There is a specific kind of oxygen-deprived hysteria that permeates the air in Davos, Switzerland. It is where the global elite gather to pat themselves on the back for ruthlessly extracting value from the plebeians, all while pretending to solve the very crises they engineered. It is the Burning Man for people who own sweatshops. Into this amphitheater of high-altitude hypocrisy stepped Donald Trump, a man who treats objective reality not as a set of facts, but as a distressed asset to be liquidated and rebranded. At the World Economic Forum, surrounded by the shivering, sycophantic architects of the global order, the President declared the world “richer, safer and much more peaceful than it was just one year ago.”

One has to admire the sheer, unadulterated gumption of the statement. To stand before a world currently teetering on the brink of economic schizophrenia and geopolitical arson and declare it “safer” requires a level of delusion that borders on the artistic. But Trump didn’t stop there. He wasn’t content to merely gaslight the audience about the general vibe of the planet. He had metrics. He had stats. He had a “Board of Peace.”

Yes, a “Board of Peace.” It sounds like a shell company set up to launder money for a mid-tier cartel, or perhaps a homeowners association committee dedicated to banning loud leaf blowers. But no, this is the President’s new initiative, launched with the pomp and circumstance usually reserved for a groundbreaking ceremony at a golf course that will eventually go bankrupt. The banality of the name is almost impressive. It strips the concept of diplomacy of any nuance or history and reduces it to a corporate boardroom where peace is presumably a KPI to be managed by middle managers in ill-fitting suits.

But the centerpiece of this farce—the moment that truly captured the zeitgeist of our stupid, stupid era—was Trump’s claim regarding his military successes. He told the assembled masters of the universe that he has stopped eight wars. Eight of them. A nice, round number. But here is where the genius of the man shines through, a brilliance so dark it absorbs all intellectual light in the room: he admitted he didn’t know some of them were happening.

“We put out all those fires,” he said, basking in the applause of the lobotomized wealthy. “Most people didn’t know, including me, that some of those wars were going on.”

Read that sentence again. Let it marinate in the part of your brain that used to house logic. The President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief of the most expensive military apparatus in human history, claims to have ended conflicts that he, personally, was unaware of. This is not just foreign policy; this is quantum physics. This is Schrödinger’s Warfare. If a war is happening in a forest and the President is watching cable news instead of reading his intelligence briefings, does the war exist? Apparently not. And because he didn’t know about them, and now they are allegedly over, he has claimed victory over the void itself.

It is a fascinating glimpse into the solipsism of the modern executive. In Trump’s mind, the world only exists insofar as it interacts with his ego. If he is unaware of a conflict, that conflict is merely a theoretical abstraction. By remaining ignorant of global strife, he has, in his own estimation, solved it. It is the efficiency of apathy. Why bother with the messy, bloody work of diplomacy, treaties, and de-escalation when you can simply not know the war exists in the first place? If only previous leaders had understood this strategy. If Lincoln had just ignored the South, perhaps the Civil War would have been resolved by a Board of Peace signing ceremony in a Swiss ski resort.

The tragedy, of course, isn’t just the President’s incoherent rambling. We expect that. The man treats history like a buffet where he only takes the shrimp and leaves the vegetables. The tragedy is the venue. The World Economic Forum is supposed to be the gathering of the “serious” people. These are the technocrats, the bankers, the captains of industry who claim to steer the ship of state with steady hands. And yet, there they sat, listening to a man claim he extinguished fires he didn't know were burning, and they nodded. They didn't laugh. They didn't walk out. They likely applauded, because as long as the tax cuts hold and the deregulation continues, the world is indeed “richer” for the people in that room.

The claim that the world is “richer” is the only accidentally truthful part of his speech, provided you define “the world” as the square footage of the Davos Congress Centre. For the rest of humanity, the world is not safer, nor is it particularly peaceful. But we don't matter. We aren't on the Board. We are just the invisible combatants in the eight, or ten, or twenty wars that the President hasn't seen on television yet. We are the static in the signal, easily tuned out by a man who has discovered that the easiest way to solve the world's problems is to simply close your eyes and declare victory.