Bolton: ‘Trump just wants to announce deals’ during Xi visit

John Bolton, President Trump’s former national security adviser, said Wednesday Trump “just wants to announce deals” during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to the White House.

In an interview on NewsNation, host Leland Vittert asked Bolton if Americans should believe the outcomes or announcements from meetings between Chinese and U.S. leaders.

“Not really until you see it become operational,” Bolton said. “There are serious issues here that I can guarantee Xi Jinping has come fully prepared on each and every one of them. He knows what he thinks China’s interests are. Trump just wants to announce deals.”

“Whether the deals happen or not is really secondary. Many of them couldn’t happen just because of their complexity until after he leaves office. And if they don’t happen, he’ll just blame it on somebody else,” he continued.

Bolton added that “meetings per se don’t do anything” and that it should be more of “a question of what they produce.”

During Xi’s visit to the nation’s capital , he and U.S. officials are expected to discuss trade and the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence industry .

The visit comes less than two months before a Nov. 10 deadline to extend the current trade truce from last year, which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday would now extend until January.

It is also the Chinese leader’s first state visit to the U.S. in more than a decade.

Bolton said the focus “dealing with the Chinese on AI is a fool’s air” as “they’re not worried about the doomsday scenarios that I think are motivating a lot of the calls in the U.S. for regulation of AI.”

“I think we’re missing what the Chinese agenda is,” Bolton added.

Trump stated on social media Thursday that artificial intelligence “will be a big topic of discussion, but I want to leave it exactly where it is. That is China’s position also. Our guardrail is the DOJ [Department of Justice]!”

He contrasts warnings from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei who urged global cooperation on AI safeguards during their speeches at the United Nations Security Council.