President Trump said Thursday that a long-expected trade summit between himself and Chinese President Xi Jinping may not happen.
Negotiations were still ongoing, and several issues needed to be resolved before that could happen, he said.
“We’ll see if it happens,” the president told reporters Thursday at an Oval Office meeting with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He. “If we have a deal, there will be a summit. I would say we’ll know over the next four weeks. … If we have a deal, we’ll have a summit. If we don’t have a deal, we’re not going to have a summit.”
Trump said that the enforcement provisions of the eventual deal was the main remaining issue. “We’ve negotiated some of the tougher points, but we have a ways to go,” he said.
The administration has been seeking to set up the Trump-Xi meeting in Mar-a-Lago, Fla., but has pushed back plans as the negotiations have dragged on.
The talks have been snagged over issues of whether the Trump administration will lift trade sanctions before it has definitive confirmation that China has moved first to address U.S. concerns over its policies and whether Beijing will agree to allow the administration to immediately apply tariffs if it is deemed in violation of the terms of the deal.
The Trump administration last year placed tariffs of 10 to 25 percent on $250 billion worth of goods from China.
