What Trump Doesn’t Understand About Xi
· The Atlantic
President Trump will host Xi Jinping for a state visit on September 24, once again putting his claimed bonhomie with the Chinese leader at the center of the relations between the two superpowers. But Trump’s insistence on the importance of this personal rapport shows just how little he understands his adversary.
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I have been studying Xi ever since he became China’s heir apparent, and I became an analyst at the CIA in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration. I spent years deciphering Xi for U.S. presidents as the intelligence community’s top expert on Xi. And I spent two years as the director for China at the National Security Council, where I staffed all of President Biden’s interactions with Xi and coordinated diplomacy with China across the U.S. government.
For a decade now, Trump has oscillated between courting and skirmishing with Xi. After his first term, Trump called Xi a friend and described him as someone he knew well. His experience with Xi seems to have led him to believe that he has unique, firsthand insights into China’s leader that his staff and advisers lack; in the past year, he has excluded even his close confidants, such as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, from intensive diplomacy with China, and has acted practically as his own China desk officer.
Trump’s go-to stratagem for gaining leverage with Xi has been to be unpredictable, or at least to try to be. Yet in Trump’s second term, Xi has surprised Trump more often than Trump has surprised him. That is because Xi’s modus operandi, at home and abroad, is that of a jack-in-the-box: He winds up patiently over years, sometimes decades, and then pops at the propitious moment. The result is always startling.
Xi rose to become China’s leader in large part by presenting himself as having the steady hands needed to restart stalled economic reforms without upsetting the comfortable gentlemen’s agreements that kept the Communist Party’s factional rivalries in check. But once Xi secured power, he launched a blistering campaign against the very party elites who had pulled him up.
Xi’s steeliness has caught Trump off guard, just as it did his Chinese colleagues. At the time of Trump’s first term, Xi was accustomed to playing politics as a quiet, intense poker match, in which the Chinese leader read the opposing players and considered his own cards with characteristic subtlety. Trump, meanwhile, approached politics and policy making more like a gambler on a hot streak at one of the casinos he owned. During his first encounter with Trump, at Mar-a-Lago in 2017, Xi learned about U.S. air strikes on Syria over a beautiful piece of chocolate cake. He spent the years in between Trump’s first and second terms winding up to deal with a president whose M.O. he now understood—and preparing to pop up when the moment was right.
That moment came early in Trump’s second term. In April 2025, the U.S. president rolled out his “Liberation Day” tariffs, which included some that amounted to a de facto embargo on China. Xi surprised Trump by being the only world leader to retaliate rather than conciliate. Trump was ultimately forced to fold.
In the run-up to the two leaders’ summit in Seoul last fall, Xi again surprised Trump’s team—this time by unfurling an expansive set of export controls on rare earth elements, which ultimately prompted the U.S. to roll back its own export controls on China. Beijing’s willingness to escalate was a remarkable departure from a previous pattern of downplaying differences ahead of such summits, and it underscored that Xi was more interested in curtailing Washington’s ability to target China than in striking a deal.
Accordingly, the meeting in Seoul, and Trump’s subsequent visit to Beijing in May, produced little beyond relatively minor commercial agreements affecting specific firms and sectors. The Trump administration, undoubtedly disappointed by the lack of any meaningful deal to emerge from these summits, chose to emphasize Trump’s efforts to deepen his rapport with Xi. The president evidently believes this personal relationship will allow him to secure deals that advance American interests.
This expectation has no observable foundation in Xi’s 14-year rule. Even by the standards of authoritarian rulers, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Xi has shown himself to be unsentimental about personal relationships—including those with members of his own inner circle, to say nothing of the leader of China’s principal geopolitical rival. Xi is very different from Putin in this regard. Whereas Putin takes extravagant risks on the international stage but is loath to hold his associates accountable for incompetence, Xi is just the opposite. He is calculating and measured in international politics but pitiless in jettisoning even longtime associates for perceived malfeasance.
In January, Xi dismissed his military’s top officer, General Zhang Youxia. The relationship between Xi and Zhang went back decades, extending not just to their childhoods but all the way back to their fathers, who were comrades in arms in China’s ferocious civil war. Four years ago, Xi deferred Zhang’s retirement, keeping him on board to help manage the world’s largest and second-most-capable military. We do not know what motivated Xi to oust Zhang, but given the history between the two men, the act was as brutal and unexpected as anything in a season finale of Game of Thrones.
Xi’s approach to Washington has been similarly dispassionate. During Trump’s visit to Beijing, the American president lavished praise on Xi, only for the Chinese leader to respond with stoic indifference.
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Trump’s desire to parlay personal charisma into deals may be one of his least idiosyncratic qualities. In fact, there is something about the impulse that is quintessentially American. Even—perhaps especially—for a Beltway outsider, ascending the American political ladder requires a tremendous amount of glad-handing and personal magnetism, if not charm. Those who reach its pinnacle often assume that the same qualities will serve them on the international stage. Joe Biden rose through the Senate, which required cordiality and the ability to strike deals with rivals. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were known for their affability. Overbearing friendliness might even be described as our national affect.
By contrast, Xi grew up in a system that punished openness and personal dynamism. His father’s boss and mentor, the reformer Hu Yaobang, whose death in 1989 sparked the protests in Tiananmen Square, was known for his outspokenness, which played a crucial role in his political demise. Hu’s ouster extinguished freewheeling politicking from the ranks of China’s leadership ever after.
Going into his next encounter with Xi, Trump seems to genuinely believe that he has the upper hand. Yet an unsettling split screen has accompanied every summit of his second term. In Seoul, Xi walked into the meeting having just outlined the five-year plan for China’s development through 2030. By contrast, Trump was in the midst of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. In May, Xi hosted Trump for a meeting that Trump had earlier postponed because of the war in Iran, which was going badly. Xi now plans to follow his state visit to Washington with a major party meeting to lay the groundwork for his fourth five-year term, which will start next year. Trump, meanwhile, will be at best a lame-duck president within weeks of the summit—or worse, if the Democrats are able to take back the House or the Senate.
The contrast evident at these meetings with Trump has surely reinforced Xi’s view of the United States as a declining but dangerous power, and of China as an ascendant one. Xi believes that time is on his side, so he does not need a deal. He’s happy to perpetuate an uneasy stalemate through a pantomime of rapport with Trump. In the meantime, Xi is winding up for the fifth U.S presidential administration of his tenure, whatever it may bring.
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S.-government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views.