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The Trump Xi Summit and the AI Race: Jim Pfaff on Lindell TV | Sep 23, 2026

Published: September 23, 2026
Network: Lindell TV
Analysis: Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff

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Xi Jinping was due at Joint Base Andrews that evening, and President Trump was going to greet him personally. On the September 23, 2026 edition of Lindell TV’s morning show, host Vanessa Broussard asked Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff what each side wants from the Trump Xi summit, with trade, Taiwan, artificial intelligence, China’s relationship with Iran and critical minerals all on the table. Pfaff’s answer was that China is facing the most serious competition from the United States it has faced in two or three decades, and that Trump intends to leave the White House talks with one message understood: China has to come to us. From there the conversation moved to Taiwan and TSMC, the AI race, the new Greenland security agreement, Zelensky’s energy-ceasefire offer, and a White House press pool that on this day included Lindell TV and not CNN.

Topics Covered

• What Trump Wants from the Trump Xi Summit
• Taiwan, TSMC and the Island of Formosa
• The AI Race, Open Source Models and Small Business
• The Greenland Agreement and the Land Shield
• Zelensky, the Energy Ceasefire and a Resolution by Winter
• Lindell TV in the Pool and Dispersing Media Power
• Key Takeaways

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What Trump Wants from the Trump Xi Summit

Pfaff started with China. For decades, he said, the United States just laid down. Since China received most favored nation status in 1999, American companies moved every bit of manufacturing they could over there to use cheap labor to build profit margins. He added that the country has retained a lot more manufacturing than is often discussed, but the loss ran deeper than factories. Early on, pound for pound, the Chinese worker at a lower cost per hour was not as productive as an American worker at a higher cost per hour, so the United States was siphoning off its productivity, and with it a lot of real wealth, to China.

Xi’s goal at the Trump Xi summit, in Pfaff’s reading, is to handle the first real competitive advantage the United States has asserted since Donald Trump came on the scene. Trump’s goal is to reassert American power and American economic domination. He will work to make deals and connections, Pfaff said, and he is not trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

“We’re not out to destroy you, but you’re definitely not going to have any advantages over us. We’re the players on the world scene. You got to come to us.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Some of what Trump asserts will become public after the meetings and some will not, he said. On the personal greeting at Joint Base Andrews, Broussard noted that Xi had greeted Trump when he landed in China earlier this year. Pfaff said the gesture fits how Trump works internationally: he will be gracious, thoughtful and serious. But this will not be the same kind of greeting Trump received in China, and that difference is part of the message: we are no longer going to be running to you for help.

Pfaff tied the summit to the hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine, now popularly called the Donroe Doctrine, is very clear, he said, and he guaranteed Trump will tell Xi that the United States will not put up with what China is doing in this hemisphere. The next test is Brazil. Pfaff said Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, is looking like he can beat Lula da Silva in the presidential election 12 days out. TCC has followed Beijing’s reach closer to home before, including in his earlier Worldview Tube analysis of the midterms, Iran and Canada-China.

“That would be the last major foothold taken away that China has in this hemisphere.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

He put Brazil inside a larger plan. Between the Iran situation and what Trump is doing with the EU, Pfaff said, Trump has had a very comprehensive plan to reorient the economic balance of power toward the United States and away from what had been an emerging Chinese dominance, or at least strong influence, on the international economic front.

Taiwan, TSMC and the Island of Formosa

Xi is expected to press Trump over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. Asked how much room Trump has to negotiate, Pfaff answered, “Quite a bit,” and pointed first to TSMC, the world’s largest chip manufacturer. Pfaff has been to its facility; he made a trip to Taiwan when he worked on Capitol Hill and spoke with Taiwan’s military generals. Trump urged TSMC to invest in the United States to hedge its bets. The company is keeping manufacturing capacity in Taiwan, Pfaff said, but its capacity here is growing significantly and is on a trajectory to get stronger.

The second point was arms. Pfaff does not think Trump will back down from arms sales to Taiwan unless there is a significant pullback in some key area related to China. Then he gave his own view, and labeled it as his own.

“I would want us to go to normal diplomatic relations with Taiwan. That’s my personal opinion. I don’t think this One China policy that Jimmy Carter asserted during his administration, which took away those direct diplomatic relations, I don’t think that was a wise move ever.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

What the United States did, he said, was concede everything to Communist China against the liberty that exists on the island of Formosa, modern-day Taiwan. He would like to see that change but does not expect it to change immediately. What he does expect is a stronger regional posture. Japan is building its military as an opposing force to China under what he called a very conservative prime minister with a great relationship with Trump, and he thinks Trump wants Taiwan to have the potential for an aggressive posture on its own behalf. He said Trump will find a way to do that without provoking a conflagration between Taiwan and China.

“I guarantee you that he’s not taking any military help to Taiwan off the table in any significant way unless there is some significant reposturing of the US-China relationship.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

The AI Race, Open Source Models and Small Business

Broussard noted that Trump has been vocal about artificial intelligence for the past two weeks and called it a race between the two countries. Pfaff said he had not verified it, but he hoped David Sacks, who served as AI czar and is not presently in the White House, would be there, because he considers AI one of the most significant diplomatic items at the Trump Xi summit.

He repeated an argument he has been making vocally: the claim that AI is going to kill us all is doomerism thrown out by people on the left, and some of the major frontier model companies want regulatory capture so they do not have to face competition from Chinese open source models or from American ones. Google and Meta both have significant, useful open-source models people can put into practice right now. He made the same case at length in his Carl Jackson Show conversation on open source AI and the funded doomerism campaign.

The payoff he described is for small and medium-sized businesses combining open-source models with frontier tools such as Claude or ChatGPT. The Conservative Caucus is using local models in its own processes, he said, and it will make a significant difference in the organization’s internal operations and in what it does every election season. More significant is the small business that makes a $10,000 to $20,000 investment, puts a couple of computers together, and serves its customers and improves its products more effectively.

Pfaff does not expect Trump to beat down China’s propagation of open source models, which can be run locally without telemetry to Beijing. What he expects is a clear statement to Xi.

“We’re not backing down on AI development in this country. We’re not going to hold it back. We’re not going to regulate it. And you need to be aware of that. And we’re going to beat you on that scene.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

He expects Trump to deliver a version of the same message to Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Sam Altman of OpenAI, whom he called the two biggest perpetrators of the internationalist regulatory system now being proposed: you are not going to get what you want. Pfaff applauded Trump’s commitment to leaving AI open for development and his commitment to data centers. Local communities need to determine where data centers are located, he said, but the fear, uncertainty and doubt thrown around about them does not hold up.

The Greenland Agreement and the Land Shield

Broussard turned to the UN General Assembly and the trilateral security agreement signed the day before among the United States, Denmark and Greenland. She was careful to say Trump did not acquire Greenland; the agreement gives the U.S. a more durable military role there. Pfaff said he had looked at the agreement and called it a very, very significantly positive outcome. He had no patience for the claim that Trump backed down.

“Anyone who makes that argument like he had to give up something that he really wanted is really absurd and frankly a bit obscene. And they’re not book readers because they obviously didn’t read Art of the Deal.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Trump went well beyond what he wanted, Pfaff said, talking about a 51st state and taking Greenland from Denmark, in order to back into an amazingly positive agreement. He listed the terms as he read them: it has no end date; it is very difficult to get out of; no other country can have a military presence there; economic provisions keep China, Russia or anyone else from building economic relations with Greenland; it reasserts NATO security provisions; and it lets the United States build bases on Greenland as it deems necessary to protect Greenland and the Western Hemisphere.

Then he told viewers to take a globe, put the North Pole in the center, and look at where Greenland sits relative to North America.

“It is nearly an entire land shield between the Eastern Hemisphere and the Western Hemisphere, as it covers over North America.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

Any nuclear weapon or ICBM fired from the Eastern Hemisphere goes over Greenland or close enough to be stopped, he said. China and Russia have nuclear weapons, and until the Iran war, Iran had a ballistic missile capability that was significant and growing. Iran lied about it, Pfaff said, until it fired missiles toward a base in the Indian Ocean that the United States has used jointly with Great Britain, which revealed that its capabilities were much bigger. The second reason is trade: sea lanes around Greenland are emerging because the North Pole area is more navigable than it has been in some time. Without a U.S. military presence, he said, China or Russia would take advantage of a future weaker president. That chance is now significantly reduced. Broussard added that the agreement also pushes forward development tied to the Golden Dome, which would detect missile threats.

Zelensky, the Energy Ceasefire and a Resolution by Winter

Broussard summarized Trump’s roughly 40-minute meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky: Ukraine is prepared to stop attacking Russian refineries and energy facilities if Russia stops attacking Ukraine’s electricity, heating, water and energy infrastructure, and Zelensky raised the possibility of an end to the war before winter. Pfaff said he finds Zelensky to be a relatively corrupt leader, while granting that he is an advocate for Ukraine and that he has no problem with Ukrainians defending themselves.

“But Zelensky wants this war to continue on. There’s a lot of money flowing into Ukraine.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

The Ukrainian military has been relatively effective against Russia, Pfaff said, making it almost as bad for Moscow as the Soviet Union’s failed war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. That history shapes Vladimir Putin’s position: there is appetite on his part to find an end, but not in any embarrassing fashion. And Ukraine, in Pfaff’s view, is not recovering the territory it has lost, mostly in the Donbas in eastern Ukraine. Either the war runs 10 or more years, which he prays it does not, and the Ukrainian military lacks the present ability to retake the land without NATO help that is not likely to come, or a peace deal leaves those territories with Russia.

“So one way or the other, they’re not getting those lands back. It’s just not happening. So the best course of action here is to stop the killing.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

He thinks a resolution by winter is possible. But on both Iran, as Trump indicated in his UN speech, and Ukraine, he said nobody will move until after the midterm election, because foreign leaders want to keep open the option of Trump being embarrassed by a Democrat Congress. That risk is real, Pfaff said, but Republicans can still keep Congress. The numbers he sees do not yet tell him Republicans will hold it; they tell him Republicans can under the right circumstances. That is why he does not expect movement on Russia and Ukraine until the end of the year.

Lindell TV in the Pool and Dispersing Media Power

Broussard laid out the week in media. On Friday, Trump removed CNN, Politico and MSNBC, now MS NOW, from the White House; on Monday they sued. The White House created Trump TV on YouTube to carry the feed, and smaller outlets moved up. That day, she said, Lindell TV was the pool for Xi’s landing at Joint Base Andrews, not Fox, CBS, NBC or CNN.

“I’m not a big fan of kicking any news outlet out of the White House, but what I do understand and I believe is going to be very useful in terms of what Donald Trump is doing is the continuing dispersal of media power outside of the main actors.”
— Jim Pfaff, President, The Conservative Caucus

The main actors, he said, have been largely useless. Even Fox News, with a lot of great personalities, has been really bad at what Roger Ailes did so well in getting Fox started: offering an honest alternative to the mainstream media. CNN in the early to mid-1990s was a lot closer to a real news organization even with a leftist orientation, Pfaff said, then radically transformed and eventually got rid of Lou Dobbs, whom he called one of the great patriots in the country and one of the great voices in media. Dobbs, he said, got the Maria Bartiromo treatment, and he pointed to what Fox is doing now.

Pfaff’s case is that Trump has brought more freedom of the press to Washington than the country has seen in a very long time, better even than the Reagan administration, which made Ronald Reagan available for tough questions. Sam Donaldson was Reagan’s Jim Acosta, he said, and far better than Acosta. Critics can fault this particular move, he allowed, but serious alternative outlets need the power dispersed away from the brokers who have always dominated. He said he prays for a Republican president elected in 2028 who does the same thing for less well-known outlets.

Key Takeaways

1. The summit message is “you got to come to us” – Pfaff expects Trump to use the Trump Xi summit to reassert American economic power after decades of manufacturing and productivity moving to China, without trying to destroy China.
2. The hemisphere is part of the deal – Under what Pfaff calls the Donroe Doctrine, Trump will tell Xi the U.S. will not tolerate China’s activity in this hemisphere, and a Flávio Bolsonaro win in Brazil would remove China’s last major foothold.
3. Taiwan’s military help stays on the table – Trump pushed TSMC to build in the United States, and Pfaff expects no significant retreat on Taiwan arms. His personal view: normal diplomatic relations with Taiwan and an end to the Carter-era concession.
4. No retreat on AI – Pfaff expects Trump to tell Xi the U.S. will not hold back or regulate AI development, and says open-source models from Google and Meta put real capability in the hands of small businesses.
5. Greenland is a strategic win – An agreement with no end date, U.S. basing rights, and a land shield across the polar missile routes and new sea lanes.
6. Ukraine will not get its land back – Pfaff says Zelensky wants the war to continue, the best course is to stop the killing, and nothing is likely to move until after the election.

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About The Conservative Caucus:
The Conservative Caucus is a grassroots public policy action organization, formed in 1974. Headed by President Jim Pfaff, the Caucus is committed to advancing free enterprise, limited government, and traditional values.

Originally broadcast Sep 23, 2026 on Lindell TV.