An intense behind-the-scenes power struggle over who will become Donald Trump’s top congressional defender is coming to a head as two Freedom Caucus leaders and their allies pressure senior Republicans to give them two top committee posts.

Rep. Jim Jordan has formally launched a bid to become the top Republican lawmaker on the House Judiciary Committee, according to two leadership sources, while Rep. Mark Meadows is going for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

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Both face an uphill battle and have made numerous enemies during their tenure leading the Freedom Caucus.

But GOP sources on the Hill and close to the White House say they’re hoping Trump advocates on their behalf to help them win the positions. Trump — who is close to both men — has urged House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to make a deal to give them prime committee assignments. And two of Trump’s top advisers off the Hill, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, have been making the case for the duo publicly and privately.

GOP leaders are set to informally discuss the matter Tuesday night as they begin to organize for the next Congress. The Republican Steering Committee, a group of several dozen lawmakers close to GOP leaders, is ultimately responsible for recommending ranking members. Both men would have to be elected to the positions, though lawmakers give leaders’ preferences ample consideration before voting.

The Steering Committee meets Wednesday and Thursday.

McCarthy would anger other House Republicans if he pushes Jordan for Judiciary, which has jurisdiction over impeachment matters. Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia and Steve Chabot of Ohio also are running for the position and are considered team players, whereas Jordan often bucks leadership and annoys his colleagues with his constant insistence on ideological purity.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a Republican member of the Judiciary Committee, said Jordan is the best choice to be the Republican face of the committee while the GOP is in the minority.

“Collins and Chabot are fine legislators. They have great skill in developing legislation and a vision for leadership. They’d make the best chairmen of the committee,” he said in a statement to POLITICO. “Neither is qualified to be ranking member now. Neither has attended the depositions of key witnesses in the committee’s most important investigations. Jim knows how to fight the battle we are facing. He has internalized the facts and timeline. If he isn’t the ranking member, President Trump will be without the most capable defense we could otherwise offer.”

“Kevin McCarthy,” Gaetz continued, “has the power to make Jim Jordan the lead Republican on Judiciary. If he doesn’t, he is actively screwing President Trump. And they both know it.”

Ironically, Jordan is next in line to become ranking member on Oversight. For years, he has wanted a leadership position on the panel, and lawmakers on the Steering Committee, according to senior Republicans, were likely to vote for him for the job.

But both men wanted to serve in some leadership capacity, and Jordan decided to try to make the leap for Judiciary, where he is a more junior member, while Meadows decided to go for Oversight.

GOP lawmakers, however, have been telling both men that it’s a risky move. Jordan is in danger of not getting any leadership position if he loses Judiciary, while Meadows could easily win the ranking position on Oversight.

The Judiciary Committee is slated for a major overhaul on the Republican side. Its chairman, Bob Goodlatte, is retiring in January, along with several other senior members, including Reps. Lamar Smith and Ted Poe of Texas, Rep. Darrell Issa of California and Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina. Rep. Karen Handel (R-Ga.), another committee member, lost her reelection bid.

The slew of vacancies gives the GOP a chance to remake its committee as it girds for an onslaught of Democratic investigations of the Trump administration led by presumptive incoming chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and a newly empowered Democratic majority.

Chabot has made his case for the ranking member position by highlighting his years of experience on the committee — he’s one of just two remaining House members who worked on the Clinton impeachment. Collins, though, has been seen as the favorite for the role — he’s spent a year crisscrossing the country to campaign and fundraise for colleagues, building bipartisan consensus on high-profile prison reform legislation and cementing ties with GOP leaders.

The Judiciary Committee also oversees the Justice Department, and Democrats are slated to make Trump’s attacks on the FBI — and whether he attempted to obstruct justice in the ongoing Russia probe — a centerpiece of their investigative agenda.

The Oversight Committee, which will also be a flashpoint for Democratic investigations, has been less hotly contested. But the committee is also due for a major overhaul on the Republican side, with its chairman — Gowdy — leaving in January and several lawmakers on their way out.

China should be ready to make concessions on trade when President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet in Argentina later this week or the White House could impose even bigger tariffs on the country’s exports, Trump’s top economic adviser said Tuesday.

Trump and Xi are expected to convene on the sidelines of the G20 leaders’ meeting in Buenos Aires, an encounter at the highest levels that is widely viewed as the best chance of cooling tensions between the world’s two largest economies. But there won’t be progress unless the Chinese are ready to deal, Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic adviser, told reporters at a meeting at the White House.

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“This is an opportunity, with the two presidents, to break through what have been disappointing discussions,” Kudlow said, adding later, “This is a big deal, this meeting. And the stakes are very high.”

The chances of a breakthrough on the brutal trade standoff that has included multiple rounds of tit-for-tat tariffs still appear slim. Privately, senior administration officials told POLITICO that they don’t know what to expect. While officials believe the Chinese are eager to engage on trade, Xi is a wild card. And even officials close to the president acknowledged that Trump has been unpredictable during meetings with foreign leaders. Aides learned long ago that they can’t control what he says once he’s face to face with another head of state.

Trump on Monday kept stirring tensions, telling the Wall Street Journal in an interview that he expects to move forward with plans to increase tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods to 25 percent — and he threatened to impose tariffs of either 10 or 25 percent on an additional $267 billion in Chinese imports.

Kudlow said Tuesday that the president was serious about following through on the tariff threat if the upcoming meeting with Xi doesn’t change what he characterized as China’s obstinance on trade.

“The president intends to keep his promise. He’s not going away. I hope [the Chinese] understand that. I’m not sure they do,” he said.

Kudlow didn’t make it clear exactly how the White House will define success at the meeting, or what concessions they expect from the Chinese. But, in addition to national security and other matters, he said the two leaders will discuss the same trade issues that have long formed the core of the Trump administration’s frustrations: alleged theft of intellectual property, forced technology transfers, Chinese ownership of American companies through so-called joint ventures, Chinese tariffs and non-tariff barriers and aggressive hacking.

“Whether they can get through all of that remains to be seen, but that’s the president’s point of view,” Kudlow said later Tuesday during a televised White House press briefing.

Kudlow suggested Trump thinks a deal can be made. “He is open to that,” Kudlow said. “But having said that, some caveats as always. Certain conditions have to be met with respect to fairness and reciprocity,”

The logistics of the Trump-Xi meeting, which is scheduled for Saturday, are still coming together, according to White House aides. The guest list has not been finalized, and a senior administration official said it’s unclear if the meeting will feature a more intimate discussion with Xi, his wife, Trump and the first lady — or a broader meeting with other top-level aides.

Trump is also slated to hold other high-profile meetings during the G-20, including with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In addition, Trump will join the leaders of Mexico and Canada on Friday to sign a newly negotiated trade deal between the two countries, Kudlow said, adding that the logistics of that event are also still being ironed out. National Security Advisor John Bolton said at a press briefing Tuesday that Trump has no plans to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Even if a truce is reached this week, trade tensions with China are likely to rise again leading up to the 2020 campaign, said Derek Scissors, a China analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. That’s because Xi is unlikely to make the kind of structural reforms that the administration wants, which will frustrate U.S. leaders.

“I think he is a Maoist dictator who absolutely will never decentralize the economy because it’s crucial to his political control,” Scissors said. “He’s not leaving any time soon, except on a stretcher.”

Others in China are also not likely to accede to the whims of Trump. China, scarred by the memory of a hundred years of humiliation at the hands of Western powers, is determined to chart its future as it sees fit.

“China does not want to have a trade war, but it is not afraid of one and will fight one if necessary,” a Chinese government official told reporters last week.

Many, however, believe that the two leaders could emerge from Buenos Aires successful by setting the right tone and framework for future negotiations — even if there isn’t a major breakthrough.

“The main issue is how to settle down the trade war,” the Chinese official said, speaking on the condition that he not be identified. “I am conservatively optimistic” that can be done.

If further talks do come from the meeting, quick progress could indeed be made on several of the major issues that the U.S. has raised.

Chinese officials have indicated about 40 percent of a list of 142 U.S. concerns could be tackled with increased engagement. However, another 40 percent of the issues would be harder to resolve and the remainder would be very difficult because of national security and other concerns.

Trump is also under pressure to keep tariffs in place until he achieves some tangible change that he can herald as a victory. If not, he could face criticism from Democrats during the 2020 presidential campaign that he caved to Beijing, noted Cheng Li, director of the Brookings Institution’s China Center.

Right now, few Democrats are challenging Trump’s decision to impose duties on close to $250 billion worth of Chinese goods.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the likely next Speaker of the House, is a longtime China critic who voted against establishing permanent normal trade relations with China when it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer voted in favor of the WTO agreement, but has been critical of Beijing’s trade practices since long before Trump arrived on the national political scene.

The continuation of duties over the long term — or ratcheting up trade tensions by slapping tariffs on all Chinese goods — could damage the U.S. economy. (Some economists already believe the U.S. could slip into a recession ahead of the next presidential contest.)

That would weaken Trump’s reelection chances, even if he remains popular with most Republicans.

In China, Xi’s authority gives him the strategic advantage of being able to wait out Western leaders. He is now in his seventh year as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and sixth year as the country’s president.

He could conceivably serve in both positions for the rest of his life. He took on the title of “core leader” in 2016 and had the constitution changed to remove the limit of two terms for president earlier this year.

But “it would be misleading to say Xi Jinping can control everything, that there’s no domestic politics at all,” Li said. “Even if it’s an authoritarian regime, there’s public opinion, there’s tensions, there’s checks and balances as well. But it’s a quite different system.”

For example, Xi faced some domestic criticism for worsening tensions with the United States by not doing more to help Trump deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s nuclear ambitions. So he responded by meeting with Kim three times in the past year, compared to zero during his first six years in office, Li said.

Some analysts expect China to surpass the United States as the dominant world power in the 21st century, but others see a cloudier outlook.

“There is no agreement whatsoever about whether we’re in a multi-polar world or a G-Zero world,” where no single country is dominant, said Scott Kennedy, director of the China business and economy project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Further complicating the picture are the deep political divisions in the United States that make it hard for politicians to develop a consensus on domestic concerns, much less international ones.

“So, it’s not a surprise that we have a difficult time figuring out … how we ought to respond to the challenge of a country as massive as China,” Kennedy added.

Rather than strike a friendly deal with China, some analysts believe the Trump administration is trying to “decouple” the two economies by making it more expensive for American companies to buy from China suppliers while encouraging American companies with operations in China to relocate. Such actions would also make it harder for Chinese companies to invest in high-tech sectors of U.S. economies.

“To me, the best outcome is to start the disengagement process. Not to make it irreversible, not to make it chaotic, but just do what we’ve done on technology and say we’re gonna cooperate less on technology and we’re going to cooperate less on goods trade,” Scissors said.

Ben White contributed to this story.