Xi Jinping lands at Joint Base Andrews around 4 p.m. today, and Trump will be standing on the tarmac waiting for him. Presidents do not do that. They wait at the White House door. Trump chose the runway, Melania Trump said on Fox this morning, because "he's coming on our soil, and we need to welcome them with the most respect."
Trump has done this once before. He rolled a red carpet across the tarmac at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson for Vladimir Putin on 15 August 2025, applauded as he walked up, and put a B-2 and four F-22s overhead. Xi gets the same flyover Thursday. Trump reserves that welcome for Xi and Putin, and UN week showed how far that puts him from everyone else: Macron used his farewell speech to call Trump's Gaza peace "a spectacle" that should "shame us all," Canada and Britain backed a Palestinian state, and Erdogan called Gaza a concentration camp from the same podium.
Trump spent Monday getting the lawn ready. He cut a red, white and blue ribbon on his new South Lawn helipad with a pair of oversized gold scissors and flew off to New York on the "maiden voyage from the newly built, and very beautiful, Heliport!" He says the granite has a "million-year life" and that Xi will be impressed. His one regret is the ballroom. "It's too bad we don't have the ballroom open," he said Friday. The East Wing is rubble and the $400 million hall stands about two-thirds built.
Xi arrives with none of that anxiety, and he knows exactly which date on the calendar gives him the leverage.
