What Trump Doesn’t Understand About Xi

President Trump will host Xi Jinping for a state visit on September 24, once again putting his claimed bonhomie with the Chinese leader at the center of the relations between the two superpowers.

But Trump’s insistence on the importance of this personal rapport shows just how little he understands his adversary.

I have been studying Xi ever since he became China’s heir apparent, and I became an analyst at the CIA in the waning days of the George W.

Bush administration.

I spent years deciphering Xi for U.S. presidents as the intelligence community’s top expert on Xi.

And I spent two years as the director for China at the National Security Council, where I staffed all of President Biden’s interactions with Xi and coordinated diplomacy with China across the U.S. government.

For a decade now, Trump has oscillated between courting and skirmishing with Xi.

After his first term, Trump called Xi a friend and described him as someone he knew well.

His experience with Xi seems to have led him to believe that he has unique, firsthand insights into China’s leader that his staff and advisers lack; in the past year, he has excluded even his close confidants, such as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, from intensive diplomacy with China, and has acted practically as his own China desk officer.

Trump’s go-to stratagem for gaining leverage with Xi has been to be unpredictable, or at least to try to be.

Yet in Trump’s second term, Xi has surprised Trump more often than Trump has surprised him.

That is because Xi’s modus operandi, at home and abroad, is that of a jack-in-the-box: He winds up patiently over years, sometimes decades, and then pops at the propitious moment.

The result is always startling.

Xi rose to become China’s leader in large part by presenting himself as having the steady hands needed to restart stalled economic reforms without upsetting the comfortable gentlemen’s agreements that kept the Communist Party’s factional rivalries in check.