If you’re going to make a living — any kind of living — on threats, it’s important those threats are seen as credible.

There are two aspects to credibility in this discussion. The first relates to your willingness to make good on threats. In short: People have to believe you. They need to understand you aren’t bluffing.

The second aspect relates to the character of the threats you’re making. Simply put: You can’t make threats the very nature of which casts doubt on even the most earnest racketeer’s capacity to follow through. If a Genovese captain strolls into a Manhattan Starbucks and says, “Nice place you got here, I’m gonna be back every Friday and if you don’t have an envelope for me, so much the worse for Starbucks,” the barista’s going to laugh him right out the door. If you want to extort Starbucks, you’d have better luck deliberately spilling hot coffee on yourself and suing them for a loose lid.

In the beginning — which is to say when you’re in the process of establishing a threat-based business — you’ll have to follow through on your threats more often than you’d probably prefer, and you’ll need to figure out a way to neutralize the risk to your fledgling enterprise from independent arbiters like, say, the police.

Thankfully for everyone involved, that phase typically doesn’t last long. For six or so months, you’ll be tested in proportion to the number of people you’ve knee-capped, figuratively or literally, and also based on those people’s perception that appealing to independent arbiters is either i) likely to be futile or ii) likely to result in more figurative or literal pain before those arbiters are able to intervene.

The more knees you introduce to baseball bats, the fewer tests. By and by, people will get the point and assuming you keep your demands reasonable in the context of inherently unreasonable demands, you’ve met both credibility conditions, everyone will pay and no one else will have to get hurt. Congratulations: You’ve established an extortion racket. It really is that simple.

Donald Trump understands the first credibility condition, or at least as it relates to actions undertaken on foreign soil. You can ask Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis about that. But he often seems to struggle with the second condition due to his affinity (it’s actually an addiction of sorts) for grandiloquence. Trump habitually makes threats the nature of which call into question not only his capacity to follow through, but in fact his grasp on reality.

Trump’s not detached from reality in the same way Joe Biden was. Trump’s detachment has less to do with the aging process and more to do with the depth of his immersion in a fantasy world he himself designed. Because he’s President of the United States, it’s within Trump’s power to self-fulfill that fantasy — to merge his delusions of grandeur with the real world — but there are limits to that, several of which relate to trade with China.

During his first term, Trump tested the boundaries of what the market would countenance in terms of threatened tariff levels on the Chinese. Generally speaking, he discovered that anything beyond 25% was dicey territory, which is to say whenever markets were asked to opine on prospective levies exceeding 25%, the verdict was an emphatic thumbs down.

It’s plain that markets are now willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt if and when he wants to threaten tariffs on China that match or exceed levels which would’ve (and did) trigger risk-asset routs during his first term. But when he goes so far as to float an embargo, markets crater and Beijing calls his bluff, at which point his otherwise successful extortion racket falls apart.

We’ve seen that at least three times this year, including a week ago, when Trump again suggested he might try to sustain triple-digit tariffs on Beijing in retaliation for new Chinese curbs on rare earth exports. Triple-digit tariffs are a de facto embargo and like clockwork, markets tanked, China called his bluff and he backed off.

During a new interview with Fox, Trump admitted to bluffing, calling his own triple-digit tariff idea “not sustainable.” He went on to suggest that he would in fact be willing to give an embargo a shot if China forces his hand, but it was clear from his demeanor that Trump’s actually not so lost in his own bombast that he doesn’t know a non-starter when he suggests one.

Around the same time the clip from the Fox interview circulated, CNBC released a survey which showed Trump’s net approval rating on the economy falling to negative 13% (42% approving, 55% disapproving). That, the network remarked, is the lowest rating on the economy for Trump “of any CNBC survey during either of [his] two terms.”

Part of that’s the government shutdown, obviously, and a lot of it’s just partisanship. But some of it’s generalized disaffection and, I’ll venture, the earliest stages of a national reckoning. While we’re nowhere near any sort of tipping point, I think the events of the last two months (and I won’t name those events; you can just pick a few) might’ve pushed us a bit closer to a place where the least-committed Trump voters are no longer willing to suspend disbelief as it relates to the objectively perilous trajectory he’s put the nation on.

Trump’s second term presidency is one giant extortion racket and while he’s proven his willingness to follow through on threats against foreign actors with little or no capacity to respond to an assertive White House, I’m not sure Trump’s satisfied either of the two credibility conditions necessary to sustain his extortion racket in the domestic context. Trump’s been hounded, impeached and prosecuted, yes, but none of that really constituted a call on his big bluff.

We talk often about “The Big Lie” (i.e., the lie that says the 2020 election was “rigged” for Biden), but never “The Big Bluff,” which says Trump’s prepared to do what’s necessary to establish himself as the authoritarian leader of a one-party dictatorship. And that nods to the miracle of Trump’s domestic extortion regime: It’s a threat-based business where the racketeer has never been compelled to prove he isn’t bluffing. “Must be nice!” said every gangster who’s ever had to slap someone around he didn’t want to slap around.

For all the National Guard troop deployments and immigration roundups, for the de facto suspension of due process and the indictments (which as of this week include John Bolton and his mustache, which is presumed guilty by association) and for the commandeering of the bureaucracy (which the Journal suggested is about to include the IRS’s enforcement division), there’s still no evidence whatsoever that Trump has it in him to make good on the threat we all know is implicit in everything he says and does.

I won’t spell out that threat other than to say again what I’ve said over and over since Trump’s authoritarian aspirations became clear enough in 2017: His constitution isn’t that of a real dictator. As such, his would-be reign remains entirely contingent on the continual, and increasingly conspicuous, absence of a “right person, right time, right line” moment — a Joseph Welch moment. Part of me (most of me) thinks it’ll never come, but if it ever does, Trump’s ill-prepared to handle it because, again, he’s not the genuine autocrat article.

Absent the mental composition of a bona fide strongman, Trump’s threat to dismantle the democratic structures of representative government in America on the way to installing himself as a strict autocrat is implausible. The only way that threat isn’t as far-fetched and ridiculous as we all — Democrats and Republicans — swore it was a mere 10 years ago, is if Trump possesses the psychological attributes of a dictator, and with them the willingness to follow-through as a real dictator would in the face of an overnight credibility crisis.

In other words, if Trump can’t satisfy the first condition of credibility for the extortion racket he’s trying to sustain in America, he can’t satisfy the second condition either and the only way this continues to work for him is if no one of any consequence in America ever calls his bluff.

To reiterate: Calling his bluff needn’t entail any sort of traumatic event. It could be something as simple as a snide, “hot mic” comment from someone we all thought was an unflinching sycophant. If the right person were to say “no” at the right time in front of the right people, the jig could be up. Because at the end of the day — and notwithstanding all my warnings in these pages about autocracy in America — I just don’t see “it” in his eyes, nor in his day-to-day comport.

Let’s say you run an extortion racket and one day, when you go to collect from the local deli, the proprietor tells you to go fuck yourself right there in front of everyone standing in line waiting for a sandwich. Everyone in that shop knows you, because everyone’s from the neighborhood, and everyone’s well aware of your business model. At that point, you have a choice to make, and it boils down to this: Either the deli owner lives or your business does, but it can’t be both. In that situation, I think Trump walks out of that deli looking for a new business.

For those of you who asked for a counter-point to “Don’t Be A Hero,” there it is. The reality behind this otherwise melodramatic episode in American history is that the country doesn’t even need a hero. America just needs the kid in town who blurts out the truth about the emperor’s fine new clothes.