Trump asked Xi Jinping whether China would like to buy American weapons. His ambassador to China, David Perdue, said so on Fox News on Sunday. "But President Trump continues to say, 'Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world,'" Perdue said. "He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some, at one point." Perdue did not say when.
The State Department contradicted him within hours. "US law prohibits arms sales to China and there is no offer or plan to sell arms to China," it said in a statement carried by the Guardian. The White House joked about it, the AP reported. So either Perdue, a former senator and Trump loyalist, invented the exchange, or the president floated a sale his own government is barred from making.
Perdue told the story to prove Trump is tough on Taiwan. Trump, he said, "is as strong on Taiwan as I've ever seen anybody." His evidence was that Trump offered to sell weapons to Beijing.
Trump met Xi on the tarmac last week and renamed his ballroom the "Great Hall of the USA" in Xi's honor, as Narativ reported on Thursday. On Monday Chinese state media praised the "extraordinary level of courtesy." The arms offer is what the courtesy looked like in private.
Perdue kept talking. Taiwan is still waiting.
