Trump Should Stop Hosting Summits
· The Atlantic
State visits are a normal and necessary part of diplomacy. National leaders should, from time to time, sit with one another in person and have candid conversations. Summit meetings between the American president and his counterparts from Moscow and Beijing are particularly tricky because of the innately tense relationship between two adversaries. Food and hospitality are part of the festivities, but in the end, such summits provide important human contact at the highest level, and as a result, crucial business can get done that might not be possible over a telephone or in messages delivered through ambassadors.
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At least, that’s how these visits are supposed to work. In the Donald Trump White House, summits are hazardous excursions during which the interests of the United States are shoved aside by a president whose cringe-inducing admiration of dictators makes these meetings into rituals of American humiliation. The country would be better off if Trump just stopped hosting or attending them.
Summits are a problem in this administration for two reasons. Most important, Trump’s unpredictability and obvious lack of preparation make them dangerous. State visits require a lot of political groundwork, and leaders rarely go into top-level meetings without a set of issues they’ve already agreed to discuss. This agenda-setting gets done long before a president actually sits down with another head of state so that stray asides (or rising tempers) do not derail whatever business needs to be discussed.
The grim outcomes of previous summits with Trump, however, suggest that they are seat-of-the-pants affairs, with little preparation, or perhaps with preparation that was ignored by the president. Some of them, such as Trump’s previous meetings with Xi Jinping, have been brief talks alongside overseas events (such as at the G20 summits during his first term) when Trump improvised efforts to mitigate the damage from his needless trade wars. And some of them, such as his meetings with the North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un and the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, have been fiascoes.
[Read: Xi is getting what he wants]
These summits with dictators produced outcomes that were worse than nothing, in part because Trump is so susceptible to pomp and flattery. After seizing the dubious honor of being the first American sitting president to visit North Korea, Trump returned and glowed about how he “fell in love” with the young menace running that prison state. Kim probably thought it had gone well too; he has since been able to build up his nuclear arsenal while watching Trump go to war with Iran over a nuclear program that has not yet produced a single weapon. Trump even admitted last summer that his nuclear-armed friend in Pyongyang will be “fine” as long as America has “a smart president” such as him.
No one, however, has taken Trump to the cleaners more times than Putin. Trump seems to both venerate and fear the Kremlin leader, and when they are left in a room together, things do not go well for the United States. After their 2018 meeting in Helsinki, Trump stood next to Putin and told the world that he accepted the word of a former KGB spy over reports from the U.S. intelligence community. And this was at a time when the president had a Cabinet and staff far more willing to tell him hard truths than his current circle of sycophants.
When Trump met Putin in Alaska in 2025—well, let’s stop right there for a moment. The President went to Alaska to meet a Russian leader, rather than hosting him at the White House or meeting him in a third country. This location allowed Putin to fly in and drag Trump in front of the cameras to force him to listen to Putin reiterate Russia’s brutal stance on Ukraine, and then—adding a true insult—Putin turned down the nice lunch Trump offered so that he could hop back over to Russia. Both men barely had time for a cup of coffee. What Trump said to his Russian counterpart we may never know, but this was worse than not meeting at all: Trump looked weak and hapless, while Putin looked determined and in control.
And that’s another reason to call off these summits while Trump is in office: They are humiliating in almost every respect. They make the United States look like a supplicant instead of a superpower, and they showcase the president’s unstable personality.
Like Putin before him, Xi got the red-carpet treatment on his arrival at Joint Base Andrews yesterday. This is an honor, as my colleague Jonathan Lemire noted this morning, that American presidents usually reserve only for the Pope. But Xi got an honor guard and a military flyover. Trump, who insists on saluting during the national anthem instead of placing his hand over his heart as is traditional, looked up and visibly winced at the sound of the jet overhead, while Xi, who seemed largely bored with the whole business, didn’t flinch. (Trump, for some reason, also wore a long overcoat and gloves on a seasonable day with temperatures in the mid-60s.)
The optics of meeting the leader of the world’s largest autocracy on a red carpet was bad enough, but then Trump did another thing that can be a problem at such moments: He decided to speak off the cuff. The president of the United States reportedly joked to the Chinese autocrat about how the Chinese press corps had the “friendliest” reporters—this, on a day when American reporters were fighting with Trump in court over their right to enter the White House.
Once at the White House, Trump took Xi for a quick tour. Trump had long ago replaced Joe Biden’s portrait in the hall of presidents with a picture of an autopen, a petty jab from a small and petty man, and on their walk, he made sure that Xi saw it. He even gave the Chinese leader a bit of a pat on the arm while yukking it up.
[Read: The deferential president]
This was too much even for the conservative writer Charles Cooke of National Review, who posted on X about Trump’s “grotesque behavior.” Xi, Cooke said, “is a communist dictator, and the head of a foreign state. Our internal divisions are not fair game in this context.”
But Trump does not think in these terms. His summits are a national hazard precisely because Trump apparently does not understand that he is representing the United States; instead, he seems to think he’s just having a visit with some of the guys in a very cool club of which he’d very much like to be a member. His attempts to ingratiate himself are obvious and pathetic, and they function as a giant tell to America’s opponents: This president likes you, fears you, and wants your approval.
These summits can have serious ramifications. John F. Kennedy and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had a brief, informal meeting in Vienna in 1961. Khrushchev looked at the 44-year-old president, judged him to be weak and inexperienced, and berated him over various issues. (“He just beat the hell out of me,” Kennedy later said.) Kennedy had mostly himself to blame; he ignored the concerns of his advisers, and he was unprepared for the older and more wily Khrushchev. They never met face-to-face again during Kennedy’s two remaining years in office.
The Vienna meeting was a disaster and may have encouraged the Soviets to take more risks, especially in Germany and Cuba. But that meeting was practically a model of presidential statesmanship compared with the incompetence and weakness Trump projects at all of these meetings with foreign dictators. The only time he seems comfortable pushing people around is when he meets with allies, including at a NATO summit in 2017, where he literally pushed the prime minister of Montenegro out of his way during a photo op.
The president has said that he wants to discuss AI with the Chinese leader, but Trump’s recent comments suggest that he has little idea what he’s talking about on that subject. Perhaps others will step in: Tonight, Trump will host a state dinner in Xi’s honor that will include guests from top U.S. technology firms, who actually know something about AI. And then, when the toasts and the meetings are over, the best we can all hope for is that Xi returns to China without incident. Then this White House can return to its normal chaos—but at least out of the sight of visiting adversaries.