Donald Trump has brought out his granddaughter to impress his Chinese counterpart.
Arabella Kushner, 15, the daughter of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, was front and center as Xi Jinping arrived at the White House on Thursday. The move was “likely” intentional, according to the Daily Mail.
The teenager speaks fluent Mandarin and has been deployed during Trump-Xi meetings for years. And she even attended the state dinner her grandfather hosted for the communist leader on Thursday evening.
In photos posted to Instagram by Lara Trump, the wife of Arabella’s uncle Eric, the youngster was seen in a black floor-length ball gown, posing alongside Lara, Tiffany Trump, and Ivanka.
Arabella has a history of being deployed to flatter Xi. During a 2017 visit to Beijing, Trump showed Xi a video of her dressed in a qipao, a traditional silk dress, while singing and reciting ancient Chinese poetry. The clip took the country by storm, and Xi said the performance deserved an “A-plus.”
It is unclear whether Arabella spoke directly with Xi or China’s first lady, Peng Liyuan, on Thursday. Before the dinner, she was pictured wearing a cream floor-length dress as she and her mother stood with Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha, as the Chinese delegation arrived to huge pageantry.
She then took a front-row seat alongside political heavyweights including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as her grandfather and Xi delivered remarks.
Arabella began learning Mandarin at 18 months old. She and her younger brothers, Joseph and Theodore, studied the language with the family’s Chinese nanny and at school—and she has long been her grandfather’s not-so-secret weapon for charming Beijing.
Ivanka, then a senior White House adviser during Trump’s first term, started sharing clips of her daughter singing in Xi’s native tongue when Arabella was just 5. In early 2017, Arabella sang for Xi in person when he visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Later that year, when Trump traveled to Beijing for a state dinner, he brought along a tablet loaded with a clip of Arabella greeting Xi and Liyuan.
“Hello, Grandpa Xi. Hello, Grandma Peng,” she said, standing in front of an American flag, before launching into a traditional Chinese folk song about the country’s rural climes. “Our fields, beautiful fields, the jade green river flows past sweeping rice fields; the sweeping rice fields are like a swinging ocean,” she sang.
The clip was later broadcast on giant screens during the state dinner.
On Thursday, Ivanka, 44, sat next to her daughter and the Vances—in a seat closer to the action than Cabinet officials including Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Hegseth.
The Trump-Kushner family has reportedly marked Lunar New Year for years. In February, Ivanka wrote a lengthy social media post celebrating “The Year of the Fire Horse,” saying the year “calls us to courage, to energy, to intention, and to fearless creation,” and that she was “stepping into it with clarity and conviction, ready to bring forward projects I have been quietly nurturing, ideas nearly ready to meet the light.”
Trump, meanwhile, has been trying to flatter his Chinese counterpart. In a Truth Social post on Thursday, the president complimented Xi and his wife’s appearance, writing, “I met President Xi at the plane (Airport!) yesterday and he looks strong, vibrant, and fit — Better than ever. Madam Xi, of course, BEAUTIFUL!”
