, Professor Xin said.
President Trump and Boeing have already said that China had agreed to order 200 of the company’s planes. The Trump administration also said on Sunday that China had agreed to “purchase at least $17 billion per year of U.S. agricultural products” in 2026, 2027 and 2028, though the amount this year would be prorated.
Beijing’s official position is that Taiwan is a domestic issue and any continued U.S. arms sales to the island are unacceptable. But it can be pragmatic, too, Mr. Xin said.
“China has never wanted to treat arms sales to Taiwan as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the United States,” he said. “But realistically, any issue can in essence become a bargaining chip in the course of international relations or great power competition.”
A Messaging Win for Beijing
In some ways, Beijing has already benefited from Mr. Trump’s gambit.
Mr. Trump’s remarks suggested he had partly absorbed China’s depiction of Mr. Lai as a dangerous separatist seeking to lead the United States to war. (Mr. Lai and his government say Taiwan is in reality already independent, and that it is Beijing that is the aggressor.)
Mr. Trump also questioned whether the United States could successfully come to Taiwan’s defense in a war. “I’m not looking to have somebody go independent and, you know, we’re supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war,” he said.
Minxin Pei, a professor at Claremont McKenna College who studies Chinese leadership politics, said: “I think Xi Jinping believes he succeeded in one respect in this summit — that is, in educating Trump on Taiwan.”
“In the view of Chinese people, Trump’s comments on the Taiwan issue are a massive breakthrough,” said Wang Wen, a former Chinese journalist in Beijing who is now a professor at Renmin University in Beijing.
Beijing can gain some advantage simply if Mr. Trump puts off any approval for long enough, some analysts said.
“The question is whether the pending $14 billion sale is delayed for weeks, months, or longer,” said Craig Singleton, the China Program senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. “A prolonged hold, especially one shaped by Beijing’s objections, would raise much more serious concerns about the reliability of U.S. deterrence.”
Trouble for Taiwan?
Taiwan’s main opposition party, the Nationalist Party, which supports closer ties with China, has seized on this moment to argue that President Lai has pushed the island into a dangerous bind — distrusted by Beijing, unable to rely on Washington.
“I believe the Trump-Xi summit represents a turning point for Taiwan,” Su Chi, a former senior official who had worked under Nationalist Party administrations, said at a forum in Taipei. “Our big brother, America, I’m sorry, he has too many problems right now and simply cannot take care of us here.”
Mr. Lai and his officials have argued that Mr. Trump’s comments do not shift relations. They have pointed to parts of Mr. Trump’s comments, including that “nothing’s changed” on policy toward Taiwan. They have also pointed to comments from Trump administration officials, including Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, that policy on Taiwan is unchanged.
“I don’t think the Taiwanese public needs to worry,” Chen Ming-chi, a Taiwanese deputy minister of foreign affairs, told reporters. “I believe the United States security commitments to us and our bilateral economic and trade relations are being maintained just as before.”
Berry Wang contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
Chris Buckley, the chief China correspondent for The Times, reports on China and Taiwan from Taipei, focused on politics, social change and security and military issues.
Amy Chang Chien is a reporter and researcher for The Times in Taipei, covering Taiwan and China.“
Sunday, May 17, 2026
‘Jim Crow 2.0’: South Carolina’s Republicans move to oust state’s only Black congressman since 1897 | South Carolina | The Guardian
‘Jim Crow 2.0’: South Carolina’s Republicans move to oust state’s only Black congressman since 1897
"James Clyburn could now find his district dismantled after supreme court effectively gutted Voting Rights Act
South Carolina has had exactly one Black representative in Congress since 1897: James Clyburn. A proposal to redraw the state’s political map would dismantle the district he represents.
The state’s sixth congressional district starts on its southern border with Georgia, in the suburbs of Savannah, moving a hundred miles north to wind around the heart of Charleston, before cutting through Black belt farmland to the state capital of Columbia, another 115 miles away.
It contains Charleston’s high-end shopping district on King Street and the state’s ornate antebellum capitol building. It also contains the Gullah Geechee coastal homeland, two of the state’s historically Black colleges and some of the poorest people in the US, in Barnwell and Allendale counties.
The district is a product of a 36-year-old peace pact between civil rights leaders and South Carolina’s white conservative political apparatus.
Now Trump has urged the state’s Republican lawmakers to effectively tear up that deal, after the US supreme court effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act that prevented racial discrimination – prompting a Republican scramble to redraw key districts.
While an early effort stalled in South Carolina on Tuesday, the threat remains. The state’s governor, Henry McMaster, called a special congressional session to consider the proposal, which started on Friday.
Back in 1990, Democrats remained in control of South Carolina’s legislature, but had been bleeding white political support for 25 years following the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
“The Black caucus went to the Republican caucus after the 1990 census and said, ‘We’ve been voting for Democrats for 100 years and we’re no better off,’” Eaddy Roe Willard, a Republican activist in South Carolina, recalled of a redistricting debate that year. “We will vote with your map on the condition that you draw one congressional district where an African American can be elected.”
With a census showing a Black population of about a third of the state, and lawsuits looming, legislators crafted a congressional district with a Black majority, but also began breaking up the multiracial coalition that kept Democrats in power at the state level. Many Democratic lawmakers left, or switched parties.
Clyburn took office in 1993, and set out to make a mark on the district, state and country.
A veteran of the civil rights movement, he quickly climbed the Democratic party’s leadership ranks in Washington, serving as majority whip between 2007 and 2011, and 2019 and 2022. He also became a rainmaker for the state, directing spending to improve its famously dysfunctional highway system, pushing money toward rural broadband and backing efforts to alleviate poverty.
Nationally, he has played the role of kingmaker for Democratic presidential aspirants, many of whom flock to his fish fry every four years in hopes of wooing Black voters. In 2020, he was credited with reviving Joe Biden’s flailing presidential campaign with an endorsement that helped Biden win the state’s Democratic primary, and put him on course for the White House.
In Congress, Clyburn advanced a 10-20-30 federal funding formula – that a minimum of 10% of federal investments should go to communities where at least 20% of the population had lived below the federal poverty line for the last 30 years – as a standard for federal spending. Black communities are overrepresented by this framework, but rural white communities across the country also benefit.
“This place has such a rich, deep history of organizing, of social change, of slavery, of harm. And none of it has really been reckoned with,” said Jessica Thomas, an activist in South Carolina. “It sits at the surface, constantly ready to bubble up and it exposes itself in issues like this.
“There are great people here. There are also people who want to keep things the old white boys’ way and control everything.”
All except one of South Carolina’s seven US congressional districts are held by Republicans. Trump’s demands on Republican state leaders to redistrict and pull apart the one seat currently held by a Democrat ignores longstanding political conventions.
Trump’s supporters call it draining the swamp. His detractors describe it as transparently racist.
“I mean, it’s like we’re never, ever going to outlive the accusation, you know?” said Terra Ciurro of Simpsonville, South Carolina, who was visiting the state capitol earlier this week with her husband, a retired soldier. “We’re never going to outrun it. It’s always going to be there because of things like this.”
Clyburn himself suggested the plan was “a comprehensive approach to creating Jim Crow 2.0”, throwing the state back to an era racial segregation and repression. “I’m gonna run no matter what,” he told reporters this week.
But the relative comfort with the current map – and its protection of Clyburn’s electoral prospects – has been criticized by some Black leaders for conceding potentially competitive territory and facilitating a wipeout of Democratic legislative power in the state for decades.
Clyburn has defended gerrymandering for partisan advantage. “Aggressive redistricting efforts, that’s one thing,” he told Ohio News Network Radio in 2022. “To be suppressive of Black voter strength, that’s another thing.”
The congressman has often criticized Republican-drawn South Carolina congressional maps, and aligned himself with the NAACP to challenge the 2020 redistricting on the grounds of a racial gerrymander. He has also been critical of the legislature’s current drive, and dared those behind it to test him, and the state’s voters.
Shane Massey, the state senate’s majority leader, acknowledged as much in a forceful address to his chamber on Tuesday as he rejected a call for redistricting. Pulling Democrats out of the sixth district might imperil the odds of electing neighboring Republicans in a tight year, he suggested.
The district does not have a Black majority today, though it’s close: US Census estimates suggest about 46% of the district’s residents are Black. About a quarter of South Carolina is Black, and about a quarter of those Black people live in Clyburn’s district.
But the state’s booming manufacturing industry has drawn a multiracial influx of skilled labor, while the warm climate and low taxes have attracted relatively conservative retirees from other states. And in time, that might change the political calculus.
“How are we going to be a state that welcomes people from everywhere else?” said Damien Barber, a recent political science graduate from the University of South Carolina. He stood outside the legislative offices in protest on Tuesday as state lawmakers weighed the redistricting plan.
Barber grew up in Richland County in South Carolina’s midlands, which contains the Congaree national park: South Carolina’s only national park, the product of legislation advanced by Clyburn in 2003.
“None of the congressional representatives are, honestly, pretty effective,” Barber said. “He’s the one that everyone talks about. Some people don’t even know who their representative is, but everyone knows Jim Clyburn.”
Saturday, May 16, 2026
Friday, May 15, 2026
Trump Was Flattering, Xi Was Resolute. The Difference Spoke Volumes.
Trump Was Flattering, Xi Was Resolute. The Difference Spoke Volumes.
“President Trump’s visit to Beijing highlighted the contrasting approaches of the two leaders. While Trump adopted a conciliatory tone, praising Xi Jinping and emphasizing the importance of their personal relationship, Xi focused on setting boundaries, particularly regarding Taiwan. Xi’s approach reflected China’s growing confidence and authority, contrasting with Trump’s more transactional style.
In contrast to his rhetoric about China at home, President Trump spoke in conciliatory terms with Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader.
David E. Sanger has covered five American presidents and their encounters with China, a subject of his latest book. He reported from Beijing.
For President Trump, the first day of his visit to Beijing was all about the personal relationship between him and Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader.
“You’re a great leader,” he told his host, whom he has often said he admires for his “powerful” control over a nation of 1.4 billion people. “I say it to everybody.”
Mr. Xi, unsurprisingly, spent little time Thursday on flattery. Once the 21-gun salute and precision-marching by units of the People’s Liberation Army were finished, the disciplined Chinese leader plunged right away into setting boundaries for the two countries’ relations. The red line was Taiwan, he said, making it abundantly clear that Mr. Trump’s effort at rapprochement could crash on takeoff if he interferes with China’s long-term effort to take control of the self-governing island.
“The U.S. must handle the Taiwan issue with utmost caution,” he said according to a readout from Xinhua, China’s official news agency. The warning came just minutes into his public remarks in the Great Hall of the People, the center of power for the People’s Republic starting just a decade into Mao’s revolution. For Mr. Xi, it was all about setting boundaries, from the start.
The moment seemed to capture the new equilibrium between the two adversaries. Mr. Xi arrived highly scripted, leaving no doubt that for all of China’s problems — deflation, depopulation, the bursting of the real estate bubble — the moment when China acts as a peer superpower had arrived.
At every turn, at least as he began his two-day trip to China, Mr. Trump sounded conciliatory, the exact opposite of his portrayals of China in public appearances back home, where during his presidential campaigns he has talked about the country as a job-stealer and national security threat. Mr. Xi, while smiling and welcoming to Mr. Trump, was quietly more confrontational — especially on Taiwan, where he delivered an unequivocal warning.
The gap spoke directly to the new level of confidence and authority Mr. Xi has adopted in his public speech, despite his challenges with the domestic economy, as he watches the United States plunge into conflict with Iran, another Middle East confrontation with no easy exit.
The Chinese president designed the day meticulously, down to a visit to the Temple of Heaven, the Ming dynasty complex not far from the Forbidden City. As Mr. Trump sat in the 13th-century wonder, he got a history lesson from the Chinese leader, tailored to echo the modern era.
At his toast at a televised State Banquet on Thursday night, Mr. Trump came with a lesson of his own, describing links between China and the United States that went back to the Empress of China, the ship that took a 14-month journey in 1783 to open trade and bring the first American diplomats to what was then known as Canton, now called Guangzhou.
“We’ve gotten along when there were difficulties, we worked it out,” Mr. Trump said. But even then he cast relations in personal terms, making clear that the huge divisions between the two countries had to be solved by two strong leaders.
“I would call you, and you would call me whenever we had a problem, people don’t know, whenever we had a problem,” he said. “We worked that out very quickly, and we’re going to have a fantastic future together.”
For his part, Mr. Xi returned to his mantra: to keep from turning competition into conflict, the two nations must keep from falling into the “Thucydides Trap.”
(The trap, popularized by the Harvard professor Graham Allison in his book “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?” comes when a rising power challenges a status-quo power, often leading to war. “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that rise engendered in Sparta,” the ancient Greek historian Thucydides wrote, “that made war inevitable”.)
Mr. Xi proposed a familiar solution: ban talk of competition between the No. 1 and No. 2 economic superpowers — a regular staple of the Biden White House — and focus on “stability,’’ a governing characteristic rarely associated with Mr. Trump.
“The common interests between China and the United States outweigh our differences,” Mr. Xi said, according to state media. “Stability in China-U.S. relations is a boon to the world.”
But unlike Mr. Trump, he explored the alternative scenario.
“If handled poorly, the two countries will collide or even clash, putting the entire U.S.-China relationship in an extremely dangerous situation,” he said, a clear reference to Taiwan, according to the readout.
If much of this sounds familiar, it was. Mr. Xi has go-to homilies, part of his philosopher-king approach to ruling over China. And in this summit he invented one new one: He said he agreed with Mr. Trump on “a new vision of building a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability.”
As Rush Doshi, a China scholar at Georgetown University noted, that sounded like an effort “to lock in a ‘truce’ favorable to them, and they want to do so beyond Trump, with this post-trade war détente setting the base line.”
Future disputes over China’s excess manufacturing capacity or rebuilding American military capability in the Indo-Pacific could be declared “a violation of this frame,” he wrote on X.
The contrast with Mr. Trump’s style — where summits are first and foremost for instant “deals,” usually ones he can boast will provide jobs or sales — is often jarring. Mr. Trump, for example, brought a group of business executives, whose presence he said was intended to show “respect” for China while seeking market access.
It had a familiar ring to it, the days when Bill Clinton and George W. Bush brought business leaders to explore the promise of the Chinese market, often for the first time. But Mr. Trump’s delegation came with decades of experience, much of it bitter. Some of them were survivors of the battles over intellectual property theft and sharp restrictions intended to favor local Chinese industry.
Mr. Xi did not bring an equivalent group. There were no executives from BYD, the huge Chinese carmaker trying to figure out how to do business in the United States, or DeepSeek, the innovative artificial intelligence firm at the heart of the battle with A.I. firms in the United States.
There were other discordant notes, heard just beneath the noise of the clinking glasses and optimistic toasts. In contrast to the Chinese readout, the American account, released by the White House, talked about cracking down on fentanyl precursors, a long-running issue with China, and buying American agricultural goods. It did not mention Taiwan, or China’s restrictions on rare earths, or its rapid nuclear weapons buildup.
The White House also described the United States and China as aligned on the need to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and keep it free of Iranian tolls. All that was true, but ignored the deeper complication: despite American entreaties, China is unlikely to deploy whatever influence it has with the Iranians for free. What the price might be is unclear.
The real test of how these two men debate their differences might come on Friday morning, when Mr. Trump is scheduled for much smaller meetings with Mr. Xi. It is the kind of session he likes best: leader to leader. And once he leaves Chinese airspace, he seems likely to present his preferred version of those talks.
The Chinese government will likely be more circumspect.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.“
Trump’s ‘Learning Curve’ on China Ends With Conciliation at Summit
Trump’s ‘Learning Curve’ on China Ends With Conciliation at Summit
“President Trump’s recent summit with President Xi Jinping in Beijing marked a significant shift in U.S.-China relations. Trump, who previously adopted a hawkish stance towards China, now appears to be pursuing a more conciliatory approach, downplaying concerns about Taiwan and emphasizing economic cooperation. While the summit produced few concrete agreements, it signaled a potential thaw in tensions and a move away from the adversarial policies of the past.
The president has shifted the foundations of American policy toward China, throwing aside the adversarial approach of recent years.
In 2024, Donald J. Trump said China was “killing us as a country.” Last year, he complained that President Xi Jinping of China was “very tough, and extremely hard to make a deal with.” His tariffs on China reached 145 percent at one point.
The whiplash that followed culminated in the pageantry in Beijing this week.
As Air Force One took off from the Chinese capital on Friday, it remained unclear what deals, if any, President Trump had clinched with Mr. Xi. But the two-day summit in Beijing underscored how far he has shifted the foundations of American policy toward China in the wake of his humbling retreat from last year’s trade war. He has thrown aside the adversarial approach of his first years in office, the Biden administration and the beginning of his own second term.
What’s more, he has largely waved aside the warnings outlined in the Pentagon’s annual, unclassified accounting of China’s capabilities and intentions, which lays out a plan to push the United States out of the Western Pacific, engulf Taiwan, claim more territory in the South China Sea and escalate cyberattacks on the United States. He acknowledges that these threats are real. He has just reversed his view of how to deal with them.
In Beijing, Mr. Trump clapped for Chinese children waving American flags, toasted the “special relationship” between the American and Chinese people, called Mr. Xi a “great leader” and exclaimed that the garden where he walked with Mr. Xi held “the most beautiful roses anyone’s ever seen.” When Mr. Trump introduced the Chinese leader to the 17 or so American executives who came to Beijing, he said they had joined him “to pay respects to you, China.”
Mr. Trump said nothing in public in Beijing about Taiwan, even as Mr. Xi sharply warned that disagreement over the self-governing democracy could lead to a “clash.” Mr. Trump boasted of big Chinese purchases of Boeing airplanes and soybeans, though details were slim — just his own accounting of his wins, conveyed to reporters on Air Force One soon after liftoff from Beijing. Mr. Xi’s government did not confirm the purchases.
And Mr. Trump insisted that Beijing and Washington were on the same page on Iran, even as the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Friday reiterated its position that his war “should not have happened in the first place.”
Taken together, the picture of a deferential American president and a confident Chinese leader reflected Mr. Xi’s success, despite his country’s bleak economic picture, in derailing the hawkish approach to China that Mr. Trump adopted at the start of his second term.
The tone the two men set, in what could be the first of four meetings this year, was one in which they would work to defuse years of built-up tension — some of which Mr. Trump built up himself — even as the Iran war has created a new potential flashpoint.
John Delury, a historian of East Asia, said that even though the summit had produced few tangible outcomes in terms of economic deals or political agreements, it had the potential to affect the geopolitical mood, both in China and the United States. Mr. Trump’s friendly statements toward Mr. Xi and the Chinese people were being amplified in China’s state-controlled media, sending the message that “we’re getting along better with the Americans,” said Mr. Delury.
And in the United States, Mr. Trump was telling voters who previously heard him describe China as a sinister, destructive force that it was a country America should do business with. The Washington narrative about “decoupling” — the idea that the United States should unwind its economic ties to China — seemed part of a bygone era.
“You don’t pack Air Force One with your biggest business leaders when you’re decoupling,” said Mr. Delury, a senior fellow at the Asia Society. “Trump is sending that message to his people — to some extent the whole country — that we can get along with China even though we’re still going to compete.”
But there are dangers in that approach, in the view of some former American officials who have served in Beijing. R. Nicholas Burns, the ambassador to China during the Biden administration, said it was understandable that Mr. Trump wanted to be polite to Mr. Xi, but that the American president’s gushing approach “weakens Trump and the U.S.”
“Xi did not hesitate to warn Trump over Taiwan,” Mr. Xi said. “Trump should not hesitate to be frank about our concerns, too.”
The summit produced little clarity about the policy details of the new relationship that Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi were shaping. Da Wei, the director of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said the United States did not appear to have “put enough energy” into the visit.
“The U.S. side looked a little passive,” Mr. Da said, asserting that Mr. Trump had said little of substance on the trip. “The Chinese side prepared very well.”
The United States went into the summit hoping to convince China to do more to get Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and stabilize global energy markets, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on the flight to Beijing this week. And China had hopes that Mr. Trump might nudge American policy on Taiwan in Beijing’s favor.
There was no evidence that China had changed its position on Iran, even though Mr. Trump asserted that he and Mr. Xi “feel very similar” about it. On Air Force One, Mr. Trump did not name a single way in which Mr. Xi had agreed to change the situation on the ground — or whether it had agreed to stop giving Iran access to satellite imagery that helps it target U.S. forces and Gulf states.
China’s foreign ministry said that Middle East “shipping channels should be reopened as soon as possible,” but it did not indicate it would put more pressure on Iran, which relies on China as the main buyer of its oil.
Mr. Trump did not comment on Taiwan until reporters asked him about it on the flight from Beijing, at which point he offered little reassurance to those hoping for a robust American defense of Taiwan’s democracy.
He suggested that he might reconsider a $14 billion arms package for Taiwan that has been awaiting his final approval. When a reporter noted that President Ronald Reagan had assured Taiwan, more than 40 years ago, that no president would consult Chinese leaders on the size or nature of such arms packages, he dismissed the whole notion, saying that was a long time ago.
“I’ll be making a decision” about arms sales, Mr. Trump said, suggesting he would announce something soon.
He said Mr. Xi had asked whether the United States would defend Taiwan if China attacked it, and that he had not given the Chinese leader a response. “I said, ‘I don’t talk about those things,’” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Xi accompanied Mr. Trump at all his public events across Beijing on Thursday and Friday. It was an extraordinary time commitment by the Chinese leader, according to Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington. Mr. Trump told reporters on his plane that the secretive residential compound Mr. Xi showed him on Friday was “amazing” and marveled that he had gotten to see it.
Chinese officials “realize that this current moment of positivity is a very Trump-specific phenomenon that may not be sustainable,” Ms. Sun said.
Analysts in Beijing said they recognized that U.S. policy could turn on a dime, and Mr. Xi signaled that he was tailoring his foreign policy to Mr. Trump specifically.
Mr. Xi presented Mr. Trump with a new concept for the U.S.-Chinese relationship called “constructive strategic stability,” according to Chinese state media, but specified a time frame that coincided with the end of Mr. Trump’s term: “the next three years and beyond.” And as he met with Mr. Trump on Friday at the residential compound, Zhongnanhai, Mr. Xi compared his “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” to Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, according to a Chinese government statement.
A question looming over all the camaraderie was how long the upbeat tone would last. Early in Mr. Trump’s first term, a similarly convivial Beijing summit in 2017 was followed by a hawkish turn against China.
But analysts in both China and the United States said Mr. Trump’s attitude to Beijing was different now. For one thing, he has seen China’s ability to retaliate against the United States, as it did by throttling rare earth exports last year, forcing Mr. Trump to back down in his trade war.
“Everyone has a learning curve,” said Sun Chenghao, a specialist in U.S.-China relations at Tsinghua University. Now, he said, “Mr. Trump knows how to deal with China.”
Anton Troianovski writes about American foreign policy and national security for The Times from Washington. He was previously a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Berlin.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.“