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WASHINGTON — President Trump personally welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping to the US on Wednesday evening as the leaders kicked off three days of state visit events expected to pair pageantry with talks on contentious matters.
Trump, joined by first lady Melania Trump, made the unusual decision to greet Xi at Joint Base Andrews — a gesture not made by Xi when Trump visited Beijing in May.
The last time an American president greeted a world leader at JBA was in 1962 when John F. Kennedy met British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.
Trump stood at the bottom of the steps and shook Xi’s hand as he arrived in the American capital.
US military members rolled out a literal red carpet for Xi after his plane touched down at JBA shortly before 6 p.m.
Six F-16s and six F-22s were lined up on the tarmac, showcasing US military might.
The visit is expected to touch on a wide range of tensions in the US-China relationship, including tariffs, fentanyl exports, artificial intelligence and Beijing’s role in conflicts ranging from Iran to Ukraine.
Trump has repeatedly said he believes a strong personal relationship between the leaders and notch benefits for the American people, though it’s unclear what concrete agreements may come.
Xi’s dinner will feature a state dinner at the White House on Thursday — with the US leader likely to show off his recent renovations, including a new granite helipad with the presidential seal and an enormous ballroom with concrete walls now protruding from the site of the former East Wing.
The relationship between Trump and Xi has had ups and downs, featuring warm in-person greetings but souring during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and during last year’s US-China trade war.
Trump, seeking to force a new trade deal that rebalances the US trade deficit and to punish China’s export of illicit fentanyl, ramped up tariffs on China last year and Xi retaliated in kind.
The trade clash saw US tariffs on Chinese goods near 150% — before a cooling off following a meeting last October meeting between Trump and Xi in South Korea, where Xi agreed to do more to quash fentanyl exports that killed about 488,000 Americans over the past decade, peaking in 2022 and 2023.
China threatened during the tit-for-tat ramp-up to impose restrictions on rare earth materials and the US stopped advanced chip sales that Beijing could use to give it a key boost in the artificial intelligence race.
A senior US official told reporters ahead of Xi’s visit that the Trump administration is dissatisfied with Xi’s actions to reduce fentanyl smuggling.
“It does not appear that China has elevated this issue,” the official said. “China is the overwhelming, predominant supplier of precursor chemicals to the cartels in Mexico and remains so. And they have done a number of anecdotal things, including a few arrests recently, but we’d like to see much more systemic change.”
Fentanyl deaths — which Trump cited in his initial wave of tariffs last year — have dipped in the US, but remain elevated and factors such as the availability of test strips and overdose antidotes and improved border detection may have eased the impact. Still, about 35,000 Americans died in the past year.
Trump’s personal warmth with Xi has in the past been coupled with shows of American strength — with the president often recounting a 2017 visit by Xi to Mar-a-Lago. The men were enjoying dessert as Trump revealed that the US had just-conducted airstrikes on Syria.
“We had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen and President Xi was enjoying it,” Trump remembered afterward. “He was eating his cake. And he was silent.”
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