The annual migration of the world's most exquisitely dressed parasites to the Swiss Alps has, once again, yielded the kind of intellectual fruit that makes one long for the sweet embrace of a solar flare. Davos, the World Economic Forum’s playground where the ultra-wealthy gather to discuss 'restoring trust' while burning enough private jet fuel to melt the very glaciers they claim to protect, has finally descended into its natural state: a high-stakes middle school cafeteria. This week, the global theater of the absurd reached its terminal velocity when Donald Trump, the human personification of a capsized cruise ship, decided to provide a fashion critique of French President Emmanuel Macron. The subject? A pair of blue aviator sunglasses.

Macron, a man whose entire political identity is built on the precarious foundation of looking like a slightly smarter version of whoever else is in the room, decided to address the delegates while sporting blue-tinted aviators. It was a choice. It was a choice that screamed 'I am a visionary of the digital future' to his dwindling band of supporters, and 'I am a mid-level villain in a straight-to-DVD sci-fi movie' to everyone with functioning retinas. It was an aesthetic plea for relevance from a man who treats the French Republic like a boutique startup he is desperately trying to sell to a private equity firm. Trump, never one to miss an opportunity to weaponize someone else’s vanity, took to the stage to ask the question that has haunted the Gallic soul since 1940: 'What the hell happened?'

There is a profound, almost poetic nihilism in watching two of the most powerful men on the planet bicker over eyewear. On one side, we have Macron, the 'Jupiterian' technocrat who thinks a wardrobe change can distract from a crumbling social contract and a continent in permanent identity crisis. His decision to wear the glasses was clearly a calculated attempt at 'cool,' a desperate reach for the kind of effortless charisma that usually requires an actual personality. It was performance art for the technocratic elite, a visual signal that he is 'forward-looking,' even as his domestic popularity rests in a shallow grave. He looked less like a world leader and more like a man trying to hide a very expensive hangover behind the shield of high-end optics.

On the other side, we have Trump, the grand maestro of the low-brow insult. Trump’s brilliance—if we can call the base instinct of a predatory scavenger 'brilliance'—lies in his ability to identify the exact point of an opponent’s insecurity and poke it with a jagged stick. He doesn't need to debate Macron’s economic policies or his stance on European strategic autonomy; why bother with the tedious labor of thought when you can just point at a pair of blue glasses and laugh? Trump understands that the modern electorate doesn't want policy; they want a roast. They want to see the 'elite' taken down a peg, even if the person doing the taking down is a man who literally lives in a gold-plated tower and possesses the skin tone of a radioactive cantaloupe.

The irony is so thick you could choke on it. Trump, a man who has spent decades perfecting a look that can best be described as 'over-toasted marshmallow with a polyester crest,' critiques the aesthetic choices of a man trying to look like a French version of Tom Cruise. It is the blind leading the blind, or in this case, the orange mocking the blue. The 'What the hell happened?' query is particularly rich coming from a man whose own political career is the ultimate answer to that very question. What happened? Reality collapsed, that's what happened. We traded substance for spectacle, and now we are left with the dregs of a civilization that treats the Davos stage like a red carpet at the E! People's Choice Awards.

Meanwhile, the audience of billionaire sycophants and corporate vultures watches on, nodding along as if this schoolyard spat has any bearing on the 'state of the world.' They are the true villains of the piece, the enablers who provide the platform for this vapid psychodrama. They pretend to care about global inequality while sipping five-figure bottles of wine, and they pretend to care about diplomatic decorum while two world leaders behave like influencers fighting over a ring light in a parking lot. The cognitive dissonance required to sit in a room in Davos and listen to fashion critiques while the world burns is perhaps the only renewable resource we have left.

Macron’s blue aviators are the perfect metaphor for the current state of Western leadership: transparently fake, slightly distorted, and designed primarily to shield the wearer from the harsh light of reality. And Trump’s mockery is the perfect metaphor for the populist response: loud, cruel, and completely devoid of any constructive alternative. We are trapped in a loop of performative nonsense, where the only thing that matters is the 'own.' The intellectual atrophication of the West is complete when the primary takeaway from a global economic summit is the color of a Frenchman’s lenses.

As the glaciers continue to recede and the global order continues to fray at the edges, we can at least take comfort in the fact that our leaders have their priorities straight. Why solve the polycrisis when you can argue about sunglasses? Why engage in the difficult, unglamorous work of governance when you can just be a 'personality'? The Davos crowd will fly home in their private jets, Macron will put his glasses back in their designer case, and Trump will continue to scream into the void. And the rest of us? We’re just the captive audience for a show that should have been canceled seasons ago. What the hell happened, indeed. We happened. And we deserve every bit of this shiny, blue-tinted catastrophe.