There’s an art to throwing a good dinner party. The right food, the right entertainment, and the right seating arrangements are all important, but nothing matters more than the guests. On Thursday, President Donald Trump threw perhaps the most consequential
dinner party of his second term: a lavish state dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the latest surreal meeting between the world’s two great powers. Or rather, three great powers. Because Trump and Jinping weren’t the only all-powerful executives in the room: the state dinner’s guest list, in many ways, was an exhaustive roll call for every oligarch, technocrat, and unelected tyrant that America has produced. If you want to know who runs the country, all you have to do is read this list.
The full guest list is almost too long to print: 134 names in total, encompassing a fascinating upper crust picked from the top of American industry, media, and technology, as well as some of the key political figures in Republican politics. This was a dinner meant to impress the Chinese — to the extent that Trump’s fumbling antics can impress the relatively unflappable Jinping — but also to make it clear whose input, expertise, and funding mattered to the future of the MAGA movement.
First, the big names you expect are all there — with some already in town for Trump’s AI summit. Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Tim Cook. But there are also newer entries to the tech pantheon, like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has become so close to Trump during the AI boom that he keeps putting the president on speakerphone during public events. Lisa Su, the CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, a competitor to Nvidia that makes semiconductors and computer parts, was also present.
A spot at one of the state dinner’s tables can mean many things. Some guests are there just because of their longtime loyalty and favor, like Miriam Adelson, the widow of late casino magnante and Trump friend Sheldon Adelson. She’s a major donor, to be sure, but her current financial situation is less geopolitically relevant than Su or Huang’s. Oligarchy is an economic endeavor, but you don’t get one that functions quite as seamlessly as America’s without a good dose of old-fashioned cronyism. The one bittersweet irony of the dinner is that no one on that list besides Trump himself can change the biggest wrench in the global economy right now: a disastrous war in Iran that the U.S. has no idea how to end.
Other guests, meanwhile, are there because they’re seen to have influence that the president wants to keep. Jesse Watters — who in the span of two decades has gone from doing ambush-style tabloid interviews for the conservative shock-jock Bill O’Reilly to the top of Fox News’ pantheon of credulous primetime dolts — was at the dinner. So were Fox hosts Brett Baier and Laura Ingraham, two of Trump’s most prominent boosters in the Murdoch empire, were also honored with seats — though Lachlan Murdoch, the heir to the News Corp empire, was notably absent.
Some of the more distressing names on the list, if you are a concerned voter who cares about things like democracy and a non-partisan judiciary, are conservative Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh. The latter two are Trump appointees, but have crucially broken with the administration on certain issues. Chief Justice Roberts is often seen as the somewhat-moderate bulwark against total right-wing control of the court.
Other political figures and CEOs fill out the rest of the list. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was there, despite the fact that he could lose his title after the midterm elections. RFK Jr., Stephen Miller, and most of Trump’s cabinet secretaries were there, unsurprisingly. Representatives from the oil industry — mostly from American companies like ExxonMobil — were there, as was media kingpin David Ellison, who will surely need Trump’s help in finally closing his planned takeover of Warner Brothers. The bankers were there, too, including Jane Fraser of Citigroup and Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan.
Very few of these names are surprising. But it’s always a clarifying event to have them all in one place. A state dinner with China — perhaps the most important international relationship the U.S. has — is an invite that any global elite would want. These are not people who turn down access and goodwill. This is the “free” market at work, eating off golden plates. Some of the media — discounting Watters and his Fox cronies — were denied access. The subjects of the many, many consequential conversations had in that room were of course not public. You and I and everyone we know will never understand what the people at those tables discussed, what they plan to do with our world. We’ll find out when they do it, when they exert their will and influence on one another and jockey for position to get to the top of a game only people on that list get to play, while the rest of us have to work just to put food on the table.
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