It is one of Donald Trump’s favourite and most sneering insults. He has used it publicly about such people as Cher, John McCain, Rosie O’Donnell and Jeb Bush. In Trumpworld, all these people have been dismissed in tweets as “losers”. Right now, though, there is only one big loser in Trumpworld, and that loser is President Trump himself.

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Trump was a loser in whichever direction you looked this week, both at home and abroad. As a candidate, Trump bragged about all the lessons he would teach China once he was president. He would stop China from “raping” the US economy and “toying” with the US over North Korea. He would bring trade cases against China in the US courts, slap heavy tariffs on Chinese goods and stop China manipulating its currency. He would ramp up the US military presence in the Asia-Pacific region. He might even renege on the holy of holies in Sino-American relations for the past 40 years – the One China doctrine that says Taiwan is a part of China, not a separate country.

Contrast that assertive Trump with the deflated one who made a joint appearance with Xi Jinping in Beijing on Thursday, as part of his five-nation Asian tour. In every respect, Trump’s script was so anodyne, and his conduct so docile, that they could have been drafted and prescribed by Xi himself. There were no threats on trade, no military posturing, and no mention of Taiwan or challenge to the One China policy.

There were no questions at the end of the joint statement either – another win for Xi – and a reminder of which of the two men now holds all the cards in the relationship. Talking about the trade imbalance that once fired so much campaign rhetoric, Trump even said, and on the radio it sounded as if there were a few titters off-stage as he said it: “I don’t blame China.”

Trump’s strategy of reaching out to a left-behind industrial base with a racial message is not sustaining itself

Trump is unpredictable. This sudden kowtowing to China and its ascendant leader this week could be abandoned as quickly as it has arrived, perhaps as soon as Trump’s visit to Vietnam or the Philippines in the coming days. There is a recent precedent, after all. In the summer, Trump abruptly abandoned his scripted statesmanship over the racist violence in Charlottesville in favour of an attack on anti-racists, and an indulgent defence of the 19th-century pro-slavery Confederacy.

Even so, it is hard to disagree with the Obama-era official Tony Blinken in his assessment that the Trump visit to Beijing showed two leaders heading in very different directions. While Trump builds walls, Blinken wrote this week, Xi builds bridges. While Trump shuns multilateralism and global governance, Xi embraces them. While Trump makes quixotic and backward-looking attempts to reinvent the coal industry, even promoting the role of fossil fuels in this week’s climate-change conference in Bonn, Xi has a 30-year programme designed to ensure China dominates the global economy, including in information technology, robotics and AI.

Trump’s defenders will say there is nevertheless consistency here. Trump was an “America first” candidate, and he is an “America first” president. America’s role as the guarantor of the peace and the liberal order in the Asia-Pacific region and in Europe remains of secondary importance to him. His stage is America, not the world. The jobs and livelihoods that matter to him are at home, not elsewhere. His voters are in the United States and nowhere else. He is retreating from world leadership to win at home.

Timeline Trump's tour of Asia Show Hide The US president must grapple with the thorny issues of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions as well as trade wars in Asia on one of the trickiest diplomatic tours in decades. Japan Trump warns of the North Korean threat and says Japanese orders for US-made military equipment will help keep Japan safe. Read more South Korea The North Korea rhetoric softens as the president suggests he is open to diplomatic efforts to resolve the nuclear crisis. Read more China Xi Jinping rolls out the red carpet for Trump, who lavishes praise on his host and blames his American predecessors for the "huge" trade deficit between the US and China. Read more Vietnam Trump swings through Da Nang for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, abruptly ending his diplomatic streak with a tirade against “violations, cheating or economic aggression” in the region. Read more Philippines On the final leg of his tour, Trump hails his great relationship with President Rodrigo Duterte, who shares some populist and mercurial characteristics with his guest, and stands accused of masterminding a brutal crackdown on drugs. Read more

This brings us to this week’s remarkable US elections. Although the bigger test of the Trump presidency will come in 12 months’ time, in the midterm elections that involve every one of the 50 states, this week’s “off year” contests have a message, too. A simple and clear one. They were a stunning defeat for Trump, and for the belief that he has remade the dynamics of US politics.

Many have argued that Trump has upended modern politics, not just in the US but more broadly, along with Brexit and the populist upsurges in many parts of Europe. Trump didn’t merely win the White House, this argument says. He represents a broader sea change, in which the public has revolted against the centre left and the centre right, in favour of more radical demands.

This week’s results cast serious doubt on that simplistic analysis and the intellectual panic that it has generated. For the unmistakable message of these elections is that Trump has lost, not won, and that the traditional alternative party, the Democrats, have scooped the pool without distinction between their moderates and their radicals.

Yes, this week’s contests took place in only a minority of states, and predominantly in states in which the Democrats could expect to do well in a good year. But voters in Virginia, New Jersey, Maine, Washington state and many cities sent a consistent signal. The suburbs, full of the aspirational, low-tax, middle-class families, voted Democrat again. Women, college-educated and minority voters led the way.

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As EJ Dionne puts it in his Washington Post column this week: “It’s now clear that the backlash against Trump is the most consequential fact of American politics.” Trump’s strategy of reaching out to a left-behind industrial base with a racial message is not sustaining itself. Those historically low approval ratings, on which some have refused to rely because polling is supposedly now discredited, have turned out to be a better indicator than many believed.

None of this is to say that US politics is now set immovably in Tuesday’s pro-Democratic template, even though the anti-Trump majority was unmistakable. Nor is it to pretend that Trump has terminally abandoned the world to Xi’s China, even though it is beginning to look that way. But one year in, Trump has been rumbled and a lot of the air has gone out of his balloon. His enemies are not, as he would have it in his tweets, “haters and losers”. On the contrary. They are optimists and winners. Right now, Trump is the loser.

• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist