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For Vickie and Jono
Introduction
At Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, it takes a while to make the chocolate cake. In pursuit of flourless chocolate sponge perfection, the pastry chef must first bring egg whites and sugar to medium-peak meringue before slowly adding the egg yolks. The Guayaquil mousse and vanilla punch also demand painstaking attention before they are combined with the chocolate sponge to yield the president’s favorite dessert.1 And no rendering of this sumptuous sweet was more important than the one plated on the evening of April 6, 2017. One slice in particular carried special importance, as it was carried through the grand dining room at the Florida luxury resort. That’s because it gently landed in front of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. Had he ever tasted anything like it in Beijing?
“I was sitting at the table. We had finished dinner. We’re now having dessert and we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen. And President Xi was enjoying it,” President Trump told Maria a few days later.2 Almost anyone would enjoy it, and the Chinese strongman certainly seemed to be enjoying his first visit to the United States since the inauguration of America’s new president. But Xi didn’t realize that while they were getting acquainted, his American host was planning to respond to a chemical attack by the Syrian government on its own citizens.
President Trump recalls that, during that cordial dinner with his Chinese guest at Mar-a-Lago, “I was given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded. What do you do? And we made a determination to do it. So the missiles were on the way. And I said, ‘Mr. President, let me explain something to you.’ ” Trump then informed Xi that fifty-nine missiles were in the air and headed for Syria.
Xi “paused for ten seconds and then he asked the interpreter to please say it again. I didn’t think that was a good sign,” says Trump. Given Beijing’s friendly relations with the Syrian regime, China’s top communist might have been expected to condemn the U.S. action. But then Xi said through the interpreter that it was acceptable to attack anybody who would use poison gas against children.
“Xi had planned a carefully crafted meeting of equals. Instead he was upstaged by a firepower demonstration,” observes Australia’s former ambassador to China, Geoff Raby.3 All fifty-nine U.S. missiles hit their intended targets. America’s new president had sent the world a message that he wasn’t afraid to exercise U.S. military force. The same message was delivered personally to the head of China’s Communist Party, but bundled with the additional note that Trump wanted to build a working relationship. Mr. Trump recalls that, after a productive day of meetings at Mar-a-Lago, he didn’t want Xi to return home and be told, “You know, the guy you just had dinner with just attacked a country.”
President Trump clearly understood the competitor he faced on the other side of the table. This would be the first of many negotiating dances the new American president would have with China’s dictator. Trump had been elected on a promise to “make America great again,” and a key part of his plan for U.S. economic revival was to change the trade relationship with China. Even if it went unmentioned over chocolate cake on that balmy night in Florida, Xi had plans of his own to make China the greatest of the world’s superpowers.
These days the mention of Xi Jinping doesn’t inspire thoughts of delicious cake but of a deadly virus which has ravaged the world. Its precise origins are still debated and many can’t help but wonder what exactly Xi’s government was cooking up inside its Wuhan virology lab in China’s Hubei province in 2019. Wuhan’s Huanan wet market, with its live exotic animals, was linked to early cases of the novel coronavirus and its deadly Covid-19 disease. But U.S. senator Tom Cotton of the Armed Services Committee says it’s important to keep investigating. “The virus went into that food market before it came out of that food market. So we don’t know where it originated. But we do know that we have to get to the bottom of that. We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety-level-four super-laboratory that researches human infectious diseases,” says the Arkansas Republican.4
Those inclined to believe in coincidences must also reckon with the fact that Xi’s regime hid the truth about the virus from its own people and the world for critical weeks, costing thousands of lives. The communist cover-up included the case of Dr. Li Wenliang, who had warned others of the new health threat before he was taken in by police, interrogated for spreading “rumors,” and forced to sign a document criticizing himself. Several weeks later the thirty-three-year-old ophthalmologist was dead from the coronavirus, leaving behind a young child and a pregnant wife.5
Almost three years before the world learned about one of China’s deadliest exports—and the deception surrounding it—Trump wanted to clarify that the United States had a new agenda and a new kind of leadership. The man sitting across the table from Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago and serving dessert was also making a display of American power that put the Chinese dictator on notice. Trump’s recounting of the meeting then offered the entire world an early window into this unconventional presidency.
The United
