CNN anchor Abby Phillip answered President Donald Trump’s state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping with the one rebuttal he cannot dismiss as fake news: Trump himself. Phillip aired a montage of the years Trump spent lacerating other American leaders for extending precisely that kind of hospitality to Beijing. Trump hosted Xi at the White House on Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026.
The centerpiece was a 2015 interview with Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly, taped while Barack Obama, then the president, was preparing to welcome Xi for a state dinner of his own. “If you were president, would you throw him a big dinner?” O’Reilly asked. Trump, then a first-time presidential candidate, was contemptuous of the idea.
“I would not be throwing him a dinner. We talked about this. I’d get him a McDonald’s hamburger, and I’d say, ‘We gotta get down to work,'” Trump said. He added that a state dinner was no way to treat a leader he accused of siphoning off American jobs and money.
Clips From 2011, 2015 and 2016
The O’Reilly exchange was not an outlier. Phillip’s reel stitched together clips of Trump hammering Obama in 2011, 2015 and 2016 for hosting Chinese officials. The theme stretched back further still: in a 2012 speech, Trump branded American leaders stupid for having given then-Chinese President Hu Jintao a state dinner, arguing that a country taking advantage of the United States should not be rewarded with a banquet. Trump’s critics piled on with their own excavations, circulating additional clips on X of his old attacks on Obama’s dealings with China.
Red Carpet, Sea Bass and No Deal
What Trump delivered in office bore no resemblance to the hamburger. A red carpet was unrolled for Xi’s arrival at Joint Base Andrews on Sept. 24, and the evening at the White House drew some 100 guests, among them tech moguls and Trump’s favorite supporters in the media. They ate sesame-crusted sea bass with baby bok choy and vanilla crémeux, finishing with White House honey ice cream. First Lady Melania Trump hosted alongside the president; Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan, attended. Part of the visit amounted to a show-and-tell, with Trump displaying his helipad and gold doodads.
The substance was thinner than the menu. In a statement issued after the trip, the White House allowed that the two leaders had discussed several issues, but announced no agreement and no timetable for action on any of them. Trump pronounced the visit tremendous.
Panelist Zeroes in on Communism Talk
The hospitality landed even harder against the backdrop of the war. China is providing aid to Iran in its conflict with the United States, and reports say Beijing is helping Iran target American service members overseas. That contradiction drove the argument from CNN panelist Leigh McGowan, a commentator known as “PoliticsGirl,” on the Friday, Sept. 25, edition of “CNN NewsNight With Abby Phillip.”
McGowan said what she hears from the Republican Party is a constant drumbeat about the horrors of communism — that Democrats are communists and that communism is the gravest threat the country faces. Then, she said, she watched a red carpet unfurled for the man she called the world’s biggest communist dictator, a leader she said is funding the destruction of U.S. bases in an active war zone. Trump, for his part, has vowed in a taxpayer-funded ad that the United States will never be a communist country. McGowan also noted that several Fox News hosts turned up for the red carpet affair, as did Republican lawmakers and conservative Supreme Court justices. “It was all buddy-buddy,” she said.
McGowan was unpersuaded by the official line that the summit produced nothing on artificial intelligence, telling the panel that the lavishness of the reception suggested a different story than the one the administration was selling. The question she wanted answered, she said, was why the United States was hosting that leader at all while his money was being used against American soldiers. Her skepticism aged well by the weekend: after the broadcast, China announced it had agreed to open a dialogue with the United States on artificial intelligence.