Did Trump offer arms to Xi Jinping? What happened on the White House tour

Okay, can you just set the scene for us? This summit that Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping had at the end of last week, was it meant to be important in some way? Like, was there a goal behind it?

Donald Trump had talked it up for months, said how important it was, the great trade deals that China was gonna give him, uh, what a great friend Xi Jinping is, uh, how he was re- he really wanted the ballroom finished in time so he could show it to his great friend, Xi Jinping.

Unfortunately, they didn't make the deadline.

It's not finished.

So yeah, he really built it up.

The, perhaps the most bizarre juxtaposition here, though, is that this is at the same time Trump is mustering his greatest insults for the Democrats by calling them communists, and here he is falling over himself, in fact, fawning over, I would say, the leader of the, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, the biggest, most prominent, and most powerful communist in the world, and a guy dedicated, running a system dedicated to the downfall of the US.

Uh, and yet, he's excitedly building him up and excitedly showing him, not the ballroom, but he did get around to showing him some other pet infrastructure projects and decorating-

Yes

... uh, excitement of the president.

Yeah, he certainly did.

So I guess it's not so much what we heard about sort of trade and defense and AI.

Not much of substance, as I understand it, was discussed on those fronts, which there's a lot to tussle about there.

But instead it is those moments that, and especially those moments that you just wrote about, which for those following at home and for those who, like myself, who aren't sort of really au fait with how these things normally proceed, they were quite unusual, and they told a much larger story.

So perhaps tell us about, take us to the moment when, um, Donald Trump welcomed Xi Jinping at the foot of an aircraft's stairs at Andrews Air Base.

This is rare or odd, right?

It's a, it, it's a rare sign of respect and affection to do such a thing.

The Andrews Air Force Base, which is Washington, um, it's only happened twice in the last 70, 80 years.

Uh, the last time that a president went to greet a for- a foreign dignitary as he emerged from his plane was the Pope.

Uh, Obama welcomed the Pope in 2015, and before that, you have to go all the way back to John F. Kennedy welcoming Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister in 1962.

And now Trump accords the same status and respect to a dictator sworn to the destruction of his country.

This puts in perspective how astonishingly rare this is, why people, including Republicans, by the way, were complaining about this.

And one of the, the Republicans, a former assistant secretary of defense who was appointed by Trump in Trump's first term, Randy Schriver, said to me, "For that alone, for the president personally going to the airstrip," normally it's done by a protocol officer, totally faceless official, "For the president to do that, we should have got something in return," said Schriver.

And he said, "I'm not sure we did."

Right.

And as the visit unfolded, we saw that he really didn't.