When Donald Trump Remembered Firing Missiles on Syria As He Enjoyed a Chocolate Cake at State Dinner

In the early hours of Friday morning Syrian time in 2017, the US fired fifty-nine Tomahawk cruise missiles from the destroyers USS Ross and Porter in the eastern Mediterranean. They struck the Shayrat airbase, which is close to the city of Homs in central Syria. At the beginning of a two-day bridge-building session, former president Donald Trump gave his firsthand account of how he had informed Xi Jinping. The two were dining at his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago. According to The Guardian, at that time, Trump stated the following to Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business when they were talking about a foreign development: “I was sitting at the table. We had finished dinner. We are now having dessert. And we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you have ever seen. And President Xi was enjoying it."

“And I was given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded. What do you do? And we decided to do it. So the missiles were on the way.“And I said: "Mr. President, let me explain something to you … we’ve just launched 59 missiles, heading to Iraq [sic] … heading toward Syria and I want you to know that." Trump continued, “I didn’t want him to go home … and then they say: ‘You know the guy you just had dinner with just attacked Syria.’” However, the Republican leader committed a grave error by failing to mention the targeted nation's name when briefing the Fox News correspondent. As per Mashable, He continued: "I said, 'We've just launched 59 missiles heading to Iraq.'" That is when Bartiromo interrupted to correct him. "Heading to Syria," she prompted. "Yes, heading toward Syria," Trump stated as he fixed the mistake.

When questioned about how President Xi of China and Russia had responded to the continuous blocking of UN resolutions aimed against the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Trump said: “He paused for 10 seconds and then he asked the interpreter to please say it again – I didn’t think that was a good sign.” “And he said to me, anybody that uses gases – you could almost say, or anything else – but anybody that was so brutal and uses gases to do that to young children and babies, it’s ok. He was okay with it. He was okay.”  China had attempted to depict the summit as a huge success, even though there had been months of hostility between Beijing and Trump's administration back then. 

“The meetings, positive and fruitful, mark a new starting point for the world’s most important bilateral relationship,” China's official news agency, Xinhua, stated in a positive remark. Bill Bishop, a China specialist in Washington who keeps tabs on the nation's political landscape through his Sinocism newsletter had stated back then: “The Chinese have been a little bit worried about some kind of grand bargain where the US pivots away from Asia and creates some kind of alliance in Russia against China,” he said. “So anything, frankly, that increases tensions between the US and Russia and anything that perhaps drags America into a Middle Eastern quagmire is pretty good for China because the US is distracted." Meanwhile, Trump had alleged that he had made good ties with the Chinese president. He said: “I liked him. We had a great chemistry, I think … Maybe he didn’t like me but I think he liked me … we understand each other.”