Why Trump gave Xi an ornate bald eagle statue at the state dinner

Why Trump presented Xi with an ornate bald eagle statue at the state dinner

President Trump said he and First Lady Melania helped design the statue

US President Donald Trump gave Chinese President Xi Jinping a sculpture of a bald eagle, a bird native to North America and the national symbol of his country, at a lavish state dinner in Washington.

Trump said the gift, unveiled before VIP guests at Thursday’s dinner, represents “the free and soaring spirit of America.”

He said he and First Lady Melania Trump took part in designing it. The statue is part of a valuable — though sometimes complicated — part of international diplomacy: gift-giving.

Such presents are a small but significant part of the broader goal of Xi and Trump’s three-day summit: building personal ties between the leaders of two global superpowers.

“They’re going to discuss all of these complicated issues,” Daniel Kritenbrink, partner at The Asia Group, says. “But at the end of the day, these are still two human beings.

“So that personal relationship means something,” he says. “I think the gift exchange is one key part of that.”

Kritenbrink, who spent more than 30 years as a US diplomat, mostly in Asia, says personal relationships matter especially to Xi.

He believes the direct Trump-Xi bond is the glue holding together “the most complex and the most consequential relationship in the world”.

He says Trump also values what Kritenbrink calls “leader-level diplomacy”.

Gifts have played a distinctive role in the Trump presidency.

The US president has received a luxury jumbo jet, an engraved gold bar, a diamond- and jewel-encrusted gold ring, and more.

Ole Jacob Sending of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs says: “You think about the Trump presidency in that way, I think gift giving, certainly broadly defined, is very much part of how he operates.”

On Thursday morning, Xi announced a gift of two Chinese pandas to a zoo in Atlanta, along with a new student exchange programme that will bring 100,000 US students to study in China over five years.

“The giant panda have been an envoy of friendship between the Chinese and the Americans,” Xi said. “In a few days, two pandas - Ping Ping and Fu Shuang - will come to their new home in Zoo Atlanta and meet with the American people.”

It is unclear whether he offered any additional gifts.

Today, lavish gift-giving is mostly found in Gulf states and autocratic governments.

“Autocracies like China give much more expensive gifts,” says Morten Skumsrud Anderson, who co-authored a study on diplomacy and gifts with Sending.

In the West, Anderson says, the tradition has been reduced by democratic safeguards and restrictions.

For instance, the US Constitution includes an emoluments clause that sets a dollar limit on gifts a president may accept from a foreign government.

At present, that limit is $525 (£397). Anything above that becomes federal property, unless the president decides to buy it back with personal funds.

Also, if a gift exceeds a certain amount, a US president would need to go through Congress, unless he were paying for it himself.

“There are a lot of rules and protocols involved,” Sending says. “A lot of thought and process relating to what type of gift to to give, where should the gift exchange happen? How should it happen? When?

“All of this is highly scripted, and involves negotiation at lower levels that goes on for weeks and weeks in advance,” Sending says.

Anderson adds: “This is not a last-minute purchase at the airport.”

During Xi’s state visit to the US in 2013, then-President Barack Obama gave him an inscribed bench made of redwood, native to California, where the two had met. They sat on it together afterward, smiling for cameras.

That was a more polished example than in 2009, when then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave Obama an ornamental desk pen holder made from the timbers of a historic anti-slave ship; Obama, in turn, gave Brown a set of DVDs, which reportedly were not formatted for UK DVD players.

“That’s one example of a kind of an embarrassing exchange,” Sending says.

Fortunately, Brown and Obama were allied leaders rather than deep rivals trying to resolve seemingly intractable differences.

“You don’t want to mess up,” Sending says, adding that the wrong gift could potentially derail broader goals.

In this case, a great deal is potentially at stake between Trump and Xi.

Their third face-to-face meeting since the start of Trump’s second term, the summit is taking place amid rising fears of an AI-led apocalypse as both countries compete for dominance in the fast-growing industry.

It is also happening after a bitter US-China trade war that has only been eased by a temporary truce, extended on this trip.

So, let the military plane flyovers, cue the performances, fill the wine glasses, Kritenbrink says. Exchange the gifts.

“It’s protocol and it’s optics and it’s gift giving all as a means to an end, which is stable US-China relations,” Kritenbrink says.

“I’ll take a fragile truce over a white-hot trade war any day of the week.”