US president Donald Trump is meeting Chinese president Xi Jinping over two days starting April 6 at Trump’s luxury resort Mar-a-Lago in Florida, where the world’s two most powerful leaders are expected to discuss the recent deployment of a THAAD military battery in South Korea, among other issues.
But that is far from the most pressing issue on Trump’s mind. As the US president wrote on Twitter, Trump’s preferred tool for airing what’s on his mind, trade is also on his agenda.
While there’s no similarly direct way to gauge Xi’s opinions about the relationship with the US, a look at Trump’s Twitter activity over the past five years show remarkable consistency on what he thinks, when he thinks about China. Well before he ran for president and took office, Trump has accused China of being a job stealer, liar, copycat, currency manipulator, a hacker, and a spy that laughs at the US all the time. He also complained about his predecessor hosting Xi at the Pentagon. (He did, however, once rise to the defense of a teenage Chinese golfer.)
Here is just about everything important Trump has had to say about China from the year Barack Obama was re-elected to his second term to present (2012 is remarkably prolific).