Breitbart: Trump says Xi has invited him to China and he could visit as early as this year

Donald Trump assured in an interview granted exclusively to Breitbart that his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, has invited him to visit China and that the trip could even take place even this year. He further added that the leader of the Chinese Communist Party will also visit the US in "the not too distant future."

“[Xi] wants me to go there and he’s going to come [to the United States], We’re just going to work out dates, but we look forward to it, actually. It’s was one of the most incredible trips in my first term. It was, I think, maybe the most incredible trip—nobody’s ever seen—and Saudi Arabia was incredible also, particularly. Those two trips were—nobody’s ever seen anything like them. Very different, but equally incredible—but the China trip was, with the Great Wall, and I don’t think you were there but it was something that was unparalleled. There’s never been anything like it. They said they’re going to make it bigger and better this time. We’ll see what happens, but we’ll most likely be going to China in the not-too-distant future, maybe before this year is out—and he’ll be coming here.”

China's importance to the U.S., greater than that of the EU

In the interview, he again insisted on the importance of China for the U.S. economy, even above the agreement reached over the weekend with the European Union. Thus, he highlighted the fact that he has sent his own Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, to meetings with representatives of Beijing to ensure the presence of U.S. products in the markets of the Asian giant:

"We want to have them open up. We want to have—certain things we want to be fair. We’re getting along very well with China. The trade deal so far is good. I actually raised the tariffs—at one point they were 145 percent, which means you can’t do any business. But that was a little bit excessive to put it mildly. Basically that stopped trade between the United States and China for a month. That was not good for China. They had a tough period of time. They were losing factories, closing factories. I don’t want that to happen. We’re having very productive discussions with China, I can tell you. It’s a little bit different. China is different. The Europeans, interestingly, is the biggest trading deal but the China [deal] is very important to us."

"The biggest deal ever made"

In addition, Trump boasted of what he has achieved thanks to his aggressive trade policy with tariffs that has allowed him to create a new US-led global trade alliance that encompasses nearly 60% of global gross domestic product (GDP) and almost two billion people worldwide.

"It’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened. There’s never been anything like it. Just the deal with Europe, if you look at that deal, that deal is bigger than any deal that’s ever been made. But the biggest deal of all is the deal on tariffs. If you look at the tariff deal—the whole concept of tariffs—which covers sort of everybody, the tariff deal we made is by far the biggest deal ever made. There’s never been a deal so big. You could buy IBM or one of our major companies a hundred times, maybe a thousand times, and it wouldn’t equate to the kind of numbers you’re talking about here. We’re taking in—the United States is becoming very rich, very fast. We’re taking in hundreds of billions of dollars. You saw last month we had a surplus of $26 billion and everyone said: ‘Where did that come from?’ I said, ‘It came from tariffs.’ We had a surplus for the first time in 40 years, of $26 billion. Everyone is wondering where did this come from? When I was in Saudi Arabia, the king and also other people throughout at NATO and other places—the head of Qatar also and the head of UAE—and the king in that particular region, they all said almost the same words. They said, ‘one year ago, your country was dead.’ They actually said ‘dead.’ We had a dead country. Our country was maybe not going to make it. They said ‘now you have the hottest country in the world.’ It’s only been six months."

"This money that's coming in is at levels no one has ever seen before"

Trump also took the opportunity to point to pundits who criticized his tariffs when the trade war began, accusing them of not really understanding what he was after and noted that several of these economists "have already apologized" after seeing the results he is getting:

"Many of them didn’t understand tariffs. Even economists didn’t understand. It’s a negotiation basically. You say you are going to pay X percent on any product that you put into our country—they’re taking our jobs, they’re closing our plants when they do this, and they have to pay a price for it. So, our country was the richest from 1870 to around 1913. Proportionally, it was the richest. That was a Golden Age in a sense. We were so rich and we had so much money we didn’t know what to do with it. That was when we had a tariff country. We took money from outside countries. Then, stupidly, in 1913, they went to an income tax system. The rest is history. You know, look, it’s done fine but we owe $36 trillion. You wouldn’t owe $36 trillion with tariffs. We will be paying off debt and we will be doing a lot of things with this money. This money that’s coming in is at levels that nobody has ever seen before. Our country has never seen money—and you cover it better than anybody—our country has never seen money come in at this level. Would you agree?"