President Donald Trump on Thursday answered he would not meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping before the March 2 deadline to reach a Chinese-U.S. trade administer.
Trump’s remarks came hours after CNBC reported, citing a senior administration official, that it was “tremendously unlikely” for the meeting to happen in the coming weeks.
While Trump and Xi are still expected to meet eventually, there’s too much go well to do to flesh out a deal with China and prepare Trump for a high-stakes meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Trump’s apex with Kim is set for Feb. 27-28.
Trump and Xi may still meet “shortly thereafter” March 2, said the official, who requested anonymity, citing a insufficiency of authorization to speak publicly about the talks.
Later Thursday, when asked whether he would meet the Chinese conductor, Trump said: “Not yet.” Pressed further on whether he would meet Xi before the March deadline, Trump said “no” and gyrate his head.
White House officials have advised against merging the issues of China and North Korea, regard for China’s invitation for Xi and Trump to meet immediately following the Kim summit.
The administration official cautioned that the situation was protean and that the status of the meeting could change after a trade delegation travels to Beijing next week.
Trump’s top pecuniary advisor, Larry Kudlow, told reporters Thursday that he expects Xi and Trump to meet, but that when and where it cooks is still up in the air.
Earlier, Kudlow told Fox Business that there’s a “pretty sizable distance” to go on a potential trade bargain between the world’s two largest economies.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has said he and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin inclination make a recommendation to Trump on whether to agree to a summit after the two return from their trip to China next week. A delegation of U.S. surrogates will conduct talks beginning Monday, with Lighthizer and Mnuchin joining later in the week, according to an application official and a person briefed on the plan.
The question now is what happens to a tranche of tariffs in Chinese goods that is set to magnify automatically after March 1, in lieu of a presidential order. The likely outcome is that the tariffs remain at the common 10 percent rate, according to two administration officials and two people briefed by the White House.
The deadline was raised in a Feb. 6 briefing with the Senate Resources Committee. The information Lighthizer provided was “not very definitive,” according to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the committee’s chairman.
As segment of a broader deal, China is expected to require tariffs to be removed entirely, Lighthizer said, but he declined to say what make happen if a deal is not reached by the March 2 deadline.
The U.S. may also consider an alternative: a “snap-back,” in which certain tariffs are selectively rumbled back but could be reintroduced if China does not follow through, according to three people briefed by the administration.