Hold Communist China Accountable: Why This Should Be Trump’s Last Meeting with Xi
Hold Communist China Accountable: Why This Should Be Trump’s Last Meeting with Xi
by Bradley A. Thayer
President Trump will meet with Xi Jinping in Beijing May 14-15. Many issues will be discussed including AI, the Iran conflict, Taiwan, tariffs and other trade issues, such as purchases of American aircraft, agricultural products and energy, U.S. investment in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and advanced computer chips.
Those issues are important and need to be addressed, but it is important to understand the power imbalance between Trump and Xi and the opportunities this yields the United States.
Xi needs the meeting to save his rule and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This meeting boosts Xi’s efforts to establish legitimacy. He wants to be seen as the equal of the American president. That is especially important now because the PRC is in the economic doldrums. Communist China needs U.S. investment, trade, advanced chips, and AI technology to get out of stagnation. Xi’s points of leverage are U.S. dependence on pharmaceuticals and rare earths processing, both of which are being addressed by the Trump administration.
In contrast, the U.S. is far stronger. Trump holds all the cards, and now is time to use them against Communist China. The meeting and its aftermath offer the administration the opportunity to hold the CCP to account for its attacks on the American people.
What the CCP has done must be seen for what it is: aggression against the American people. The lies and deception of Communist China helped the Covid-19 outbreak to become a pandemic and kill millions of Americans and disrupt the lives of the entire population, and the world’s population. Cyber plays a key role in the CCP’s belligerence. The Salt and Volt Typhoon cyber penetration of U.S. telecommunications networks, which compromised senior U.S. national security officials and their families, as well as U.S. infrastructure, including power and water plants, showed the CCP targets American leaders and can turn off the lights and water supply whenever it wants.
The CCP is directly responsible for shipping fentanyl precursors to Mexican cartels to kill many tens of thousands of Americans every year, almost 100,000 in 2024, and ruin the lives of hundreds of thousands more, every year. In December 2025, the Trump administration declared it a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) employed against Americans. It is an open question whether the CCP is abiding by the November 2025 agreement reached in Beijing between FBI Director Kash Patel and Communist Chinese authorities to agree to a plan to tighten control of the thirteen precursor chemicals and seven chemical subsidiaries. However, for Communist China, all agreements are like pie crusts, made to be broken, and so this agreement needs to be watched closely.
In the military realm, Communist China’s expansion has been unrivaled. The growth of its conventional forces, increasing sophistication of its cyber, space, and logistical forces, as well as nuclear forces, including production of nuclear weapons and delivery systems such as ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles. The expansion of the PRC’s nuclear forces has been breathtaking according to former commanders of U.S. Strategic Command.
Beijing has employed its military might to coerce Taiwan in myriad ways, including air and maritime violations and sustained political warfare, it has seized territory in the South China Sea, threatened U.S. allies Japan and Philippines, and clearly its ultimate target is the U.S. itself. In the conflict with Iran, it supports Tehran against the U.S. The PRC supplies weapons, missile fuel, and weapons technology to Tehran. Those capabilities kill and wound Americans and their allies. The U.S. is in a proxy war with the PRC. It also has supported Russia in the war against Ukraine.
Most importantly, the American people now know that the CCP interfered in U.S. elections in 2020, contributing to the theft of that election from President Trump to Joe Biden. So, the guy seated across the table from President Trump robbed the American people of a legitimate election in 2020. In addition, he caused the cornu copia of disasters that was the Biden presidency. That includes open borders in which tens of thousands of Communist Chinese agents entered the country. No doubt, the CCP’s election interference was not only limited to 2020, or only in the ways publicly known today. De facto, the CCP executed a coup d’état against the U.S. They have not paid a price for that. The response is to treat Communist China as the enemy it is.
Deterrence is needed to prevent this from occurring again—and that depends upon punishment. The costs of the CCP’s election interference must be so high to the CCP that it is deterred from attempting it again.
In the Sino-American relationship, President Trump has a royal flush. Communist China needs energy from the Gulf. To be sure, that is a key point of leverage. But far more significantly, Beijing requires access to the U.S. economy and U.S. technology and innovation for Xi to have any hope of improving his economy.
In sum, Trump has the power to deny the odious regime the oxygen it needs to survive. Now is the time to hold the CCP to account for their coup, for Covid-19, for their employment of fentanyl as a WMD, for their belligerence against the U.S. and its allies.
The integrity of U.S. elections does depend on passing the SAVE America Act, but it also depends upon punishing foreign actors who have interfered with such a high cost they will not do it again. At the meeting, Trump should present Xi with the bill—a clear statement of what CCP has done to the American people—and then move to collect the debt. No access to U.S. technology, whether that is Nvidia computer chip sales or in education or employment in universities, national laboratories and private industry. No H-1Bs for prospective employees from Communist China. No access to U.S. investment or to stock or commodities markets. And no acceptance of the illegitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party.
Bradley A. Thayer is an American Freedom Alliance Fellow
