President Donald Trump is being reprimanded by conservatives and Reagan Republicans for not defending the United States when President Xi Jinping reportedly referred to the U.S. as a “declining nation.”
Trump claimed Xi was referring to the U.S. under the Biden administration and said he agreed with Xi’s assessment.
“Two years ago, we were, in fact, a Nation in decline,” Trump wrote on social media, claiming the Chinese leader had congratulated him “on so many tremendous successes.”
Conservative commentator Jay Nordlinger, former senior editor of National Review, responded: “I don’t think a U.S. president should side with a Communist dictator and denigrate a former president. There was a time when most Republicans and conservatives would have agreed with this. I remember.”
There’s no way Ronald Reagan would have engaged in mutual smack talk putting down Jimmy Carter during negotiations with Gorbachev.
Yet another reason why Reagan will be remembered as one of the greats, and Trump will not be remembered for much more than an embarrassing episode… https://t.co/qoL6HnQygw
— Justin Stapley (@JustinWStapley) May 14, 2026
Constitutional scholar Justin Stapley, director of Utah’s Reagan Caucus, also replied: “There’s no way Ronald Reagan would have engaged in mutual smack talk putting down Jimmy Carter during negotiations with Gorbachev. Yet another reason why Reagan will be remembered as one of the greats, and Trump will not be remembered for much more than an embarrassing episode in American history.”
[NOTE: Conservative strategist Gregg Nunziata, who served as policy counsel to the Senate Republican Policy Committee, and later as general counsel and domestic policy adviser to then-Sen. Marco Rubio — in addition to serving in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division — amplified Stapley’s post and added, “What a demented thing for our president to say. I’m so America First that I think a foreign tyrant’s opinion of America’s performance is worth less than nothing, his professed esteem a scandal, not an honor.”]