“They had a meeting this morning,” Trump told reporters, declining to say to whom he was referring. “It doesn’t matter who ‘they’ is. We may reveal it later, but they had meetings this morning, and we’ve been meeting with China.”
China on Thursday said it had not held trade talks with Washington despite repeated comments from the US government suggesting there had been engagement.
“China and the United States have not conducted consultations or negotiations on tariffs, let alone reached an agreement,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun told reporters at a news briefing, calling reports of such information “fake news”.
I considered a possibility that he says that Taiwan is the real Chinese government. It seems too unlikely.
I think it’s more likely that he’s just lying entirely to save face. He realized that China isn’t going to negotiate but the tariffs are hurting the US. So he drops the tariffs and pretends he came to a great deal.
Third possible scenario. He says that he’s negotiating with China. Trump doesn’t lift the tariffs. He says that China won’t come to a deal. US goes into a recession. Trump blames China for the recession.