Trump says whatever will get him attention. He’s an illiterate. He has no knowledge of geopolitics. Xi Jinping, whatever his faults, understands the issues. Many people, including me, couldn’t believe a man as stupid as Trump would become President. Do you believe Trump understands how tariffs work? He doesn’t. Xi wrote a 500-page book. Trump has never written a single page of policy analysis.

What Xi was blindsided by was his expectation that he could play the rational debate game with the U.S. under Trump’s administration. That China could get business interests in the U.S. to get Trump to shut up. I would have thought the same.

Although I detest Trump, he said what many in the U.S. wanted to say to China but couldn’t because, well, they were just too educated and polite. Or they didn’t want to lose money from the disruptions.
Trump didn’t want to talk about anything. Someone whispered in his ear about IP theft. He said it at a rally. Everyone cheered. So he said do that thing to China that screws with them and makes me popular.
Trump was very useful because actually did something while intelligent people could say, “what can we do? He’s President. We didn’t vote for him.”

Trump was all of America saying to China, we’ve had enough. We can’t talk to you rationally so you have to deal with one of our nutjobs. Maybe Xi wasn’t surprised. I sure was!!! In a weird way, Trump WAS the voice of all Americans. My Democrat friends would disown me for saying that ;)