President Donald Trump has not asked U.S. officials to draw up a proposed trade plan for China, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Friday.

The veteran financial guru and former Ronald Reagan adviser told CNBC in an interview he was not as optimistic as he once was about the two nations reaching a deal.

Kudlow said a meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping later this month at the G-20 summit was definite and would include trade talks.

"There's no massive movement to deal with China," Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, told CNBC. "We have already put out asks to China with respect to trade,"  said Kudlow, who served as the Trump campaign's senior economic adviser.

"We're doing a normal, routine run-through of things that we've already put together and normal preparation," he said. "We're not on the cusp of a deal."

Trump said Thursday on Twitter that trade discussions with China were “moving along nicely,” and that he planned to meet Xi on the sidelines of a G20 summit, in Argentina, after the two had a “very good” phone discussion.

Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, later reported that Trump wants to reach a trade agreement with China at the G20 meeting and that after the call with Xi, he had asked officials to begin drafting possible terms.

The news agency said it was not clear if Trump was easing up on demands that China has resisted, and it cited one person as saying intellectual property theft was a sticking point on a possible deal.

Kudlow also added that Trump "could pull the trigger" on additional tariffs on Chinese imports, depending on how talks go.

Trump administration officials have said U.S.-China trade talks cannot resume until Beijing outlines specific actions it would take to meet U.S. demands for sweeping changes to policies on technology transfers, industrial subsidies and market access.

The two countries have imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of each other’s goods and Trump has threatened to extend the tariffs to the remainder of China’s $500 billion-plus exports to the United States if the disputes cannot be resolved.

Jacob Parker, vice president of China operations at the U.S.-China Business Council in Beijing, said there were plenty of challenges that would require significant negotiations in advance of a meeting between Trump and Xi to ensure success.

“What negotiations have lacked to date has been that (presidential) level of engagement. If President Trump makes an agreement with President Xi, there is nobody above them to overturn it,” he said.

“We’re optimistic this is a potential off-ramp of increasingly antagonistic trade tensions and hope it leads to a pause and new negotiations,” he said.

Tu Xinquan, a trade expert at Beijing’s University of International Business and Economics, said he was sceptical that the Trump administration was truly ready to deal, and that other factors, such as the mid-term congressional elections, could be driving statements from the administration.

“The best situation (from a Trump-Xi meeting) would be no further actions, temporarily. But the tariffs already imposed will not go away,” Tu said.