Trump chose a very unfortunate phrase to celebrate progress with China

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.
(Image credit: THOMAS PETER/AFP/Getty Images)

Near the start of a five-post thread on his Saturday trade talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Trump made an unfortunate phrasing decision on Twitter Monday morning:

The Great Leap Forward has been called the worst man-made disaster in world history. It led to mass-scale famine in China, starving tens of millions while millions more were executed or tortured to death by the state.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Trump's tweet does not indicate whether he realized the allusion he was making. But Factba.se — which offers a searchable database of all Trump's public comments as president — does not turn up any other instances in which he has used the phrase "leap forward."

Explore More
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.