Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary appears to have gotten into a confrontation with state security guards during the president’s rocky trip to China last week.
Footage circulating online appears to show Scott Bessent being stopped outside the Great Hall of the People, one of the Chinese Communist Party’s chief government buildings in Beijing, ahead of a state banquet held in Trump’s honor at the venue on Thursday.
The guards seem to be pointing out that Bessent isn’t wearing what was likely an entry or clearance pin on his suit after blocking him at the door. After a brief conversation, he is handed an item by his aides and then allowed into the building.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Treasury for comment about the incident. It followed a similar altercation earlier that day, when Chinese security guards prevented a U.S. Secret Service agent from going inside the capital city’s Temple of Heaven religious complex while carrying a gun.
White House reporters traveling with the U.S. guard said that entry into the site, where Trump was meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, was delayed for an “intense” half-hour, with rival security officials on both sides refusing to step down.
“A compromise was eventually found,” AFP White House correspondent Danny Kemp later reported, without providing further details.
Both tense exchanges came amid a slew of other gaffes, misfires, and blunders during the whirlwind two-day trip, which had originally been scheduled for April but was delayed due to regional security concerns sparked by Trump’s war with Iran.
Trump landed Wednesday night and was met on the tarmac not by Xi, but rather by Vice President Han Zheng. He also made the trip without First Lady Melania Trump, who accompanied him on his last visit to the country in 2017, during his first term.
Closed-door discussions between Trump and Xi are alleged to have been fractious. Time reported that Xi gave a “stinging rebuke regarding American arms sales to Taiwan,” a country in the Western Pacific to which China has long maintained a claim. He even went so far as to warn that the U.S. and China could “collide or even enter into conflict” over the island nation.
Trump has since sought to frame a pending $14 billion arms shipment to Taiwan as a “negotiating chip” and stressed that “I haven’t approved it yet.” He was nevertheless eager to insist he’d maintained the upper hand during those talks, telling reporters aboard Air Force One on the return journey that he’d told Xi it was fine for China to spy on the U.S., because “we spy like hell on them too.”
The president has also faced conflict-of-interest accusations over the trip, given that he was accompanied by his son Eric Trump, as well as MAGA-aligned businessmen, including NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
Musk himself drew fire for what critics describe as erratic behavior during the official visit, in particular by making bizarre faces while posing for selfies during Thursday’s state banquet.
