Trump Pulls Out The Stops To Flatter Another Ruthless Dictator

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WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is set to flatter yet another dictator with the nation’s top honors, including a personal airport welcome Wednesday evening, a courtesy that, for the past half-century, has been afforded only to visiting popes.

China’s Xi Jinping will get a red-carpet welcome from Trump at Joint Base Andrews, a military flyover, a full state visit and dinner and even a guided tour of the National Archives.

Why, exactly, Trump is giving Xi higher honors than he has ever given a democratically elected leader is unclear. His White House did not respond to HuffPost queries about why Trump was giving the leader of a repressive autocracy such a lavish welcome.

“He seems to like autocrats better than democrats,” said Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration and now a professor at Stanford University. “It’s an embarrassing mistake.”

While U.S. presidents have greeted visiting popes at the airport in recent decades, they have not welcomed foreign leaders on tarmacs since the administration of John F. Kennedy in the 1960s, when their planes arrived at National Airport, just a few miles from the White House.

“He shouldn’t do it. Beijing will portray this as a sign of subordinate status,” said John Bolton, one of Trump’s first-term national security advisers who, like other critics, has been prosecuted by Trump’s Department of Justice.

Trump’s choice to fete the leader of a country that has routinely stolen American intellectual property, operates a surveillance state, jails dissidents and has forced an entire ethnic minority into concentration camps has angered some fellow Republicans, too.

“Had the White House asked me for advice, I would have suggested the president not invite Xi Jinping to Washington for such a lavish welcome here in the United States, based on all of the troubling issues we have with President Xi and the Chinese Communist Party,” U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi and chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a floor speech Tuesday. “During every minute of dialogue, our commander in chief should keep in mind that his guest is a brutal, unelected and oppressive dictator.”

Trump has for decades publicly praised and defended dictators. In 2013, he pined for the approval of Russia’s Vladimir Putin as he staged a beauty pageant in Moscow. In 2015, running for president for the first time, he defended Putin’s murderous behavior and said the United States did equally terrible things.

Trump has been equally admiring of Xi over the years.

“He’s a brilliant guy. He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist,” he said in 2024.

During his first term, Trump repeatedly spoke about how he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un “fell in love.” He displayed giant, poster-sized photos of him visiting Kim in the White House and then later hung the picture at Trump Tower after he left office following his failed Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt.

In his second term, that photo returned to the West Wing walls as Trump continued wooing both Putin and Xi. A year ago, purportedly to bring an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine, Trump hosted Putin at a summit in Alaska, literally having American military service members on their knees rolling out a red carpet to Putin’s plane. And Trump has been talking about giving Xi a state dinner — the top diplomatic honor the United States has for a foreign leader — pretty much since returning to office.

Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine now with the Brookings Institution, said he does not know why Trump is treating Xi so solicitously, but that it gives the appearance that the Chinese leader is the “alpha” in their relationship.

“Bad optics,” he said.

In any event, Trump’s willingness to appease and normalize dictators does not appear to be ending, at least in the near future.

Despite Putin’s continued nightly attacks against Ukrainian civilians in his now nearly five-year-old invasion — and despite a pending indictment against him in the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes — he has been invited to the G20 meeting Trump is hosting late this year at his golf resort adjacent to the Miami airport, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Wednesday.

“We believe this will be an opportunity for him to engage not just with Donald Trump but also with world leaders,” said Rubio, who was once a sharp critic of Putin before joining Trump’s administration. “We hope this invitation will be accepted.”