Donald Trump spent Thursday rolling out the red carpet for Chinese President Xi Jinping.
One Republican senator watched the spectacle and apparently had a very different reaction.
“It’s a WTF moment.”
That’s how Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina described Trump’s lavish reception for Xi during an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil.
And Tillis wasn’t joking.
The retiring Republican senator said he is increasingly concerned about what he sees as a troubling contrast between Trump’s embrace of authoritarian leaders and his treatment of some of America’s democratic allies.
“I’m worried about the trend of spending more time with despots and less time with democratic leaders of nations,” Tillis told CBS News.
Xi received an extraordinary welcome during his first White House visit in more than a decade.
Trump personally traveled to Joint Base Andrews to greet Xi and his wife when they arrived Wednesday — an unusual presidential gesture.
The following day brought full military honors at the White House, bilateral talks and an elaborate state dinner attended by Cabinet officials, Supreme Court justices and some of America’s most powerful business and technology executives.
Trump repeatedly emphasized his personal relationship with Xi.
During the White House arrival ceremony, he described it as a “truly great friendship.”
But Tillis said he couldn’t reconcile that treatment with Trump’s past rhetoric about China — or with China’s current behavior.
“It’s not that Xi Jinping is coming here to learn how to become a democratic, capitalist nation,” Tillis said.
“Xi Jinping is trying to understand how his opposition will ultimately embrace their worldview.”
Tillis contrasted Xi’s red-carpet reception with Trump’s sometimes much more confrontational treatment of leaders from democratic allies, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
And his complaints didn’t stop with the optics.
Tillis pointed to China’s human-rights record involving Uyghurs, espionage concerns, alleged acquisition of U.S. voter data and reports concerning China’s relationship with Iran.
He also questioned why the Trump administration has held up an arms shipment to Taiwan.
For Tillis, the timing simply didn’t add up.
He called Xi’s visit “bad timing.”
But perhaps the most interesting part of his criticism was his acknowledgment that he doesn’t understand what caused Trump’s approach toward China to change so dramatically.
Trump campaigned for years as an aggressive China hawk.
During his first presidency and again after returning to office, he imposed sweeping tariffs and routinely portrayed China as one of America’s principal economic and strategic competitors.
Now Trump is publicly emphasizing friendship with Xi.
And Tillis wants to know what changed.
“The reality is, he was tough on China,” the Republican senator said.
Then he raised an intriguing possibility.
“I just don’t know what has changed.”
“Whatever has changed had to have been at a confidential level,” Tillis continued, “because I haven’t seen any public basis for the sea change that we see right now in our posture towards China.”
Tillis did not claim to know that some secret agreement or undisclosed event caused Trump’s shift.
His comment was explicitly speculation about what might explain a change that he says he cannot account for based on publicly available information.
Trump, meanwhile, has presented his warmer relationship with Xi as beneficial to the United States.
At Thursday night’s state dinner, Trump called for the two countries to build a relationship that promotes “prosperity and security for future generations.”
Xi said the two leaders had held “sincere and in-depth exchanges” and reached a “common understanding on many issues,” though he did not publicly detail those areas of agreement.
Tillis isn’t arguing that the United States shouldn’t maintain a relationship with China.
In fact, he explicitly said engagement can be productive.
His argument is that engagement shouldn’t mean ignoring conduct he believes Washington should confront.
“If we want to build a relationship, a productive relationship with Xi Jinping and China, we also have to hold him accountable for things that are just simply unacceptable,” Tillis said.
That makes his criticism notable.
This isn’t coming from a Democratic senator attacking Trump over China.
It’s coming from a Republican who told CBS that he supports Trump “the majority of the time.”
But after watching Trump roll out an extraordinary welcome for Xi Jinping, Tillis had a considerably less diplomatic description.
Three letters:
“WTF.”
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