Donald Trump turned up in Davos wielding an insult bazooka. He mocked Emmanuel Macron’s aviator sunglasses, chided Mark Carney (“Canada lives because of the United States”), asserted that the Swiss are “only good because of us” and had a dig at Denmark for losing Greenland “in six hours” during the second world war.
But beyond the fractious rhetoric, the US president brought a deeper message on Wednesday that sought to unify the west rather than divide it. It was his most dark, insidious and sinister project of all.
Trump surmised: Yes, we might have our internal squabbles, but I am bringing tough love because we are all in this together. We are the standard bearers of western civilisation. We must resist the barbarian hordes. We must save the white man.
The ageing president, who in 2024 complained, “We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” told the World Economic Forum that he was “derived from Europe”, namely: “100% Scotland, my mother; 100% German, my father. And we believe deeply in the bonds we share with Europe as a civilisation.”
He lamented that “certain places in Europe are not even recognisable, frankly, any more”, blaming culprits that included “unchecked mass migration”. Trump said: “It’s horrible what they’re doing to themselves. They’re destroying themselves, these beautiful, beautiful places. We want strong allies, not seriously weakened ones.”
What came next was pure racism as Trump reflected on immigration to his own country, where he has made the Somali community a special target of his deportation rhetoric after recent government fraud cases in Minnesota in which a majority of defendants had Somali roots.
“We’re cracking down on more than $19bn in fraud that was stolen by Somalian bandits,” he said. “Can you believe that Somalia – they turned out to be higher IQ than we thought. I always say these are low-IQ people. How did they go into Minnesota and steal all that money?”
Then he got to the heart of the matter: “The situation in Minnesota reminds us that the west cannot mass-import foreign cultures which have failed to ever build a successful society of their own. I mean, we’re taking people from Somalia, and Somalia is a failed – it’s not a nation. Got no government, got no police, got no nothing.” (Somalia does, in fact, have a government, though not democratically elected.)
He launched a bitter tirade at Ilhan Omar, a Somali-born Democratic congresswoman who is a US citizen. Then he insisted: “The explosion of prosperity and conclusion and progress that built the west did not come from our tax codes. It ultimately came from our very special culture.
“This is the precious inheritance that America and Europe have in common, and we share it. We share it but we have to keep it strong. We have to become stronger, more successful and more prosperous than ever. We have to defend that culture and rediscover the spirit that lifted the west from the depths of the dark ages to the pinnacle of human achievement.”
Trump’s speech had the fingerprints of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and architect of his draconian immigration policy, all over it. It chimed with an entire discourse of white identity politics festering on the US right.
It is there in the “great replacement” theory, a conspiratorial notion that demographic change is engineered to replace white majorities with non-white populations, undermining traditional culture. It is there in Trump’s decision to grant asylum to white South Africans because of a fictitious “white genocide” said to be taking place in their country. It is there in the rabid ideology underpinning Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) thuggish assault on immigrants in Minneapolis.
It is also there in Miller’s worldview, which has long promoted racist fears of demographic replacement of white people and civilisation decline. He has become the editor who turns Trump’s pub chatter into “Make America great again” scripture.
Speaking at the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk’s funeral last year, Miller said: “Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry. We stand for what is good, what is virtuous and what is noble.”
Only Miller could have spent last Christmas watching a Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra family TV show from 1967 and had this takeaway: “Imagine watching that and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world,” he tweeted. (There was an instant backlash from X users noting that both Martin and Sinatra were the sons of immigrants.)
Elon Musk, a white man born in apartheid in South Africa and now the richest person in the world, has amplified such ideas. His feed on X, the social media platform that he owns, is still replete with dire warnings of white civilisation under siege. Earlier this month he retweeted with a “100%” endorsement a post declaring that: “If white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered … White solidarity is the only way to survive.”
Trump’s far-right allies have been worrying of late that he has become distracted by global conquest – Iran, Venezuela, Greenland – and losing sight of his creed of “America first”. On Wednesday he may have been addressing the wealthy elites in Davos but, as ever, his true target audience was the one back home. The message: I am still the great white hope.
