President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet in Palm Beach for the first time since Trump’s campaign, in which he labeled China a currency manipulator that was hurting American workers.
President Trump has arrived in South Florida for his first face-to-face meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping, armed with a full agenda of U. S. concerns but only modest expectations for results.
Trump and Xi will huddle on the grounds of the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate, beginning Thursday night with a dinner that includes their wives. More formal discussions are expected Friday on a range of economic issues and, more significantly, worries about North Korea’s stepped-up pace of nuclear development and ballistic missile tests.
“I think China will be stepping up,” Trump told reporters traveling with him Thursday aboard Air Force One ahead of the meetings.
Trump said he expected the meetings to focus most heavily on North Korea, but also trade.
“We have been treated unfairly and have made terrible trade deals with China for many, many years,” he said.
Summits between U. S. and Chinese leaders are typically tightly choreographed affairs, with the agenda and even public statements scripted long before the first meeting. Years of planning went into what the White House touted as an informal “shirt sleeves summit” between President Obama and Xi at the Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage in 2013.
But U. S. officials have emphasized that kind of detailed preparation isn’t the case for this summit. Their Chinese counterparts have said little about the meeting altogether.
“There’s going to be a very robust discussion,” was all White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Thursday.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross joined Trump and First Lady Melania Trump on the flight to Palm Beach, and were set to join Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for the meeting with their Chinese counterparts.
