Trump lumbers across the stage at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland. Screengrab from live feed.
Trump left for the elite meet-and-greet at Davos in one of his manic phases. He’d just spent the previous two days trash-talking, bragging about his Venezuelan coup, boasting over pocketing the revenue from Venezuelan oil in offshore accounts, lobbing invasion threats against allies, brandishing new tariffs as if they were hypersonic weapons, badmouthing his rivals, trolling his political enemies, and serial-posting of memes depicting himself as the latest conquistador of the New World. The Re-Conquistador.
Trump’s delusional conception of his own ever-expanding power, even as his poll numbers here continue to shrivel, now outpaces the megalomaniacal reveries of the Sun King of the Ancien Régime. After all, Louis le Grand only saw himself as the embodiment of the state (L’Etat c’est moi). But Trump envisions himself, through the magical hallucinogen of the Donroe Doctrine, as the Emperor of the entire Western Hemisphere (L’hémisphère occidental, c’est moi!) And he was flying to Switzerland to proclaim his new hegemony.
But a funny thing happened on his way to Davos.
The stock market collapsed. The Prime Minister of Canada cut a trade pact with China and urged other countries to do the same. Denmark told Trump to fuck off (literally). Unhelpfully for Trump, the Russians chose this week to publicly endorse his scheme to snatch Greenland from the Danes. The European Union, usually so timid and fractious, resisted his impetuous bullying and threatened to join military exercises in defense of Greenland and levy retaliatory tariffs of their own against the increasingly frail US economy.
Trump landed a deflated man. During his nearly incoherent speech at the World Economic Forum, Trump looked morose and sounded peevish. The words slurred, the fraying sentences trailing off into the ether. His insults lacked fire and punch. He rambled aimlessly. His cognitive decline, never a fall from alpine heights to begin with, was on full public display.
Was this the fearsome tyrant, so many had trembled in obeisance before? He looked like an old man, frail in body, infirm in mind. Not the new Sun King of his cult-stoked fantasies, but a patriarch deep into his autumn, struggling to find the words for retreat. Trump’s strategy (if you can call it that) for cultivating more enemies than friends was always doomed to backfire on him. The only question was how long it would take and how many he’d drag down with him.
So, Trump backed down. The intemperate bombast was spent, replaced by wheezing and stammering. He backed down on invading Greenland. He backed down on imposing new tariffs against European nations. He backed down in front of the elites he both despises and envies.
The humiliation will gnaw away at him for weeks, as he heads home, a weakened despot, to confront the escalating war he’s waging in American cities, against an increasingly rebellious population who’ve reached their own limits of tolerance for injustice and state violence.
