The good news headline from Donald Trump’s trip to Davos was that he seemed to rule out force for now in his urgent quest to acquire Greenland. The bad news: he started talking about Iceland as well.
What might have been a big reveal about the next step in Trump’s imperial ambitions was more likely a slip, though all speculation about the workings of the presidential brain is by now a guess at best.
It was possible to trace the origins of the glitch. Every time Trump expounded on his desire to own Greenland at Davos, he described it as a big or beautiful “piece of ice”, pronounced with the same lascivious relish as a Sopranos wiseguy sizing up a female character’s attributes.
As a statement of geology, it was plainly untrue. Greenland is a significant landmass – the biggest island on the planet – but the notion of a “piece of ice” has clearly lodged in Trump’s mind, and from there it was a short mental hop to talking about Iceland instead.
The president’s cognitive functions have been a source of concern for some time, but although Trump acknowledged he was now one of the older people at the Davos forum, he insisted he didn’t feel old.
He had arrived later than scheduled after an aerial dysfunction, the presidential retinue forced to turn around over the Atlantic and return home with an electrical fault on Air Force One.
He took off again but on a smaller plane, making for a less imposing arrival in Zurich for the world’s most powerful man, but the delayed entrance only heightened the tension in the Swiss town. The apprehension was palpable in the hall by the time Trump appeared, a sort of reverse stage fright: the audience were far more scared than the performer.
This was the World Economic Forum after all, the embodiment of the postwar global liberal order that Trump has dedicated his second term to smashing. That order has come apart so completely and so quickly that Trump’s seeming announcement that he was not about to send US troops to seize the territory of Denmark, a longstanding ally, counted as a win.
With its “excessive strength and force” the US would be “unstoppable”, Trump claimed, but he added: “I won’t use force.”
The relaxation of gripped jaw muscles around the room was almost audible and the president paused to take in the moment, savouring the fact the room was hanging on his words.
The day before, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, had told the same audience that the world was “in the midst of a rupture, not a transition”.
It was the “end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality” Carney said to the world’s powerful and wealthy. “We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
Carney did not mention Trump by name when he talked about “great powers” that had begun using “economic integration as weapons”, but Trump had no qualms about calling out Carney who he said was not sufficiently “grateful” to Canada’s powerful neighbour.
“Canada lives because of the United States,” the president said. “ Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”
This remarkable claim, the epitome of American supremacy, reflected a recurring theme of an otherwise rambling, disjointed address, which was mostly a stump speech aimed at a domestic audience.
As he had flown over Switzerland, he could see it was indeed a beautiful country, but he told his hosts they “wouldn’t have a country” without the US. He suggested the same for much of Europe and the world – any country that had been maintaining a trade surplus with the US. His reasoning seemed to be that because countries had sold more than they had bought from his country, their very existence was parasitical.
“You’ve been screwing us for 30 years,” Trump shouted. “America is keeping the whole world afloat.”
In his view of history, the US had taken over Greenland during the second world war and prevented imminent invasion (from Nazis presumably, although he gave no details), and then handed it back to Denmark in an act of foolish generosity.
Danish sovereignty in Greenland dates back 200 years and was unchanged during the war, but the idea that the US had somehow taken ownership of the island and then mistakenly surrendered it (an echo of Vladimir Putin’s claims about Crimea before he claimed all of Ukraine) has stuck in Trump’s consciousness and was Wednesday’s reason for why Greenland had to belong to Trump.
It was a speech sprinkled with the overt racism that has increasingly become part of the president’s shtick. He repeated a slur against Somali Americans as social benefit cheats, based on a largely debunked “investigation” by a far-right YouTuber.
Trump claimed that “$19bn in fraud” had been “stolen by Somalian bandits”. He has previously expressed his desire to deport Somalis en masse.
The speech dwindled to a halt and there was a smattering of applause from a gathering that was glad just to have been schooled for admitting migrants into their country and backing renewable energy, rather than witnessing a full-on declaration of war on the stage in front of them.
Trump signed off with “I’ll see you around” in a way that sounded foreboding. US troops would not be parachuting into the snow today at least, but the president made repeated references to the military might at his disposal should he change his mind.
The starkest reminder was silent, however. It came in the shape of the White House military office Marine Corps aide who got off the president’s helicopter with him in Davos holding the “football”, the black briefcase carrying the codes for launching the 900 nuclear weapons the US has on alert at all times. It is the constant antidote to any temptation to laugh at Trump’s rants or gaffes.
