Trump blows up Davos and demands Greenland

0:02The Telegraph

0:10It's the speech we've all been waiting for. Donald Trump has eviscerated cheese-eating surrender monkey Davos man. Greenland is just a block of ice, but he wants it, he deserves it, and he's going to humiliate any Western leader who stands in his way. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Camilla Tominy.

0:38Tim, forgive me, but weren't you clean shaven this morning and then after a day in the car with me? I look like Columbo. It's terror. It's a terror beard. No, you drove really well. We have just come back from Dorset where we're recording a special episode about Labour's war on pubs, which will come out on Friday. And then we had to get back very, very quickly to the office and you drove through the rain and you never broke the law once. Thank you for saying that. I'm very proud that I was once awarded an advanced motoring certificate. And like Partridge, I do metaphorically wear driving gloves.

1:11We've been in Dorset and now we need to go from Dorset to Davos. And you and I sat next to each other in the car listening to this extraordinary speech. Now, I know those with TDS, Trump derangement syndrome, are going to say it was rambling. It actually wasn't. I mean, it was repetitive, as they always are. But, I mean, I got the message loud and clear, didn't you? He talks about the weave and he started actually saying, I'm doing the weave. And the weave is where he starts an idea and goes around the houses and covers several other points, but then somehow returns to the idea. So there is this intellectual thread.

1:43And we were listening on the BBC to this. And I noticed they spent 30 seconds to a minute afterwards talking about how discombobulated they were and how some viewers, some listeners might think the speech was strange. It's like, we've had him for 10 years now. Yes. He can no longer take you by surprise. No. This is what Donald Trump sounds like. The interesting thing is, what does it mean? We will talk about what he said. Yes. And how he said it with some bad impersonations. But the key thing is, what does it mean for the world? Let's just rewind a bit, Tim. So we had this quite chaotic press conference last night, where Trump wants to list 365 achievements for 365 days in office since the inauguration.

2:28And he repeated a lot of that at Davos. I'd heard much of this speech before. Before, exactly, which is ever the case. Then he sets off to Davos but has to turn the plane around because of an electrical fault, which is not something you would hope Air Force One can get. No, exactly. Especially a nervous flyer like you. I know, can you imagine, it's the one plane in the world that's supposed to not get electrical faults. So then he's three hours late and everybody's waiting for him at Davos, even though there's a collection of the world's most important people. Everyone's waiting for Trump. There's talk about which of the two biggest rooms can we put this guy in.

3:01Another room for his ego, perhaps. While he was in the air, the US Treasury Secretary Scott Besson said that the UK was letting us down over Chagos. So remember the context of this meeting of Davos, which is a big row over Greenland. Donald Trump threatening to hit European countries that won't support him buying Greenland with tariffs. And having previously said that he was in favour of the Chagos deal, he has now revisited that. And Trump is now saying it's a bad deal, in fact a stupid deal. So this is all about setting Trump up for a big fight, a big negotiation with the Europeans. Before we go to Switzerland, let's go to Westminster, Tim, and just deal with PMQs.

3:39Obviously there's a big attack, there's a big kind of target on Starmer's back here. Has he been strong enough in his response to Donald Trump? Not least now he's been humiliated over giving away Chagos and is he really in a position to comment about the self-determination of Greenland when he sold out the Chagossians, which is a point of attack for Kemi Badenock, the Prime Minister did appear to strengthen his rhetoric. President Trump deployed words on Chagoss yesterday that were different to his previous words of welcome and support when I met him in the White House. He deployed those words yesterday for the express purpose of putting pressure on me and Britain in relation to my values and principles on the future of Greenland.

4:27Mr Speaker, he wants me to yield on my position and I'm not going to do so. The problem with him saying I will not yield on principle, and those principles are as clear as mud, is that by refusing to hit Trump with counter-tariffs and by talking about the need to go on talking, it does sound like he has yielded. I mean, it's a little like he's the boy on the beach who's having sand kicked in his face and he's saying, I will not yield in the sense of getting up and walking away. Yes. But you're welcome to go on kicking sand in my face. Yes. Maybe I'll put on a pair of goggles, but you know, you just carry on.

5:07Yeah, exactly. And I will still be here tomorrow. But the one person who sort of noticed this and accused the prime minister of being bullied and used quite a colourful metaphor, It was Ed Davey, leader of the Lib Dems. We remember how Tony Blair ignored warnings from these benches and tied himself to an unpopular American president and a disastrous foreign policy, while close allies like Canada and France looked on in horror. With Donald Trump increasingly acting like a crime boss running a protection racket, threatened to smash up our economy unless he gets his hands on Greenland, Will the Prime Minister avoid Blair's historic mistake, take our advice this time, and join Prime Minister Carney and President Macron in standing up far more strongly to President Trump?

5:59Meanwhile in Davos, somebody's enjoying themselves, as you would expect of a former banker. Mark Carney, formerly the Governor of the Bank of England, now Canadian PM, having usurped Justin Trudeau, who, by the way, turned up at the summit with Katy Perry. Oh. Cue flashbulbs. As incongruous as David Beckham turning up, but there you have it. So they're there on the sidelines. And suddenly, Mark Carney is able to position himself as the golden boy of the Western alliance with some fairly, I mean, intellectual, but also liberal language around how Trump was treating his supposed allies. On plurilateral trade, we're championing efforts to build a bridge between the trans-Pacific partnership in the European Union, which would create a new trading block of 1.5 billion people.

6:51On critical minerals, we're forming buyer's clubs anchored in the G7 so that the world can diversify away from concentrated supply. And on AI, we're cooperating with like-minded democracies to ensure that we won't ultimately be forced to choose between hegemons and hyperscalers. This is not naive multilateralism, nor is it relying on their institutions. It's building coalitions that work, issues by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together. In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations. What it's doing is creating a dense web of connections across trade investment culture on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities.

7:44Argue the middle powers must act together because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu. Mark Carney, of course, won an unwinnable election by opposing Trump because Trump had threatened Canada with tariffs. and the Liberal Party got re-elected in a sort of patriotic response. Yes, we won't be the 51st state in all that. And what Carney is saying is very interesting, which is everything has changed. The old rules-based multilateral order is over. Things are retreating into great powers, pushing people around. And his message was less directed at America than it was his fellow Europeans.

8:23What he was saying was, don't give in. don't just try and suck up to the big powers, America or China, because if you do that, we'll all get rolled over, and they'll roll over you eventually as well. So people at this thing are starting to think about, is there the potential for a non-great power alliance to emerge, for little countries to defend the rules-based order? And he has support in that view from Emmanuel Macron, who showed up to Davos wearing a pair of very attractive sunglasses. Aviators that were kind of mirrored, a little bit like Maverick in Top Gun. And we weren't the only people wondering why he was wearing them, but we'll come back to that.

9:04He said it was an eye infection. We're wondering whether Brigitte, his wife, may have... Brigitte's lost her patience. Possibly. But anyway, we'll get on to Donald Trump's kind of evisceration of the various Western leaders that he's been dealing with in recent days. But he opened the speech with a very funny line. When he finally landed at Davos and he arrived in the room and everyone was waiting for him, Of course, he starts speaking and he starts speaking about how great America is doing under his watch and all the rest of it. And economically, it's thriving. And everyone's sitting thinking, is he going to mention what he went on to describe as a big block of ice?

9:41You do it better than me. A big block of ice. And he actually made a joke about this idea that the world was watching for one particular mention of one particular country. We want strong allies, not seriously weakened ones. We want Europe to be strong. Ultimately, these are matters of national security and perhaps no current issue makes the situation more clear than what's currently going on with Greenland. Would you like me to say a few words of Greenland? I was going to leave it out of the speech, but I thought I think I would have been reviewed very negatively. Trump reiterated that he has tremendous respect for Denmark and the people of Greenland, but he has a history story to tell, which is that during the Second World War, the United States somehow kind of took ownership of Greenland because the Danish couldn't defend it.

10:40And at the end of the Second World War, it handed it back. We fought for Denmark. We weren't fighting for anyone else. We were fighting to save it for Denmark. Big, beautiful piece of ice. It's hard to call it land. It's a big piece of ice. But we saved Greenland and successfully prevented our enemies from gaining a foothold in our hemisphere. So we did it for ourselves also. After the war, we gave Greenland back to Denmark. How stupid were we to do that? But we did it. But we gave it back. But how ungrateful are they now? Now, I'm sure historians will disagree very strongly with that interpretation.

11:24My understanding is that although America had bases on Greenland, they at no point owned it. So they didn't really have anything to give back. And of course, they then after the war had an agreement with Greenland whereby NATO could be militarily present on it. So that's all disputable. But that is his history story. So what he's saying is, if we had it before, why can't we have it again? Then there's a point where he channels his inner Alf Garnet and says, if it wasn't for the Americans... Without us, right now you'd all be speaking German and a little Japanese, perhaps. The other thing he clears up, Tim, because a lot of his critics have said, hang on, why are you doing this?

12:08You do not need to own this block of ice, this country so far away from your own territory. You do have rights because you had military bases on it. Some of them you've closed. You can very easily reopen them under the terms of the initial treaty. You don't need to be the freeholder. You can just be a leaseholder here. And he did address that directly. All we're asking for is to get Greenland, including right title and ownership, because you need the ownership to defend it. You can't defend it on a lease. Number one, legally it's not defensible that way, totally. And number two, psychologically, who the hell wants to defend a licence agreement or a lease, which is a large piece of ice in the middle of the ocean where if there is a war, much of the action will take place on that piece of ice.

13:05Think of it. There was clarity in that. There wasn't so much clarity as to whether it's called Iceland or Greenland. Yeah, what was that all about? At certain points, he slipped into calling it Iceland. I mean, our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland's already cost us a lot of money. I'm helping Europe, I'm helping NATO, and until the last few days, when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. I think this has happened because he referred to Greenland as a big block of ice. Yes. So in his mind, it has become Iceland. Yeah. One hopes to heaven that this isn't all based on a horrible misunderstanding and that what he actually wants is Reykjavik.

13:44Yes, that's right. Because if we do finally give him Greenland, we're not giving him Reykjavik too. I don't know what, if he's worried about inflation. When he turns up and says, this is not what I was expecting. He goes to Reykjavik and tries to buy a pint, needs to remortgage the White House. Then he'll know whether he wants it or not. But we digress. He's going to build the greatest golden dome ever built. That's a kind of... Protective shield. A protective shield, really, for America's benefit, I think, rather than anyone else's. Like the Iron Dome in Israel, only a Golden Dome in Greenland.

14:14Yes, yes. OK. So having laid out his case for why he should have it, what everyone must be thinking in the room is, so what are you going to do if we won't give it to you? We probably won't get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be, frankly, unstoppable. But I won't do that. OK, now everyone's saying, oh, good. That's probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force. I don't have to use force. I don't want to use force. I won't use force. All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland. Well, we already had it.

14:53Now shoot me, Tim. But as I was listening to this, I could sympathize and empathize with the logic in a way of what he's saying. What he's saying is for years and years and years since the Second World War, America has kept his end up. In fact, even before then, we came in, you know, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We joined the war. We joined the Allied effort. If it wasn't for us, you wouldn't have won. We can have our own discussion about that on a separate podcast, whatever. Right. Equally, ever since then, we have shouldered the burden militarily and financially for NATO. We've kept our end up.

15:33We've never asked for anything. I'm not saying that I want Greenland just for America. I'm doing it for peace on Earth. I'm saying that this is now so geographically crucial and strategically placed that I need to take control of it. And I actually deserve no less because of the contribution that the USA has made to world peace since 1945. And if we accept the logic of superpower confrontation, which Mark Carney has said is the way things are going, though he wishes it wasn't, then the choice is, should Greenland be dominated by America or by China? Yes. Now, Westminster right now is going through a little blitz spirit Churchill thing of running to the defence of small nations.

16:22And that's the principle upon which Keir Starmer will not yield. And he's quite right to. We're a small country. We believe in national sovereignty. That's why we voted for Brexit. We think countries should be free to make decisions about their own futures. That, again, is why we came to the defense of Ukraine. And in spirit, America agrees with that. What Trump is saying is, but we're always the ones who pay for that. And here is a case where we don't want to do that. And you can't stop us. And you can't stop us for a whole series of reasons that he went into. about the decline of European civilisation.

17:01Yes. So he's also saying, by the way, don't blame me that you have weakened yourselves. Don't blame me that you are now weaker because you have allowed mass immigration to your countries. You have adopted loony green policies that mean that your energy is now the most expensive in the world. He had a right go at the UK, actually quite rightly, for saying they're sitting on literally J.R. Ewing levels of oil in the North Sea and refusing to grant licenses. You've done this to yourselves. The United Kingdom produces just one-third of the total energy from all sources that it did in 1999. Think of that, one-third.

17:41And they're sitting on top of the North Sea, one of the greatest reserves anywhere in the world, but they don't use it. And that's one reason why their energy has reached catastrophically low levels with equally high prices. high prices, very low levels. Think of that, one-third, and you're sitting on top of the North Sea, and they like to say, well, you know, that's depleted. It's not depleted. It's got 500 years. They haven't even found the oil. The North Sea is incredible. They don't let anybody drill. Environmentally, they don't let them drill. They make it impossible for the oil companies to go.

18:17They take 92 percent of the revenues. So the oil companies say, we can't do it. they came to see me. Is there anything you can do? I want Europe to do great. I want UK to do great. Sitting on one of the greatest energy sources in the world and they don't use it. In fact, their electricity prices have soared 139%. There is a cogent argument as well too. Look, I don't want to denigrate Europe, but I want my allies to be strong. And at the moment, you're weak. you're in this sort of continued status quo where nothing changes unless somebody like me starts throwing their weight around. And that was the message of its national security document produced last year, that European civilisation is in collapse.

19:09America doesn't want that because, and this is a very interesting moment, here's Trump talking about his own ancestry. I am derived from Europe, Scotland and Germany. 100 % Scotland, my mother, 100 % German, my father. And we believe deeply in the bonds we share with Europe as a civilization. I want to see it do great. So there is a sympathy for Europe among American conservatives, but there's also a reluctance to keep bailing them out. He said, certain places in Europe are not recognizable. I love Europe and I want to see it do good, not heading in the right direction. Massive spending, unchecked mass migration, green energy, foreign imports from faraway lands.

19:57So if Europe wants to suddenly defend the rules base order, fine, good for them. But they can't. No. And also, by the way... Because of these problems and these decisions they have taken. And the timing, actually, in making this all about America versus China, either with or without the Europeans' help. The timing was just interesting from a UK perspective because only this morning we had Ed Miliband on the airwaves talking about giving us all billion-pound subsidies for solar panels that are actually going to be made by the Chinese in the week that we have granted, quite stupidly in Trump's eyes and indeed the eyes of anyone with any knowledge of intelligence policing or indeed China, a super embassy on the site of the Royal Mint right next to very important cables linking the City of London to the rest of the world.

20:49So it is a bit more, it's sort of on our domestic radar, I think, more, the China threat and emboldening China. I just found it ironic that you had the Environment Secretary out and about saying it was great to be building more windmills only for Donald Trump over in Davos to tell all the people that believe in the windmills, despite their jet-set travel lives, that the windmills are stupid. I mean, he made a claim about China having no wind farms. There are windmills all over Europe. There are windmills all over the place. And they are losers. One thing I've noticed is that the more windmills a country has, the more money that country loses and the worse that country is doing.

21:33China makes almost all of the windmills. and yet I haven't been able to find any wind farms in China. Did you ever think of that? That's a good way of looking at it. They're smart. China's very smart. They make them, they sell them for a fortune. They sell them to the stupid people that buy them. But they don't use them themselves. No, that's not correct. But the British public who have had it up to here with Net Zero would have been nodding along to that and see the folly and agree with the criticism of the Milibandisation of our energy policy. Because all of this£300 off the bills isn't happening to you or I or anyone else listening or watching.

22:12I just want to put that there, just domestically. The framing of all this was quite interesting. If anyone listening wants to write in for an answer, why, after over a decade of subsidies and investment in renewable energy, does the price not collapse? Because Ed Miliband keeps saying it will collapse. And whenever you say, why is it not then? The green types always say, because the price is set, by gas, and gas is incredibly high at the moment. Well, why is the wholesale price set at gas? If this is a green government, maybe I'm being thick, maybe there is a very simple answer to this, but if the price is going to continue to be set for gas until the end of time, what's the darn point of all this investment in green?

22:50At what point do we reap the benefits of this green revolution?

23:05It gets quite personal, doesn't it? It does, in a very funny way. Yes. He's like a comedian who is dealing with hecklers. Yes. It's like he's going around the audience and saying, where are you from? It's a horrible place. You look stupid. That's right. I like, so basically, and bearing in mind in the background of all this is him giving up the WhatsApp messages that have been sent to him by various European leaders. So we have already seen people sucking up to him. Yes. And he has betrayed that confidence. Yes. Then we have this moment where he addresses Mark Rutter, who is the Secretary General of NATO and has got quite a lot of work on his hands right now.

23:44And it's this strange mixture, Tim, isn't it, of trying to, like, maintain a degree of cordiality while at the same time there's just an undercurrent of taking the mickey. Oh, yeah. I'm helping NATO, and until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me daddy, right, last time. Very smart man said, he's our daddy. Then there's the dig at Macron, the French president, and basically Donald Trump says what all of us are thinking. So when I called up Emmanuel Macron, I watched him yesterday with those beautiful sunglasses. What the hell happened? Then he pops Kanye's balloon by saying this about Canada.

24:31We're building a golden dome that's going to, just by its very nature, going to be defending Canada. Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way. They should be grateful also, but they're not. I watched your prime minister yesterday. He wasn't so grateful. They should be grateful to us. Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements. While all this is going on, I'm thinking, OK, Sir Trump is incredibly rude. But also, why do none of the people in the room who he insults get up and walk out? There is something so demeaning and undignified about people who, in their own minds, are statesmen, just sitting there, perhaps behind a pair of sunglasses to hide the tears, pretending they're not gravely insulted.

25:33Yes. By these very, very rude jokes. And this is the thing about Trump. You get, so before he arrives, before he's in the room, they're acting like, we shall stand up to him. He won't push us around. We have dignity. We're people too. As soon as he's there, it is like the bully walks in the room. As soon as he's there, it's all, hi, how are you, Donald? Oh, you're so funny. You're right. I should stop hitting myself. Yes, exactly. It's pathetic. I mean, in all seriousness, never mind I will not yield. You yield every time you interact with him because you never publicly say no to him. He says no to you.

26:08Would it kill you to once say, I'm leaving? Yes. Do a storm out. I mean, he joked about you'd all be speaking German or Japanese. There were Germans and Japanese there. I know. But then isn't the dilemma for those not suffering from Trump derangement syndrome, so just take out all the people that as soon as he even gets up to speak, they're outraged and they can't believe he's saying it and they're self-flagellating because it's all just so awful and how has the world come to this? Let's just take them out of the equation because they're not quite rational. The trouble is with it for the right, and indeed right-minded in both senses of the word, Western leaders, is there is a grain of truth to what he's saying.

26:52Yeah. But there is an objection to the way that he is saying it, and indeed the way that he is intended to execute what he's saying. Well, and to go back to Ed Davies' metaphor of the mob boss, he did say there will be no force. But whenever someone says, there will be no force, they're doing it to remind you that they have force. There could be force. It's like someone walking into the saloon with a gun and saying, I won't be using this gun. Just yet. But I have it. I do have the gun and it's loaded. And we all know that the reason why no one walks out of the room is because they can't afford to.

27:30Also, is it the art of the deal again, you know, getting bored of saying maybe we should take him seriously but not literally? I mean, it was difficult not to take him literally during that speech in the sense of, is this all a giant first gambit? I want it. I need to own it. I'm having it. I deserve it. You need to give it to me in a bid to just push into a position where they reassert some kind of leasehold rights over the country and move forward. Or does he genuinely want to own it? I mean, this is what we don't know, right? Yes. How does this guy, how does this property developer behave? Yes.

28:13He's behaving by asking literally for the earth, or at least a little icy piece of it. Yes. Is he going to climb down in the face of people trying to bargain back and say, well, hang on a minute, you want to reassert some rights over Greenland, we're not going to go as far as you want, but we'll meet you halfway? Because if people meet him halfway, then he's got something, he's won. Or is this to the death, fighting to the death for the ownership of Greenland? Well, look what he got on NATO spending. He got people spending 2%. The alternative was what? His threat to walk away? Well, he wanted 5 % like they're spending, right?

28:48So they got the 2%. So I suspect the way to deal with Trump is to offer him something else that he can sell to people. By the way, he was also talking at great length about how he had rung up individual leaders and told them, I am raising the price of US drugs on you so that I can lower them on me. That is humiliating. He is telling Democratic leaders, like Nero gathering the Senate, that I am going to hurt your clients. I'm going to hurt your constituents in order to advantage mine. And he parodied the people who gave in as weak. That was actually the most offensive part of the speech. But again, no one ever walks away.

29:31And they don't walk away because they can't walk away. This is where Carney and Trump are in agreement. They both pointed to the phenomenon of the last 30 or 40 years of Europe trying to get by on the cheap by globalization. We will just import all the workers we need. We'll move towards financialization. We'll sell off our industry and we'll buy cheap rubbish from China. And for a while that gave the mirage of wealth. But as Carney said, and Trump would agree, you have left yourself exposed. Your supply lines can now be used against you. I love this, by the way. Carney was complicit in all that.

30:12Of course he was. He is part of the very elite that did this to us. And when we ask, why does Trump apply tariffs? That's crazy. I mean, no one would ever think of doing that. They did it 100 years ago. But we did it in the British Empire. He's doing it precisely because he doesn't want America to be vulnerable to the very pressures he's now applying to other countries. So they are in agreement on this. that globalization has left everyone weak and it's why they can't resist someone doing what Donald Trump's doing right now. But to bring it back to Blighty, I mean, it's so difficult now, isn't it?

30:49Starmer chose not to go to Davos. Again, still can't understand that. To quote Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, big mistake. Yes, huge mistake. Huge. He's now off to Beijing of all places. Oh, what a visual that is. So he's going to China and Japan. Yes. And this is a risk, by the way, that European countries now do more business with China. They can't imagine a future just standing on their own two feet, so they're going to move towards China rather than America. If ever this nation and indeed Europe and the Western world needed a Churchillian figure, it was now. And our prime minister just simply isn't that.

31:26So in a kind of fantasy world, even just speaking journalistically, one would love to watch an exchange between Trump and Thatcher. Do you know what? Equivalently, I wouldn't mind seeing how Boris Johnson might have handled Trump in these circumstances. And we're left with Starmer, who isn't even in the room. I mean, it's humiliating enough to be in the room and be embarrassed. He wasn't even in the room, Tim. I'm sorry, but I think that is ludicrous. You're meant to be the bridge. Yes. And you're not even present. Yes. I think that comparison with Churchill, which I hadn't thought of before, is interesting because, of course, he also had to deal with isolationism.

32:07He had a sympathetic president in FDR, but he had a Republican Congress who wouldn't allow America to support Britain at the beginning of the Second World War. So Churchill had to work very close with administration and with politicians to win them around, which he was partly able to do thanks to his own American connections. But crucially, Churchill's vision of the world was an Atlantic alliance of the English-speaking peoples which would encompass the British Empire. He had a card to play with. Our prime minister has no cards. So if you have no cards, all you can do is take the insults and ultimately give in.

32:44So until European countries behave seriously and build serious nation states, they're going to have this done to them. Just to take your card analogy, I was going to say the joker in the pack, but that's not fair to the Reform UK leader. The wild card here, and we have to watch events in Davos tonight, is Nigel Farage. Because in the Prime Minister's absence, he is there. My understanding is that they're going to rub shoulders at some event over the course of the next 12 to 24 hours. Yeah. So let's just watch that space, because, of course, Mr Farage is storing a great deal of capital in his own relationship with the US president and doing some kind of pre-briefing that in some way he can try and influence this situation, even though he said he doesn't want to tread on Keir Starmer's toes.

33:30Well, he can't get near Keir Starmer's toes because they're tucked up in bed at Downing Street. He will not yield from bed. That other great UK to American export, Prince Harry, has been on the stand today, Tim. Haven't got time to talk about it today, but we'll definitely discuss that tomorrow, 5pm.

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