Donald Trump talked to Xi Jinping on Thursday. Nothing much came of it.

China was first to announce the call. Beijing described it as a favor to Trump, who spent the last four months trying to get Xi on the phone to no avail. Earlier this week, at 17 past two in the morning, Trump’s frustrations boiled over. Xi, he told the TruthSocial faithful, is “very tough” and “extremely hard to make a deal with.” (“No sh-t,” said every experienced diplomat on Earth.)

Xi’s not the only one. Vladimir Putin now spurns Trump regularly on Ukraine peace talks. In a surprisingly forthcoming account of the last call between the two men, Trump conceded that a ceasefire isn’t “imminent.”

There’s a common thread here, and Bloomberg — of all outlets — picked up on it Thursday. “Trump has long boasted about his ability to cut deals with the world’s strongmen, but his charms haven’t worked on the leaders he professes to admire,” Natalia Drozdiak and Courtney McBride wrote.

That’s a simple, but important, observation. Over and over again these past nine years, I’ve cautioned that Trump’s pretensions to autocratic authority aren’t taken seriously by most, if any, real autocrats around the world.

To Putin, Trump’s a sap, plain and simple. To Kim Jong-Un, he’s a curiosity. To Mohammed Bin Salman and sundry robed royals and emirs, Trump’s a kind of kindred spirit. He likes gold, palaces and other shows of garish pomp, he’s into nepotism, he loves the idea of kings and he’s highly amenable to bribes. But to the extent he’s kin, he’s the uncle you only want for dinner two times a year, at most. To Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump’s a US president uniquely vulnerable to strategic manipulation. To Viktor Orban, Trump’s… well, Viktor Orban, only too inept and impatient to execute on the Fidesz playbook.

With Xi, the dynamic’s a little more nuanced. The qualities Trump exudes — avarice, hubris, impatience and so on — are anathema to the sort of ascetic, quasi-piety Xi claims for himself. Trump’s hardly a stoic, and pretty much everything he does and says attests to corruption and incompetence. Xi despises, with the holiest of holy passions, corruption and incompetence. Or at least of the sort Trump displays. Further, Xi knows damn well Trump’s no strongman.

But — note the emphasis  — Trump’s a living, breathing manifestation of 21st century blue-collar American disaffection, which increasingly scapegoats China for the plight of globalization’s left-behinds. Trump’s also a shrieking, chest-beating nationalist and a shameless purveyor of overwrought jingoism. All of that’s problematic for a China which hoped to quietly usurp American hegemony over a period of decades.

Trump works every day to ensure US-China strategic competition’s front-page news. If China’s going to supplant America on any front, Beijing will have to do it out in the open, for the whole world to see. That’s not what the Party wanted. Not yet, anyway.

Notwithstanding the tail risk of a Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine, the stakes in the US-China bilateral are far, far higher than they are for any other relationship Trump’s trying to manage with a foreign autocracy. Ironically, that may reduce the peril inherent in Trump’s hopeless attempts to convince Xi of his authoritarian bona fides.

If you’re Beijing, there’s too much to lose from just telling Trump to go f-ck himself which, by all indications, is what Putin told him this week, what Benjamin Netanyahu will tell him if Trump tries to rein in the slaughter in Gaza, what Khamenei might still tell him if the new nuclear deal doesn’t allow Iran some level of uranium enrichment, what Kim might tell him if, at 41, North Korea’s boy king isn’t enamored with celebrity summits anymore, and so on.

The US and China aren’t friends, and maybe they’re outright enemies, but the nature of the enmity isn’t the same as it is between the US and North Korea, Russia, Iran and so on. The two countries’ economic fates are inextricably bound up. An outright military confrontation’s a non-starter because it’d be the end of the Party or the end of humanity. The former’s unacceptable to Beijing, which leaves the latter. (The PLA would sooner blow up the world — literally — than lose a conventional war, because losing a conventional war to the US would almost surely mean the Party losing power domestically.)

So rather than burn the bridge entirely for the sake of one bloviating moron lost in his own dictator fantasy, China’s going to slow-walk Trump — string him along, buying time and using his own words and actions against him. Like this: “Well, Europe, with friends like Trump, who needs enemies? Want to meet and talk about trade?”

That’ll go on for the entirety of Trump’s term or until he gets tired of negotiating with the S&P 500 and caves, whichever comes first. That’s not to say he won’t strike some kind of “deal” with Beijing, but it is to say whatever that “deal” looks like, it won’t be any sort of game-changer and almost no one in America will be able to ascertain any meaningful benefits.

On Thursday, Trump described his call Xi as “very good,” which is the same thing he says about every phone call, including the one with Volodymyr Zelensky which earned Trump his first impeachment. The two cleared up confusion on “the intricacies” of what Trump’s still calling a “Trade Deal” agreed last month in Geneva.

That’s what I mean about deals that aren’t deals. No one even knows what the terms of that Geneva arrangement are. About all we know is there’s a dispute over China continuing to throttle rare earth exports and Trump claimed Thursday “there should no longer be any questions respecting the complexity” of those products.

Spoiler alert: Exactly nothing will change in Beijing that doesn’t have to as a result of this phone call. The Party will take whatever steps are necessary to make Trump believe he accomplished something and exactly no more.

Somewhat oddly, Trump went out of his way to emphasize that “Nothing was discussed concerning Russia/Ukraine, or Iran.” Those are hot-button issues to be sure, but it’s not obvious why he included that bookend. If he was trying to preempt media questions, it won’t work. In fact, he’s just invited more questions: “Why weren’t Russia and Iran discussed?”

As for a future meeting between US and Chinese trade negotiators, Trump said Scott Bessent, Howard Lutnick and Jamieson Greer will convene with Xi’s envoys “shortly at a location to be determined.” The administration “will inform the Media as to scheduling of the soon to be meeting,” he went on.

Again, this is transparently farcical. Trump’s obviously being strung along, and everyone with any sense about them can see it. By appearances, he has virtually no leverage at all other than the above-mentioned existential nature of the broader stakes in preserving a modicum of respect in the China bilateral.

As Bloomberg pointed out in the linked article, we’re witnessing, in real time, the humbling of Trump’s autocratic pretensions. “The president is coming face to face with the fact that [authoritarian] leaders aren’t as willing to back down as he’d predicted,” Drozdiak and McBride wrote, calling that evidence against Trump’s pitch to voters, who were told “he had the cunning and toughness… to stare down leaders like Xi and Putin.”

Americans — from everyday people to members of Congress to corporate executives to Supreme Court Justices to deep-pocketed law firms and universities — should take note. Trump isn’t who he says he is. He’s not a strongman. There’s nothing behind the autocratic facade. He only bullies the defenseless. He’s only brave when he’s berating America’s allies. All you have to do is call his bluff and the whole act falls apart.