Trump Photos With Putin and Xi Spotted in White House - Newsweek

President Donald Trump is facing backlash over photos of him with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping that have been hung in the White House.

MS NOW journalist Jacqueline Alemany on Thursday posted images showing the framed photographs hanging next to the White House's Palm Room doors. It led to widespread criticism online, with a Republican strategist calling it “an insult to Democratic values” and an anti-Trump political group asking why “communist authoritarians [are] in gilded frames in the White House?”

Trump faced a similar controversy in January, when a PBS News White House correspondent published the image of him and Putin.

The White House told Newsweek at the time that there was "nothing unusual" about showcasing snapshots in the building of Trump's public meetings and events. There are "photos of several other instances when the [sic] President Trump met with world leaders," the official said.

Newsweek contacted the White House on Friday for comment.

Alemany said in her post that the photos were hung next to the doors of the Palm Room, which connects the West Wing with the residence.

The photo with Putin appears to have been taken at their summit on August 15, 2025, at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska. It appears to be the same one Trump previously described as a gift from Putin after the summit in the summer, but the White House has not confirmed it.

Multiple people have spoken out against the display, citing the multiple human rights abuses Russia and China have been accused of and the ideological differences the countries have with America.

“Republican or Democrat, no U.S. president should display framed photos of dictators in the White House. It’s an insult to the democratic values that office is supposed to represent,” Republican strategist Brittany Martinez wrote on X.

Yvanna D. Cancela, a former White House adviser to President Joe Biden, shared the pictures of Putin and Xi on X with the caption: “This is pretty insane, while media commentator Brian Krassenstein, who frequently criticizes Trump, wrote on X: “Just a photo of Trump standing next to Putin on display in the White House. Nothing to see here... Imagine if this was Biden's White House.”

Co-founded by conservative lawyer George Conway, ex-husband of former Trump campaign manager and counselor Kellyanne Conway, the Lincoln Project—which advocates against Trump—wrote on X about the photos of Putin and Xi: “If ‘communism is the greatest threat to our country in its history’ and he wants to root it out of America, then why is he hanging pictures of communist authoritarians in gilded frames in the White House?”

Despite Trump’s second term taking place against a backdrop of the war between Russia and Ukraine, along with major trade tensions with China, Trump has pursued diplomacy with Putin and Xi.

The Kremlin-controlled mass circulation newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets reported last month that Putin is unlikely to accept the invitation by Trump to attend the G20 conference in Miami in December, although Moscow welcomed the move. Some world leaders criticized it as normalizing Russian aggression nearly five years into Putin's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

In August last year, Trump welcomed Putin with a red carpet and a military flyover at their Alaska summit in an effort to secure a deal between Russia and Ukraine.

Trump said at the time that he and Putin had a “great meeting in Alaska on Biden's stupid war, a war that should have never happened!!!"

Trump visited China in May before hosting Xi in Washington in September, in the Chinese leader's first official state visit since 2015. Trump is seemingly looking to Xi for help with resolving wars involving Chinese allies Russia and Iran and is looking for new trade deals. Newsweek has broken down their relationship, in detail here.

At a State Dinner at the White House last month during Xi's visit, Trump presented him with a statue of a bald eagle, America's national symbol. He later said: "As the leaders of our two nations, President Xi and I both understand that we represent different systems—but the ties between our people endure, and we've never gotten along better. He added that the two can continue to build a relationship "that promotes prosperity and security for future generations."

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Jordan King and Dave Siminoff.