Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters left their Thursday shows to attend President Trump’s White House state dinner for China’s Xi Jinping, after months of warning viewers about communist politics at home.

President Donald Trump hosted Chinese leader Xi Jinping at a formal state dinner in the White House East Room on Thursday evening. Among the invited names were Fox News hosts Jesse Watters, Laura Ingraham, and Bret Baier, alongside tech executives Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg.

The Daily Beast reported that Ingraham and Watters did not host their Thursday evening programs and framed the night as a clash with the network’s on-air warnings about communism. Fox News was contacted for comment.

Ingraham told Instagram followers why she was away from the desk.

She said:

“Sorry I’m not on the show tonight, I had to stop by and see President Xi of China, I’m invited to a state dinner, I have to go,”

The post included video of her dress for the evening. Watters was described as arriving for the dinner as well. Baier was listed among those invited.

Xi was in the United States at Trump’s invitation. The two leaders spoke through interpreters. Melania Trump was also present, including in a moment captured with Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Warnings about domestic radicals never targeted state dinners

For months, the same Fox voices had drawn a hard line against far-left politics inside the Democratic Party. That record is not hard to find, and it was not aimed at the protocol of a presidential state dinner.

Watters has described New York’s Zohran Mamdani in blunt terms. On air he said:

“This guy is trouble. This guy is a Trojan horse, and communism is gonna take over the Democratic Party, and then we’re gonna have to beat it, because you can’t do anything else besides beat it to a pulp.”

In another riff he went further:

“You’re coming for us, You’re coming for our money, you’re coming for our people. You’re coming for our way of life. It’s not socialism, guys. This is communism. You can’t... reason with these guys. You have to crush them. And we will.”

Ingraham has made the same case in her own lane. In a June post on X she wrote:

“You think NYC’s turn to socialism and communism is just a `New York’ thing? It’s not. Uncontrolled immigration, green-lit since the 80s by the Uniparty, is remaking every American community. We imported anti-Americanism, cultivated it in schools. Now comes the poisonous crop.”

That argument tracks voter concerns about cities, schools, and borders. It is not a claim that the United States should refuse formal diplomacy with Beijing.

Trump’s “communism” line was about the midterms

Trump himself has repeatedly labeled leading progressives, including Mamdani and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, as communists while making the case for Republican turnout. In a recent interview with Ingraham this month, she asked why Republicans need to vote on Nov. 3. His one-word answer was “Communism,” followed by a broader attack on the left’s direction.

He said they are “trying to destroy our country” and added that “they’ve skipped socialism, these people are sick.” The exchange sat in a soft format, and it was aimed at domestic politics ahead of the midterms, not at the guest list in the East Room.

Viewers who watch Fox regularly have also seen tension between Trump and the network in other settings, including when Trump’s top economic adviser called out Fox polling on air over partisan oversampling.

Separate from Thursday’s dinner, Trump has even blasted the brand outright at times, as when he called Fox News Sunday “beyond redemption” after an interview he disliked. None of that history revise the basic fact of a state dinner: presidents host rivals and partners alike.

A gotcha that flattens two different fights

The Daily Beast piece treats the dinner invitation as a punch line against hosts who spent months hammering socialist and communist currents on the American left. The contrast makes for easy copy. It does not make the underlying distinction disappear.

China is run by the Chinese Communist Party. Xi is a dictator with global power. American presidents of both parties have still seated Chinese leaders at formal meals because great-power contact is part of the job, not a loyalty oath to Marxist theory. Taxpayers fund state dinners; that is how official hospitality has long worked at the White House.

Holding that event does not require Fox anchors to apologize for saying Mamdani-style politics would damage New York or the Democratic Party. One track is foreign statecraft. The other is a fight over what American cities and ballots should reward.

Media pile-ons against television personalities are also familiar beyond cable news. High-profile hosts in other networks spark public blowups of their own, including when Sunny Hostin described her role as the holdout juror in a notorious New York case. Celebrity TV fights draw clicks. They are not a substitute for the policy stakes Ingraham and Watters named on air.

Who was in the room

The VIP list mixed politics, media, and industry. Musk attended as SpaceX’s leader and Tesla’s CEO. Altman was listed with OpenAI, Bezos with Amazon, and Zuckerberg with Meta. Trump, Melania Trump, and Xi anchored the head-of-state side of the evening.

Watters and Ingraham’s decision to skip Thursday’s shows put them in that room instead of on the set. Ingraham’s Instagram clip made the trade plain in her own words. The Daily Beast cast the night as hosts racing to a “dictator’s dinner” after slamming communism. The attendance is real. The collapse of two separate arguments into one smear is the commentary move.

Open questions remain in the public record the outlet offered. The piece gave no absolute calendar date beyond Thursday evening. It did not settle whether Baier only received an invitation or fully attended. It recorded no on-the-record reply from Fox beyond the attempt to reach the network. Full verbatim wording of Ingraham’s midterms question to Trump was not supplied, only the topic and his answer.

Even so, the core sequence is straightforward. Trump invited Xi. The White House put on a state dinner in the East Room. Named Fox hosts were invited. Ingraham and Watters said yes and left their chairs empty that night. Their earlier warnings targeted domestic left-wing politics and figures such as Mamdani, not the existence of presidential diplomacy.

Americans can reject communist ideology, resist its influence in local government and schools, and still understand why a president seats a Chinese leader under chandeliers. Those are not mutually exclusive acts, no matter how hard a hostile outlet works to fuse them into a single charge of hypocrisy.