Donald Trump has used his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos to lay into US allies, repeat his demand for Greenland, and question his commitment to the Nato military alliance.
However, in the space between making headline-grabbing threats and mixing up Greenland and Iceland, the US President treated attendees to a 70 minute-long, rambling, often incoherent, and factually questionable rant on topics ranging from tariffs and immigration to sunglasses and pirates.
Among those, he revisited favourite talking points including complaining about the chairman of the US central bank, declaring that climate change is a hoax, and repeating his often-debunked claims that he won the 2020 US election.
Trump’s windmill ‘scam’ is back
Trump has long been a climate sceptic and during his speech, he once again singled out windmills – better-known as wind turbines – as something only “stupid people” buy.
“Because of my landslide election victory, the United States avoided the catastrophic energy collapse which befell every European nation that pursued the green new scam, perhaps the greatest scam in history,” he declared. “Windmills all over the place. Destroy your land. Every time that goes around you lose $1,000. You’re supposed to make money with energy, not lose money.”
US government officials including Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio during Trump’s speech (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/ Reuters)He added: “One thing I have noticed is that the more windmills a country has, the more money that country loses and the worse that country is doing.”
He claimed that while China made almost all of the “windmills” he had not been able to find any wind farms in China. “They sell them to the stupid people that buy them,” he said.
Trump has often made such claims, few of which are true. In fact, China has many windfarms – 44 per cent of the world’s capacity, ranking number one globally.
Some 16 per cent of electric generation in China came from wind in 2024, according to the Energy Information Administration, with China increasing wind energy by 76 gigawatts that same year.
Emmanuel Macron’s sunglasses
The US President took some time in his speech to mock the French President, Emmanuel Macron, for having worn aviator sunglasses the day before during his own speech at Davos.
Macron had been wearing sunglasses because of a burst blood vessel in his eye.
Trump told an audience that presumably included Macron: “I watched him yesterday with those beautiful sunglasses, what the hell happened?”
He then went further, claiming he forced the French President to raise drug prices, and at times mimicked his accent.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron during his speech at Davos (Photo: Denis Balibouse/ Reuters)Trump said: “He was at $10 for a pill… and I said ‘Emmanuel, you’re going to have to lift the price of that pill to $20 maybe $30’… He said ‘no no no Donald I will not do that’ I said ‘Yes you will, 100 per cent.’”
“I said ‘Emmanuel you’ve been taking advantage of the United States for 30 years with prescription drugs, you really should do it’”
“If you don’t, I’m putting a 25 per cent tariff on everything you sell into the United States and a 100 per cent tariff on your wines and champagnes.”
Switzerland and Rolexes
The President also singled out Switzerland – the conference host – for disparaging remarks, claiming that “they’re only good because of us… the majority of money they make is because of us because we never charged them anything, so they come in, they sell their watches, no tariffs… they walk away, they make $41 billion on just us.”
“So… I brought [the tariff] up to 30 per cent and the Prime Minister called, a woman, and she was very repetitive, she said ‘no no no you cannot do that, we are a small small country.’”
Switzerland’s Federal President Guy Parmelin meets Trump before a bilateral meeting at Davos (Photo: Laurent Gillieron via Getty Images)“She just rubbed me the wrong way I’ll be honest with you, and I said ‘alright, thank you ma’am’.. and I made it 39 per cent, and then all hell really broke out.”
He claimed that he had realised that “the United States is keeping the whole world afloat”.
He also claimed that there was an “imbalance” in trade with Switzerland. After the speech, the President of the Swiss Federation Guy Parmelin met Trump and attempted to correct him, pointing out that rather than there being a trade imbalance, there was actually a surplus.
Trump’s tirade against Somalis and ‘pirates’
Somalia and its people have been a popular target for Trump and his hardcore Maga base.
Trump lashed out at Somali-Americans in the Democrat US state of Minnesota in his speech, before suddenly pivoting to speaking about Somalian pirates off the Horn of Africa.
In Minnesota, a fraud investigation has been launched into federal childcare programmes. The majority of defendants are Somali, and Trump has used this as a pretext to initiate an immigration crackdown in the state, which is home to the largest population of Somalis in the country.
Trump said: “We’re cracking down on more than $19bn in fraud that was stolen by Somalian bandits… they turned out to be higher IQ than we thought.
Latvia’s President Edgars Rinkevics and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi at Davos today (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/ Reuters)“I always say these are low IQ people, how did they go into Minnesota and steal all that money?
“They’re good pirates but we shoot them out of the water just like we shoot the drug boats out, they’re not pirating too many boats lately do you notice?”
Criminal charges filed in Minnesota since 2022 do not come to £19bn, according to the independent fact-checking organisation PolitiFact. Furthermore the fraud investigations are still under way.
An irrelevant house prices tangent
Towards the end of the speech, journalists reporting from the venue described members of the audience visibly losing interest, checking their phones, with some struggling to stay awake and others leaving.
The increasingly rambling and structureless nature of the speech descended into largely irrelevant statements on domestic issues including rising house prices, which Trump blamed on the previous president, Joe Biden.
“So to help our citizens recover from the Biden disaster, all caused by this horrible president… I’m asking Congress to cap credit card interest rates at 10 per cent for one year, and this will help millions of Americans save for a home.”
Commentators pointed out the fundamentally pointless nature of lots of the speech.
Michael Clarke, a military analyst and visiting professor at King’s College London described Trump as “making a speech to himself”, adding: “He was just talking to himself in a way, because he was musing on all sorts of things.”
Trump’s prominent Democrat nemesis Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, summed up Trump’s speech as “remarkably boring” and signifying “absolutely nothing”.
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