Not only did China’s premier have to put up with Trump’s ‘dictator-maxxing’ copycat act, he sat him on a table with Elon Musk
Trump did his best to look like a dictator in front of his hero(Image: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Donald Trump’s wining and dining of China’s Xi Jinping had a real ‘anything you can do I can do better’ vibe.
“AI?” Trump might have said at their behind-closed-doors meeting. “We can do that, in fact we’re so good at it, we call it SUPER INTELLIGENCE.”
“Spying?” he might have said during the military flypast. “We can do that too – in fact, here comes one of our top secret stealth bombers. Have a good look, Mr General Secretary. Take some notes if you want.”
“Cracking down on free speech and critical media coverage? …Well, that one’s pretty new to us but we’re working on it.”
There was a grim irony in the gleeful propagandists of the Chinese communist party being welcomed into the White House complex to cover the arrivals while CNN were still excluded.
But it’s not the first time Trump has expressed and demonstrated his envy for the lifestyles of authoritarian leaders. It is, after all, the reason he’s building the massive ballroom on the side of the White House.
Well, that and the fortified bunker underneath it, which he’s going to need when everything goes south and the revolutionary tanks start rolling into DC.
A year before he took office, then-candidate Trump said he wouldn’t be throwing Xi Jinping next time he visited the US, and instead would sit him down with a McDonald’s hamburger.
But that was before Trump got his taste for dictator-maxxing. A decade on, he treated his “great friend” to Yellow Squash Velouté followed by Sesame Crusted Sea Bass with a dessert of Vanilla Cremeux and White House Honey Ice Cream.
None of which, last I checked, were on the menu at the Golden Arches.
The top table at the lavish banquet looked like a tenth circle of hell so miserable Dante thought it might be a bit much.
Not content with forcing Mr and Mrs Xi to put up with yet another hour in the company of Trump and an increasingly grumpy-looking Melania, they were joined for dinner tech weirdo Elon Musk and a bunch of chip company CEOs.
The first lady and Elon were seated next to each other, which might partially explain her sour face.
Tim Cook was also at the table, which given he stepped down as CEO of Apple earlier this month, suggests he either really wanted to be there or Trump doesn’t know who he is.
Trump didn’t seem to mind that next to no progress had been made on matters like trade rows, human rights or AI safeguards – although the pair did apparently agree that super-intelligent bots should remain “under human control”, which seems like the bare minimum one could hope for.
But after dinner, Trump stood up and invited everyone to come look at the thing he does care about: The building site that now sits on the ruins of a third of the White House, on which he’s building a cavernous, glittering aircraft hangar of a ballroom to rival China’s great hall.
In the end, it was all about Trump trying to impress the world’s most successful living dictator with his tribute act.
