There is a specific, vintage flavor of ennui that descends upon one when observing the World Economic Forum in Davos. It is the feeling of watching a group of arsonists debating the price of fire extinguishers while standing knee-deep in gasoline. And into this glittering theater of the absurd steps Donald Trump, the American President, delivering a speech that renders the very concept of “fact-checking” distinctively quaint—like bringing a slide rule to a knife fight.

The media, bless their earnest, ulcerated hearts, have scrambled to “fact-check” the President’s latest address in the Swiss Alps. They pour over transcripts with the diligence of Talmudic scholars, pointing out inaccuracies regarding the status of Greenland or the specifics of NATO spending. But to subject Trump’s rhetoric to the binary rigor of true-or-false is to fundamentally misunderstand the genre of performance art we are witnessing. It is a category error. One does not fact-check a Salvador Dalí painting; one merely asks if the melting clocks are visually arresting.

Let us consider the Greenland affair, which apparently refuses to die a dignified death. The President’s continued fixation on the strategic acquisition of a semi-autonomous Arctic island—as if it were a distressed property in Atlantic City—is treated by the fact-checkers as a geopolitical error. It is not. It is a revealing glimpse into a transactional psyche so total, so all-consuming, that sovereignty itself is viewed merely as a negotiation hurdle. The reporters scream, “You cannot buy Greenland!” while the President looks at the melting ice sheet and sees prime waterfront real estate. The fact-checkers are technically correct, but they are arguing physics with a man who believes he can negotiate with gravity.

Then we arrive at the NATO spending claims, a perennial favorite in the Trump repertoire. The President stood before the global elite—a collection of individuals who have monetized the decline of Western civilization—and claimed credit for billions in defense spending from allies. The numbers, as the frantic journalists point out, are “contested.” This is a polite euphemism for “invented in the shower.” But again, the precision of the number is irrelevant to the method. By reducing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to the logic of a country club membership where Germany is behind on its dues, he successfully shifts the window of discourse. We are no longer discussing the value of the post-war order; we are hagglers arguing over the bill at a restaurant where the food was terrible anyway.

The spectacle is heightened by the setting itself. Davos is where the architects of global inequality gather to congratulate themselves on their philanthropy. Watching them squirm as Trump dismantled their carefully curated reality was, admittedly, a dark pleasure. These European technocrats, with their perfectly tailored suits and their belief in the sanctity of institutions, looked at Trump with the horror of a host watching a guest drink from the finger bowl. They clapped politely, of course. They always do. Because while Trump’s relationship with the truth is tenuous, his relationship with the stock market—their true deity—is robust.

The exercise of debunking these claims feels increasingly like a ritual performed for the comfort of the debunkers, rather than for the edification of the public. It assumes there is a shared objective reality that matters. But in the rarefied air of the Swiss Alps, reality is a flexible commodity. When the President claims the American economy is the “greatest ever,” despite the structural rot visible to anyone earning less than seven figures, he is not lying in the traditional sense. He is manifesting. He is projecting a reality distortion field that the Davos crowd, despite their snobbery, secretly admires. After all, isn't that what they do? They spin narratives of “conscious capitalism” while the planet boils.

So, let the fact-checkers wield their red pens. Let them point out that Greenland is not for sale and that NATO funding mechanisms are complex. It is noble work, in the way that bailing out the Titanic with a teacup was noble. But let us not pretend that this changes anything. The tragedy isn't that the President lies; it's that in a world defined by the absurdity of Davos, the truth has become just another distressed asset, waiting to be acquired or liquidated.