Trump criticized Obama’s state dinner for Xi before holding his own

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DC Bureau: POTUS Welcomes Xi

DC Bureau: POTUS Welcomes Xi

President Trump criticized former President Barack Obama for hosting Chinese presidents for state dinners, including Xi Jinping, multiple times more than a decade before doing it himself.

Trump personally greeted Xi at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday and hosted a state dinner for him Thursday.

But in 2016, Trump criticized state dinners, saying, “We shouldn’t have dinners at all.”

“We should be eating a hamburger on a conference table, and we should make better deals with China and others and forget the state dinners,” he said at a rally, adding that they “cost a fortune.”

In 2015, he said on Fox News that he wouldn’t be throwing Xi a state dinner.

“I would not be throwing him a dinner. … I’d get him a McDonald’s hamburger and I’d say, ‘We got to get down to work,’” he said at the time. “You know, we’ll give him a state dinner and what he’s........

© The Hill