His Own Ambassador to China Revealed on Fox News That Trump, Around Xi Jinping's State Visit, Offered to Sell U.S. Weapons to China — the Adversary the Entire American Defense Posture Is Built to Counter, and to Which Arms Sales Are Illegal Under a Ban in Place Since 1989 — a Casual "Would He Like to Buy Some" Pitch That the State Department Immediately Denied and That Analysts Called "Insane" and "Unsettling" to the Allies at "the Pointy Edge of China's Spear"

There is one country the United States military spends most of its strategy, its budget, and its alliances preparing to deter, and it is China. So there are few sentences a president could utter that would land more strangely on America's allies than an offer to sell that country weapons. According to Trump's own ambassador, he uttered it — casually, to Xi Jinping's face, and apparently more than once.

What the ambassador said

The disclosure came not from a critic but from David Perdue, the U.S. ambassador to China, in a friendly appearance on Fox News on September 28, 2026, days after Trump hosted Xi Jinping for a state visit. Perdue offered it as a compliment to the president's salesmanship: Trump "continues to say, 'Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world.' He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some, at one point." The context, per the reporting, was Chinese irritation over U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan — the self-governing island Beijing threatens to seize. In other words, confronted with China's complaint about America arming Taiwan, Trump's response was to offer to arm China too.

Problem one: it's illegal

Begin with the plain legal fact, because it is dispositive. The United States has banned arms sales to China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre; it is not a matter of policy preference but of law. That is why, when Perdue's comments circulated, the State Department did not defend the idea — it denied it existed, stating that "U.S. law prohibits arms sales to China and there is no offer or plan to sell arms to China." So the administration is in the awkward position of having its own ambassador describe, as a selling point, a presidential overture that its own diplomats insist is illegal and never happened. Either the president floated something forbidden by law, or the ambassador misrepresented him on television. Neither is reassuring, and both are the administration's to explain.

Problem two: it is strategically incoherent

Set the legality aside and the offer is still alarming, because of what it signals. China is the pacing threat — the adversary against which the Pentagon plans, and the reason the United States maintains alliances with Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Australia. The entire logic of American power in the Pacific is that Washington helps its partners defend themselves against Beijing and does not strengthen Beijing's ability to coerce them. For a president to respond to China's objection over Taiwan arms by offering to sell weapons to China is to treat the most consequential strategic rivalry on earth as a swap meet — as if the security of allied nations were a bargaining chip to be traded for a deal with Xi. Analysts said as much: Ryan Hass of the Brookings Institution warned the offer "will be unsettling to American partners at the pointy edge of China's spear," and Benedict Rogers of Hong Kong Watch said, "If the Ambassador is telling the truth, then this is insane." When your partners are the ones China points its missiles at, hearing that the American president offered to sell China arms is not a rounding error; it is a reason to doubt the guarantee their safety rests on.

Joke, gambit, or serious — it still counts

In fairness, it is genuinely unclear how serious the offer was. It may have been a flippant aside, a negotiator's provocation, or a real notion the State Department then buried; observers openly debated whether it was "a joke, a gambit or something more." That ambiguity is worth stating. But it does not rescue the moment, for two reasons. First, allies do not get to know which of Trump's musings are jokes; they have to plan against the possibility that any of them is real, and a president who jokes about arming their enemy has already imposed a cost in trust. Second, the remark was not a leaked hot mic — it was volunteered by the U.S. ambassador to China, on television, as an example of the president's skill. When your own diplomatic corps is proudly broadcasting that you offered to sell weapons to Xi Jinping, the problem is not that a private thought escaped; it is that the administration does not recognize the offer as a problem at all.

Why it belongs here

This fits a pattern this archive has tracked in Trump's foreign policy: a transactional instinct that flatters adversaries and unsettles friends. He praised Kim Jong Un and gutted joint exercises with South Korea; he stood beside Vladimir Putin and doubted his own intelligence agencies; he launched and mismanaged a war with Iran that alienated allies and empowered rivals. The offer to sell arms to China is the same reflex aimed at the biggest target: an approach to the world in which alliances are burdens, adversaries are potential customers, and the accumulated strategy of decades is something to be improvised over at a state dinner. Whether or not a single weapon is ever sold to Beijing — and the law says none can be — the message was sent, by the president and amplified by his ambassador: to the nations living under the shadow of China's military, that the country they count on to have their backs just offered to sell guns to the shadow.