President Donald Trump’s three-day visit to China last week appeared to be an awkward and cringeworthy affair for some top executives who accompanied him, an adviser said Tuesday.
Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior trade and manufacturing adviser, praised the state of U.S.-China relations during an interview Tuesday following the summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping but said the trip didn’t appear to be a pleasant experience for a few prominent CEOs involved, including Blackstone’s Steven Schwarzman and BlackRock’s Larry Fink, as well as billionaires Elon Musk and Tim Cook.
“The Schwarzmans and the Finks and the Musks and the Apple guys that go over there on that trip, I mean, that was embarrassing for those guys,” Navarro told CNBC during an interview. “They weren’t even let into the room at one point. The Chinese do not view those folks as anything more than useful idiots.”
Navarro, 76, did not accompany the Trump administration for the summit in China, the first visit by a sitting U.S. president in nearly a decade.
“They don’t have that kind of self-awareness, but that’s how they’re viewed,” Navarro said of the “useful idiots” characterization. “And it’s fraught when we take our technology over there. We should’ve learned that lesson 30 years ago, but we’re still trying to learn that lesson.”
Newsweek reached out to representatives at BlackRock, Blackstone, Apple and Tesla for comment on Tuesday.
Navarro also accused China of inviting the U.S. delegation to the country to gain an unfair advantage globally.
“They tell us they’re going to invite us over to the mainland and take our technology, digest it and spit us out—they tell us that,” Navarro said. “Yet [General Electric] goes over there and hands its technology over, Elon Musk goes over there and suddenly there’s a Chinese electric vehicle company that’s now the biggest in the world—not Tesla. Over and over again.”
Trump had said he planned to ask Xi to “open up China,” so that several tech, finance, agriculture and aerospace industry leaders accompanying him could “work their magic” during the meetings between Washington and Beijing. The group of executives included Apple’s Cook, as well as GE Aerospace CEO Henry Lawrence Culp, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta President Dina Powell McCormick.
Trump and Xi also “talked a whole night” during the summit about Taiwan, the self-ruled island and chipmaking powerhouse that Beijing considers the most important issue in its relationship with the United States, Navarro told Fox News on Saturday. Trump later criticized Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te, accusing him of seeking independence and potentially dragging the U.S. into conflict with China.
“Taiwanese people understand this is not the first time Trump has spoken in this way,” Domingo Yang, an assistant research fellow at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research and an adjunct assistant professor at National Chengchi University, told Newsweek on Monday. “He is probably speaking to a domestic audience and trying to project a tough stance.”
