The president of the United States, Donald Trump, wanted to impress Xi Jinping with a day of pomp and tinsel on the Chinese leader's first visit to the White House in eleven years, and saved the main course for last: a state banquet for 134 guests, with nods to both cultures and a long cast of personalities. And in which there was no allusion in the speeches, in the toast or in the cordial greetings among the guests, to the important tensions in key areas of the most important bilateral relationship in the world: neither to artificial intelligence nor to the fragile tariff truce momentarily extended.
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