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New York: Pictorially, Donald Trump had a blockbuster 24 hours. One minute he was in Busan shaking hands and signing deals with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the next he was back at the White House, handing out Hershey chocolate bars to children for Halloween.

That included a pair of babies whose costume - a pram decked out as a drive-through McDonald’s - obviously won the cheeseburger-loving president’s heart.

President Donald Trump was handing out Halloween chocolate to children within hours of arriving back in Washington from Asia.Credit: AP

In their usual style, Trump and his team cast his six-day Asia trip as a superlative success. “President Trump remains the greatest dealmaker in the world,” the State Department posted on social media. Scott Bessent, Trump’s treasury secretary, said his boss was “commanding respect around the world like no other leader”.

Whatever Trump did in Malaysia and Japan, it was always going to be his sit-down with Xi - his first since 2019 - that mattered most. On the surface, there was much to like about the trade war “truce” between the world’s two largest economies. The much-anticipated meeting has ostensibly delivered a year-long reprieve from the on-again, off-again battle between Trump’s tariffs and Xi’s coercion on rare earth minerals.

It will certainly be welcome news for America’s soybean farmers, who depend on Chinese buyers for their livelihoods and were begging Trump for relief. China has now agreed to buy 12 million tons of American soybeans from now through to January, and then 25 million a year.

Caleb Ragland, a ninth-generation farmer and president of the American Soybean Association, whose Kentucky farm this masthead visited in........

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