The World Economic Forum in Davos is once again proving that if you gather enough private jets in one place, the sheer concentrated weight of human arrogance can actually alter the local gravity. Into this thin mountain air steps Donald Trump, a man who views the globe not as a complex ecosystem of sovereign nations, but as a late-night infomercial where everything must go, including the ground beneath your feet. The latest absurdity trickling down the snow-capped peaks of Switzerland is the burgeoning 'front' against the American President, as European leaders attempt to grow a collective backbone in the face of his desire to annex Greenland. It is a spectacle of such profound futility that one wonders if the oxygen deprivation has finally reached a critical mass.

Let us consider the Greenland gambit—a colonial fever dream that sounds like a rejected script for a bargain-bin Bond film. Trump’s ambition to wrest control of this icy expanse from Denmark, a NATO ally, is the ultimate expression of his particular brand of real estate nihilism. To him, Greenland is just a fixer-upper with a lot of potential for luxury bunkers and strategic mineral extraction. The Danish, naturally, are offended, clinging to the quaint 20th-century notion that you can’t just buy a country because you’ve run out of things to slap your name on in the lower forty-eight. But the real comedy lies in the European reaction. The 'confrontational' stance being adopted by the EU is the diplomatic equivalent of a toddler holding its breath until its face turns blue. They are horrified, not because the request is insane—which it is—but because it strips away the polite veneer of 'international cooperation' to reveal the raw, transactional greed that fuels the very forum they are currently attending.

Davos itself is a monument to hypocrisy, a place where the ultra-wealthy meet to discuss the plight of the poor while sipping vintage champagne that costs more than a Midwesterner’s annual deductible. Trump was originally scheduled to use this platform to address 'affordability issues' back home. The irony is so thick you could carve it with a steak knife. To discuss the cost of living from the comfort of a Swiss ski resort, surrounded by billionaires who have spent their careers making the world unaffordable for everyone else, requires a level of cognitive dissonance that would kill a lesser man. It is a performance for an audience of none, a cynical nod to a working class that wouldn't be allowed to park the cars at this event, let alone enter the building.

But the Greenland distraction is far more entertaining for the media vultures. It allows the European elite to play the role of the virtuous defenders of sovereignty, conveniently forgetting their own long, blood-soaked histories of doing exactly what Trump is proposing, albeit with slightly better manners and more elegant paperwork. They are forming a 'front' against him as if they are defending a fortress of democratic values, rather than just protecting their own interests in a changing geopolitical climate where the old rules of decorum have been tossed into the wood chipper. They despise Trump because he is the mirror they refuse to look into; he is the personification of the unbridled capitalism they all serve, just without the tuxedo and the faux-intellectual jargon.

As Philip Turle and the rest of the press corps sharpen their pencils to tell us 'what to know,' the reality remains stubbornly simple: the world is being run by narcissists in parkas. The clash between Trump’s crude expansionism and Europe’s performative outrage is not a battle for the soul of the West; it is a squabble between creditors over a shrinking pie. Whether Trump talks about affordability or real estate, the outcome remains the same for the rest of humanity. We are merely the spectators to a high-altitude pantomime, watching as the people who broke the world argue over who gets to keep the pieces. The 'growing front' in Europe will likely amount to nothing more than a series of sternly worded press releases and some awkward photoshoots in the snow. Meanwhile, the farce continues, and the ice in Greenland continues to melt, indifferent to who claims to own the dirt beneath it. In the end, Davos is just a very expensive way to watch the inevitable collapse of civilization from a slightly higher vantage point.