Donald Trump ‘pictured Xi Jinping as a woman’ to help pronounce his name before 2017 summit
Trump required ‘some tutoring’ with regard to the family name of his Chinese counterpart before their summit last year, White House expose claims
The solution? Think of him as a woman.
That, according to Michael Wolff’s explosive insider account of Trump’s White House, is the advice aides gave the US president as he prepared for a crunch two-day summit with the Communist Party leader at his Mar-a-Lago estate in April last year.
Wolff’s book, obtained this week by The Guardian and set for publication on Friday, describes how Trump required “some tutoring” with regard to the family name of his Chinese counterpart, which is roughly pronounced “shee”. Not known for his linguistic talents, Trump was instead prone to call the leader of the world’s No 2 economy “Mr X-i”.
To avoid such gaffes during Xi’s visit, “the president was told to think of him as a woman and call him ‘she’,” Wolff claims in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.
Watch: China-US relations in the Trump era