WATCH: Chinese President Xi Jinping Talks To Justin Trudeau Like A Bad Employee

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may be a political leader in Canada, but whenever he is abroad Trudeau has always come across like a minimum wage worker nervously trying to seek the approval of his managers, and not succeeding.

He always appears to be lost at every international conference he attends, as if in a room full of much more personally strong leaders he doesn’t know how to conduct himself.

Trudeau recently got confronted by the President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping, during the G20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia, who berated him for publicly posting information about a conversation the two had on the phone. 

Trudeau’s office released a readout of a phone conversation between Trudeau and Xi which they had talked about issues from trade to the detention of two Canadians in China (Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig), which the Communist Chinese government did after Canada had detained Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou for assisting in circumventing trade sanctions against Iran.

Through an interpreter, Xi, who was speaking in mandarin, said to Trudeau: 

Everything we discuss has been leaked to the paper; that’s not appropriate. That’s not … the way the conversation was conducted. If there is sincerity on your part.

Trudeau then followed up from what Xi said by saying back to the interpreter that:

[As Canadians] believe in free and open and frank dialogue and that is what we will continue to have. We will continue to look to work constructively together, but there will be things we will disagree on, and we will have to…

Xi then cut back in before Trudeau could continue speaking and said “Let’s create the conditions first,” in response to Trudeau’s signaling about openness between Canada and China. 

Trudeau made some slightly better comments at a later press conference about Canada being a democracy, unlike China, but the moment was still an overall dud.

One thing that must be stated about this situation is that despite Justin Trudeau being a divisive political figure in Canada (I believe rightfully so), Xi Jinping is an authoritarian Communist who does not believe in civil liberties. 

The Communist Party-controlled government in China is currently locking up over 1 million Uygur Muslims in concentration camps and even oppressing the Han Chinese majority with a dystopian social credit system and absurd lockdown regime. President Xi Jinping is not just some foreign leader Canadians may differ with on politics, he is an evil dictator.

Justin Trudeau could have stood up against Xi’s bullying, but because he lacks a spine when operating on the world stage Trudeau could only come back with some platitudes about cooperation and openness. It’s a far cry from then-US Vice President Richard Nixon going after Soviet Premier Khrushchev for communism’s inability to raise the living standards of the Russian people. 

As fun as it is to joke about how much of a weakling Trudeau is, his inability to bite back, even rhetorically, at authoritarians on the world stage is emboldening those oversea authoritarians to do whatever they want.