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Trump and Xi: Strongmen at the Temple of Thymos

The ego-driven fragility of a world run by Xi Jinping and Donald Trump.

U.S. President Donald Trump tours the Temple of Heaven in Beijing with China’s President Xi Jinping, May 14, 2026.

When U.S. President Donald Trump made his second state visit to China in May 2026, Xi Jinping escorted him through Beijing’s magisterial Temple of Heaven, where the Ming and Qing emperors performed rites that mediated between heaven and the earthly order. But when these two men with autocratic impulses and outsized egos strolled through the complex, it became not a Temple of Heaven but a Temple of Thymos – a stage for distributing recognition rather than cosmic concerns. Now, the neoclassical architecture of the White House provides the set for their September 23–25 encounter. Readers of The Diplomat can find in it many articles on the “Thucydides Trap” popularized by the political scientist Graham Allison. The Thucydides Trap suggests that China and the United States are headed for inevitable conflict. Several scholars dispute Allison’s reading, and yet the ancient historian’s ghost still hovered as Xi and Trump moved through the temple, with the Chinese Communist Party’s general secretary, who has a pattern of citing Allison, even referencing the phrase.

I want to propose a lens for power rivalry that’s equally ancient but different and complementary: a Thymos Trap. 

Thymos – also rendered thumos – is an ancient Greek word (θυμός) that expresses the desire for recognition. Both Xi and Trump display an unquenchable thymos and take pains to appear outwardly strong. But in fact, countries led by strongmen who build regimes around their personalities are only outwardly magnificent. Internally, they tend to be precarious. Anyone who assumes that the superficial strength of such regimes and leaders makes them permanently durable may be falling into a Thymos Trap. As popularized by the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama, thymos is “the part of the soul that craves recognition of dignity.” It’s innate to all of us and not a marker of damaged, narcissistic men. But Fukuyama makes distinctions between isothymia (recognition as equal) and megalothymia (recognition as superior). The genius of liberal democracy is that it satisfies the human need for isothymia. But megalothymia can never be extinguished, because its fossil fuel is the trauma of prior humiliation, now powering a yearning for reversal. Nationalism can transfer that dynamic from individual to nation: Xi wears it on his sleeve as China’s “century of humiliation,” ensuing “hurt feelings of the Chinese people,” and his Chinese Dream of rejuvenation. Trump emblazons it on his “Make America Great Again” baseball caps.

This desire for status, as the journalist Will Storr explained in “The Status Game,” is pursued through dominance, virtue, or success. These differing tactics can depend on the cultures in which status-seeking individuals operate. 

According to political philosopher Ye Xue, in the United States, where status is relative and must be defended, the cultural tendency is to pursue self-esteem through demands for honor. China, by contrast, is rooted in a stable hierarchy in which status is relational and harmony is sought. Trump and Xi represent these different cultural approaches to recognition perfectly; Trump’s is deeply individualistic and even antagonistic, while Xi’s is more concerned with a collective megalothymia that demands deference to China as a whole.

For all their differences, Xi and Trump share a common insistence on staking their own legitimacy on the nation’s self-esteem, updating French King Louis XIV’s apocryphal line, l’État, c’est moi (“I am the State”). But they do differ in noteworthy ways. Per Ye Xue’s research, Trump demands conspicuous displays of deference to him as an individual, while Xi is more concerned with displays of “face” – something he has fused with gestures toward China as a whole. In that way, Xi is a quintessentially Chinese statesman, in being tactful, understated, and formal.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney reflected after a January 2026 meeting with Xi how the general secretary had said something to him to the effect of “don’t lecture me in public.” Xi wasn’t averse to hearing complaints, Carney implied, but to be seen being criticized was an unacceptable loss of face. 

The U.S. president, meanwhile, has a grammar that is distinctly American. The historian Walter Russell Mead identified Trump as following in the line of President Andrew Jackson’s heirs: populist, informal, and quick to respond to insults. Trump must win visibly while Xi must not lose face. They are reflective of their different cultural traditions but are variations on the same substance. And they suffer from the same paradox of outward strength and inward fragility.

Despite the cultural variations, megalothymia is a perennial human temptation, which is why institutional safeguards are needed to prevent the emergence of strongmen. Liberal democracies have flourished through centuries by erecting exactly those guardrails. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” wrote James Madison in “The Federalist Papers.” The particulars vary, but the strongman style has clear commonalities. As the columnist Gideon Rachman outlined in “The Age of the Strongman,” it is defined by four overlapping traits: a cult of personality, contempt for the rule of law, populism, and a politics of fear and nationalism. The style runs along a continuum, ranging from unchallenged autocrats like Xi and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un through strongmen in hybrid regimes – think Russia’s Vladimir Putin – to wannabe dictators operating in democratic systems, such as Trump.

The insatiable need for recognition is the engine of these men who pretend to be (and perhaps wish to be) truly larger than life. But every actor needs a stage. And for strongmen, the summit provides that. All summits are manufactured encounters where protocol and positioning become deeply important displays of honor for both states and their statesmen. Particularly in China, a summit is as closely choreographed as a Broadway play or Peking opera. That’s why in May Trump’s effusive rhetoric – and Xi’s comparatively aloof demeanor – was so significant. The U.S. president described his counterpart as his “good friend” and “a man I admire greatly.” He even waxed poetic about receiving “the most beautiful roses anyone has ever seen.” It was a perfect example of political scientist Todd Hall’s research showing how affective ties – love, affection, attachment, and devotion – shape, constrain and manipulate leaders. China’s officials likely aimed to induce warm feelings from Trump through the summit’s flattery, and they succeeded. Xi’s language didn’t approach Trump’s rhapsodizing. He did, however, oversee the lengthy Chinese readout of the meeting, which consisted of a new four-pillar framework of stability – what the Communist Party calls a tifa – centered on Taiwan. The White House readout, by contrast, was just one paragraph. That’s because, for the CCP, a summit that shows the U.S. president as an equal (or lesser) statesman is a crucial moment in a legitimating narrative of how it is returning China to greatness. That story is bolstered when a powerful foreign leader who is desperate for a sense of superiority feels flattered by the pageantry. What kind of man is most susceptible to this theater, and most addicted to building one? Without direct clinical psychoanalysis, it would be inappropriate to presume any formal diagnosis. But there are psychological constructs that offer an........

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