Donald Trump loves talking tough on trade. He’s full of swagger as he threatens to wield the power of tariffs against friend and foe alike to reclaim the American primacy that he feels other politicians are too weak to assert. In 2018, Trump tweeted, “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore—we win big. It’s easy!” Toward the end of last year, a senior Trump official told a Financial Times reporter, “Our strategy on tariffs will be to shoot first and ask questions later.”

You don’t need to be a psychologist to know that this type of hyper-macho swagger is often compensatory, masking deep insecurities about weakness. There’s no reason to think words will match deeds, especially with a figure like Trump whose characteristic mode of aggressive hyperbole is invariably dishonest. Trump’s lies are integral to his politics and public persona, rooted in his background not just as a real estate huckster but also as an entertainer. Aside from his career as a reality-show star, Trump learned the art of public showmanship through many years as a fixture on the World Wrestling Entertainment circuit, where he was friends with the disgraced impresario Vince McMahon (whose wife, Linda McMahon, is Trump’s nominee to be Department of Education secretary).

Trump is to real politics as professional wrestling is to genuine sports: a parody that has popular appeal because it offers the pleasures of over-the-top narratives. Professional wrestlers often engage, like the heroes of Homeric epics, in prolonged, rhetoric-filled feuds. They insult each other, give each other nicknames, fight battles, and then, as the plot twist might require, suddenly shift from bitter enemies to best buddies. Professional wrestling has given us the useful word “kayfabe,” which Merriam-Webster defines as the “tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, etc., are genuine.”

So far in his second term, Trump’s trade wars have been pure kayfabe. They’ve been noisy, attention-getting, and full of surprise narrative turns, but they are only slightly more connected to reality than the feud between Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant.

The major mark of Trump’s second-term trade wars to date has been that he has mostly gone after countries considered close allies (Canada, Mexico, Denmark, Panama, Colombia), with a milder focus on America’s supposed geopolitical rival China (notably slapped with 10 percent tariffs as against the 25 percent threatened against Canada and Mexico). Moreover, the overall thrust of Trump’s trade war has been in the Western Hemisphere, with grandiose proclamations of a new “manifest destiny” (proposals to annex Canada as the 51st state and take over imperial control of Greenland from Denmark). Finally, in each of these hemispheric trade wars, Trump was quick to claim victory after a purely symbolic triumph where his supposed antagonist merely made face-saving concessions designed to give Trump good headlines.

In other words, Trump is just fighting fake matches on a wrestling stage that allows him to beat his chest as well as enact the essential surprise turn where he shifts from friend to foe to friend again. This may be great kayfabe—but it has little to do with economic or geopolitical reality.

It’s worth spelling out in detail just how counterfeit the trade wars have been. Let’s take the countries one by one.

Mexico: Trump put a pause on threatened tariffs after an agreement with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who said she would send 10,000 troops to help secure the USA/Mexico border if the United States would work to stop the flow of weapons into Mexico. As Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell notes, “Anyone reporting Mexico conceded anything to Trump to get him to delay tariffs has not done their homework. Trump boasts he got Sheinbaum to commit to stationing 10K troops at our border. Apparently he didn’t realize Mexico already has 15K troops deployed there.” Trump in truth got nothing, while Sheinbaum got a major concession.

Canada: Again, Trump put a pause on tariffs after an agreement with Justin Trudeau that promised $1.3 billion in border spending as well as “new commitments” such as the creation of a border czar. But again, Trudeau was agreeing to something that he had already previously announced (the border spending plan was first floated in December). As the right-wing magazine National Review observes, “The ‘new commitments’ are either pointless or not new.” With both Mexico and Canada, National Review complains, Trump is a “cheap date.” Another prominent Trump-friendly right-wing organ, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, came to the same conclusion, noting that it was Trump who blinked in his tariff war, and only won “minor concessions.”