In this week’s edition of dinner parties your roving correspondent can only dream of being invited to: the state banquet held by Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., for Chinese president Xi Jinping, which was attended by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and several other famous names. The menu included sea bass with braised bok choy, and a vanilla crémeux for dessert (surely a Big Mac Meal would have been more authentically Trumpian), and was held against the backdrop of what seems to have been a successful state visit, with agreements reached around the simmering down of the US-China trade war and the two presidents generally seeming to get on as well as could be hoped.
What most caught Rakewell’s eye, however, was the exchange of diplomatic gifts that took place. As many a Chinese premier has done over the years, Xi announced the loan of two pandas to the United States. Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, who will arrive at Zoo Atlanta in the coming days, will be the first Chinese diplomatic pandas to reside there since October 2024, when a family of pandas was recalled to Beijing amid ongoing tensions between the two countries. Rakewell notes that Fu Shuang translates to ‘double blessing’ while Ping Ping means ‘peace’ or ‘calm’ – no doubt in honour of the twice-elected and famously anti-war US president.
In return, Trump gave his counterpart a statue of a bald eagle, which he said was ‘made by an extraordinary American artist, one of the greatest in the world, and designed in personal collaboration with Melania and myself’. It is not the first time a world leader has used his artistic skills in diplomacy: Winston Churchill, for one, gave FDR a painting he had made of Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakech in 1943. The work – which is not as bad as its description might suggest – ended up in Angelina Jolie’s private collection, from where it was sold in 2021 for £8.2m to another collector.
Trump’s eagle raises several questions, though. What exactly was his input in the design? And who is that great artist? It’s hard to make the case – admittedly looking at it in the slightly grainy press photos – that it is a beautiful object. It’s massive, for a start (taller than Trump on its plinth) and shows a bald eagle, one of the five US national symbols, sitting atop an oddly unrealistic tree branch. If Xi’s artistic tastes are any more developed than Trump’s, then the US president’s hope that it ‘will find a nice place, a wonderful place’ back in China may not come to pass. Look closer, though, and that curved branch starts to look a little like a snake, which gives the whole thing a surely unintentional resemblance to the national symbol of Mexico, an eagle devouring a rattlesnake – an amusing prospect given the supreme disdain Trump holds for the neighbouring country. Or perhaps it wasn’t unintentional at all: maybe the ‘extraordinary artist’ is Mexican and this statue, a Trojan eagle, if you will, is their magnum opus.
