As two B-1 Lancer bombers roared overhead, President Donald Trump physically and visibly recoiled at the thunderous sound of pure American air power. Yet the man standing next to Trump, and for whose arrival at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday the flyover was intended to honor, perhaps even intimidate, didn’t flinch. Chinese President Xi Jinping has an unreadable facial expression at the best of times, a deliberate feature of Beijing’s approach to diplomacy: give nothing away.
Xi merely followed the aircraft with his bored eyes, mouth flattened into neutral. "That was really loud," Trump remarked to Xi, who didn’t reply. One social media user described the moment as perhaps the “biggest loss of aura we've ever witnessed,” adding that Trump had been “absolutely deaf-mogged by China.” Mogging, if you’re unfamiliar with this piece of internet slang, means when one person dominates or outshines another in some way.
Looks, performance, whatever. The flyover might be taken as an attempted mogging of Xi by Trump. But it wasn’t just the pair that caught Trump by surprise on display for his Chinese rivals.
Six F-16s and six F-22 Raptors also lined the tarmac. A B-2 Spirit and four F-22s are due over the White House on Thursday in another mogging-by-air. These are formidable machines, certainly.
But like Trump, they are also surprisingly old for how they look and sound. The Air Force's F-16s average nearly 34 years, its B-1Bs 37, its B-2s nearly 29 and its F-22s 19. Xi has some younger models to toy with.
He didn’t bring them with him. But China’s latest contribution to the world of military aviation is a sharp-edged stealth fighter jet that looks more like a fei biao throwing dart than a plane. It was on show across the internet this week, as new footage of the J-36 jet circulated.
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