Trump Meets Xi From Weakness, and the Bill Lands on Workers
Watch where the leverage sits, and you can see who is about to lose. Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Washington Wednesday evening for his first state visit in more than a decade, and not as a supplicant. He is expected to bargain from a position of strength when he sits down with Donald Trump this week. The administration that never stops talking about winning is holding the weaker hand — and any concession it makes will be paid by people who were never in the room.
Start with why Trump needs a deal at all. His own household is on defense: First Lady Melania Trump went on Fox and Friends on Wednesday to defend her husband's second term despite his abysmal approval rating — a rating driven, in part, by anger at the economy and Trump's war with Iran. Her case for the presidency was that the man is busy. "He works nonstop," she told the hosts. In the same stretch of days she was filming a documentary series about her own life. That is a government with nothing material to offer the people it rules: not lower prices, not steadier work — just spectacle, and the assurance that the man at the top is working hard.
A leadership that weak at home has every incentive to come back from a summit with something it can sell as a win, and that is exactly where working people get sold. Senator Elissa Slotkin, who has introduced bipartisan legislation to keep Chinese connected vehicles out of the US market, is warning Trump against an agreement with Xi that would hand Chinese automakers greater access to the country. Read it plainly: the bargaining chip on the table is the domestic auto market — the plants, the lines, the jobs that still buy a working-class living. A president short on approval could trade that access away for a headline, and the bill would land on the shop floor long after the cameras leave.
The asymmetry is the danger. Xi comes to Washington to project strength despite growing economic tensions at home. Both governments are managing discontent. But Xi presses his advantage, while the American side arrives dragging a war and an economy its own First Lady has to go on television to excuse. When a strong negotiator meets a weak one who urgently needs to look strong, the weak one gives ground — and here the ground is other people's livelihoods.
Notice what the administration does at the same moment it courts Beijing. On the day Xi landed, a federal judge heard arguments in a lawsuit brought by CNN, MS NOW and Politico challenging Trump banning the outlets from the White House. In court, lawyers for the White House and the three banned outlets sparred over the constitutional rights of journalists — a fight Trump is bracing to lose. Same power, two fronts: bargaining away workers' interests abroad while narrowing who is allowed to watch it happen at home. Lock out the press, and the deal is scrutinized by fewer eyes.
Put the reports together and one logic emerges. An administration weakened by an economic anger it cannot fix meets a rival who holds the stronger position, with the auto market among the things that could be surrendered, while it fights in court to thin the coverage of everything it does. Whatever comes out of the summit will be spun as toughness. But the leverage is Xi's, the pressure to concede is Trump's, and the people who build cars for a living never got a vote on whether their market becomes someone else's chip.