Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
Donald Trump gushed about Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s looks and brains in an interview on Fox News.
He said Xi is “top of the line” and that there is no one in Hollywood who could play him in a movie.
Trump also called Xi’s translator a “beautiful female interpreter.”
Former President Donald Trump gushed about Chinese leader Xi Jinping in an interview on Fox News, calling him a “brilliant man” and praising his good looks.
During a sit-down interview on Tuesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked Trump how smart he thinks Xi is.
Trump replied: “Top of the line.”
“President Xi is a brilliant man. If you went all over Hollywood to look for somebody to play the role of President Xi, you couldn’t find it. There’s nobody like that. The look, the brain, the whole thing,” said Trump.
—Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 12, 2023
During the interview on Tuesday, the recently indicted ex-president also complimented one of Xi’s interpreters on her appearance.
Trump told Carlson that he knew what he was about to say was “very impolite and very politically incorrect,” but said it anyway.
“A beautiful female interpreter, she was very beautiful,” Trump said. “She was very professional. She spoke every word for him.”
—Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 12, 2023
Trump did not specify which interpreter of Xi’s he found attractive. Xi has been seen with both male and female interpreters over the years.
The Tuesday interview is one of the many times Trump has lauded Xi, who was handed an unprecedented third term as China’s president in March.
In a rally in Pennsylvania in September, he called both Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin “fierce” and added that Xi was “smart” to rule China with an “iron fist.”
And during a speech at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2020, Trump said that he and Xi “love each other,” per Politico.
Before Trump left office, he was also known to tweet praise about Xi on occasion.
In a February 2020 Twitter post — in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic — Trump praised Xi for being “strong, sharp and powerfully focused” on controlling the virus. Trump also boasted about his “very strong and personal relationship” with Xi in a December 2018 tweet.
Xi, in return, called Trump his “friend” at an economic forum in Russia in 2019, per Reuters.
Trump’s interview on Tuesday aired a week after he was arrested and charged in New York. On April 4, in a Manhattan courtroom, Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 low-level felony charges of falsifying business records.
The charges were filed against him by the Manhattan district attorney’s office in connection with a lengthy investigation into an election-eve hush money payment made to the porn star Stormy Daniels.
Representatives of Trump and the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment sent outside regular business hours.