The REAL reason why Trump traveled to China

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Donald Trump visited China this May and met with China's President Xi Jinping.

[00:00:06]This was the first trip by a US president to China since 2017.

[00:00:12]And it's important to emphasize that it was Trump who asked for this meeting. It was not China that initiated this. It was the US. So this raises the question, why did Trump want to go to China and meet with President Xi?

[00:00:27]The short answer is that this is mostly about the US economy.

[00:00:32]Trump launched a trade war against China back in 2018 in his first term, and during his second term in 2025, he massively escalated this trade war against China, but it backfired majorly.

[00:00:47]The US economy was already facing significant problems with inflation, which has been eating away at the purchasing power of American workers, and Trump's trade war and tariffs have only made the situation even worse. So it is now widely acknowledged in US foreign policy circles, even by the Council on Foreign Relations, that China has the upper hand in these negotiations. And the thing about Trump is he has no subtlety. He always says the quiet part loud. And Trump boasted that he was traveling to China with some of the most powerful billionaire oligarchs in the United States, including the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, as well as the richest billionaire oligarch on Earth, Elon Musk.

[00:01:39]And these billionaires actually traveled on Air Force One with the US president.

[00:01:46]They were on the plane with Trump. He was also joined by Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, although Trump calls him Tim Apple, as well as Larry Fink, who is the CEO of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, along with Stephen Schwarzman, who is the CEO of Blackstone, which is the world's biggest alternative asset manager. By the way, Schwarzman is the highest-paid corporate executive on Wall Street, and he was also a big donor to Trump's presidential campaign.

[00:02:19]Along with them, Trump boasted that he was joined by the CEOs of Boeing, Cargill, Citigroup, GE Aerospace, Goldman Sachs, Micron, and Qualcomm. So, these are some of the most powerful corporations on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, and their CEOs were joining the US president on this trip to China. So, symbolically, the US president is standing with the most powerful billionaire oligarchs from the United States, some of the richest people on Earth. These are the oligarchs who determine US government policy.