Culture
Trump Tells Press Xi Jinping Is Personally Very Knowledgeable About Granite
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The United States and China did not resolve their trade war on Tuesday. They did not agree on Taiwan, on fentanyl, on semiconductor exports, or on the six other agenda items that two hundred combined staff members had spent fourteen months preparing briefing documents for.
What they did establish, on the record, before the assembled press corps, is that Xi Jinping knows a lot about granite.
"He likes granite," President Trump said, apparently moved to share this. "He's an expert on stone." The president gestured broadly. Reporters wrote it down.
The remark came after Trump took Xi on a personal tour of the White House helipad, which is concrete, not granite, a detail nobody mentioned because the moment had already exceeded the available frameworks for analysis.
Sources familiar with the visit say Trump was "very enthusiastic" about showing Xi the helipad, describing it as one of the best helipads he has seen, including the ones he owns. Xi, for his part, reportedly nodded. Trump interpreted this as connoisseurship.
"He really looked at it," Trump told reporters. "He studied it. Most people don't study it like that."
The Chinese delegation has not commented on Xi's geological interests or confirmed whether he holds any formal credentials in the stone sciences. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement describing the meeting as "productive and forward-looking," which is the diplomatic equivalent of saying the dinner was fine and you are never going back to that restaurant.
Former National Security Advisor John Bolton, reached for comment, said he was not going to comment and then commented for eleven minutes.
Marco Rubio, who was present at the summit in his capacity as Secretary of State and who spent three years calling Xi Jinping a threat to the free world, stood slightly to the left in the photographs and did not appear to be processing the granite portion of the afternoon in real time.
Policy analysts at Brookings, the Council on Foreign Relations, and one extremely tired person at the State Department's East Asia desk have begun the work of contextualizing what it means for the leader of the People's Republic of China to be publicly credentialed, by the President of the United States, as someone who understands rocks.
The early read is that it means nothing, except that it happened, and was said aloud, into microphones, and is now part of the historical record of American foreign policy alongside the Monroe Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.
A follow-up bilateral on semiconductors is tentatively scheduled for Thursday. The agenda does not currently include a materials science component, but the week is young.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-meeting-china-xi-jinping-weird-1235631237/