Trump called Xi a genius. Xi filed that away and got on with winning.

Let’s be absolutely clear about what happened here. Trump pointed it at China, and then spent forty minutes telling the Chinese president that he was, in fact, terrific. Tremendous, even. A real class act.

Xi Jinping has been running the world’s most populous nation with an iron fist since before most of Trump’s cabinet could locate China on a map. He has sat across the table from every American president since Obama. He has watched, waited, and said precisely nothing that wasn’t already decided three weeks earlier by a committee in Beijing.

Trump, by contrast, appears to have prepared for this call by watching Fox News and believing what he heard.

The result was entirely predictable to anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex. Xi walked away with everything he came for. Trump walked away thinking he’d made a new friend.

There is a word for this. Several, actually. But the politest one is “outclassed.”

A man who built a career on gold-plated toilets and the word “fired” has now discovered, rather late in life, that geopolitics is not a property deal. You cannot flatter your way to a trade surplus. And you absolutely cannot out-manoeuvre a civilisation that was ancient when your country was still a forest.

Xi knew this. He always did.