President Donald Trump personally greeted Chinese President Xi Jinping at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2026, and hosted him at a state dinner on Thursday, Sept. 24, an exercise in pageantry that Trump called “the hottest ticket in town.”
It was also an exercise he spent years telling Americans was a waste of money and of leverage. Long before he was in a position to set the guest list, Trump derided the practice of feting Chinese leaders at the White House, and he aimed a good deal of that scorn at former President Barack Obama, who extended that hospitality to Chinese presidents — Xi among them — more than a decade before Trump did the same.
A Campaign-Trail Case Against State Dinners
The most sweeping version of the argument came at a campaign rally in 2016. Trump told the crowd the United States should do away with such dinners entirely, that American officials would be better off eating a hamburger at a conference table while driving a harder bargain with China, and that the ceremonies were enormously expensive.
A year earlier, in 2015, he had been asked on Fox News what he would do with Xi. He would not be throwing the Chinese leader a dinner, he said, and he offered a menu of his own. “I’d get him a McDonald’s hamburger and I’d say, ‘We got to get down to work,'” Trump said then. In the same interview, he accused Xi of draining American jobs and money out of the country.
Cannons and Music at the Pentagon
The earliest of the complaints is also the sharpest, because it was aimed squarely at a sitting president. In 2012, Xi traveled to Washington as China’s vice president and was received at the Pentagon with a full honor ceremony that included music and cannons.
Trump was unimpressed. “So wrong! @BarackObama is hosting China’s VP Xi Jinping today at the Pentagon with a full honor ceremony with music and cannons,” he wrote in 2012.
That ceremony was a courtesy for a visiting vice president, not a state dinner. But the objection Trump raised then is the same one he carried through the next four years of commentary: that the United States was staging tributes for a country he argued was taking American jobs, and getting nothing at the negotiating table in return.
The Welcome Trump Staged Himself
The choreography of the past week inverted all of it. Rather than dispatch a lower-ranking official to the airfield, Trump went to Joint Base Andrews on Sept. 23 to meet Xi as he arrived. The state dinner followed the next day.
Presidents routinely revise their views on protocol once the protocol is theirs to manage, and the reversal here is unusually well documented, stretched across a rally stage, a cable news interview and a social media post that named Obama by his account handle. Trump’s earlier objections were not couched as procedural quibbles. They were an argument about what the United States gets out of the spectacle — an argument he made repeatedly, in plain language, and at the expense of the man who was then in the job.
What the dinner on Sept. 24 produced in the way of deals, and whether the hamburger standard Trump once set for himself will be applied to the results, are questions for the weeks ahead. The ticket, at least, was his to hand out.
