Xi Came to Washington. The Internet Remembers the Flinch.

A cartoon parody song about the week Xi Jinping came to Washington for the first White House state visit in over a decade — and about the three seconds of it the internet kept.

Xi's trip was his first to Washington in 11 years, and the arrival on the Wednesday came with a red carpet at Joint Base Andrews, an honor guard, and a pair of B-1 bombers overhead. Trump, saluting with a gloved hand raised to his brow, glanced up and then closed his eyes in a wince; Xi stood through the flyover without moving. The clip was a meme before the visit was over — the joke being that a president who posts pictures of himself in a military uniform had just been photographed flinching at his own air force. 1

The rest of the visit was staged at the level of a coronation. Trump had taken the unusual step of meeting Xi and his wife at the airport himself rather than waiting for the formal White House welcome; Thursday brought a Rose Garden military review and a state dinner in the East Room, with red tablecloths, Reagan-era red china, a first course of yellow squash velouté, a main of sesame-crusted sea bass with braised baby bok choy, and ice cream made with honey harvested from the White House. The guest list ran past 130 and included Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, three Supreme Court justices and most of the cabinet. Trump gave Xi a large bronze bald eagle, and then went off script to invite the entire room to tour the construction site of his South Lawn ballroom afterwards: "you'll be the first people to step foot on that." 2

The toasts were warm. "We've never gotten along better," Trump said, adding that the two countries have "different systems" but that ties between their people endure. Xi welcomed an "historic juncture" in the relationship and said artificial intelligence should develop "always under human control." 3

On the questions actually dividing the two countries, there was little to announce. The tariff truce had been extended by two months earlier in the week with no broader deal, no breakthrough was reported on Iran, and the $14 billion arms package for Taiwan that Trump paused in May is still paused. Republican Senator Roger Wicker said that had the White House asked his advice, he would have suggested the president not invite Xi to Washington for such a lavish welcome; Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen said Trump "always deludes himself into thinking that, by ingratiating himself with authoritarians, he's somehow going to get his way." 4

Not everyone in the president's own party was charmed either: Republican Senator Thom Tillis called the visit "a WTF moment." And the press fight continued around it — CNN, MS NOW and Politico had been barred from the White House the previous week, a federal judge had ordered their access restored, and the five-network television pool declined to cover the president's movements while CNN's return to the rotation stayed unguaranteed. Trump posted that the two networks had "refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years… Actually made for Television." 5

The song and every frame of the cartoon are original to this episode.