There is something deliciously grotesque about Davos. It is a place where the air is thin, the champagne is vintage, and the hypocrisy is thick enough to stop a bullet. In this Alpine playground for the world’s self-appointed stewards of capital, one expects a certain level of performative concern for the planet. Instead, we were treated to the spectacle of Donald Trump, a man who views the world not as a collection of cultures and histories, but as a series of distressed assets. His latest pitch? The peaceful acquisition of Greenland. It is the ultimate manifestation of the mercantilist ego, delivered with the casual indifference of a man deciding which tie to wear to a deposition.

Trump’s insistence that he wants to “get Greenland, including right, title and ownership,” is a phrase that should haunt the nightmares of any remaining proponents of international law. Note the linguistic precision—or lack thereof. He did not speak of diplomacy, nor of mutual benefit, nor of the self-determination of the Greenlandic people. He spoke in the dialect of a real estate closer. “Right, title, and ownership.” It is the language of a foreclosure auction. To Trump, the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark is merely a pesky lien on a prime piece of polar real estate. One can almost see the mental blueprints: a gold-plated hotel nestled in a melting fjord, perhaps a casino where the polar bears used to roam. It is manifest destiny reimagined for the era of reality television.

But the true brilliance of the performance—the part that truly drips with the irony I so dearly cherish—was his magnanimous promise not to use force. How profoundly civil. In an age where the bar for global leadership has been lowered into the Marianas Trench, we are now expected to applaud a superpower for promising not to invade a NATO ally to steal a third of its landmass. It is the diplomatic equivalent of a neighbor telling you he won’t burn your house down, provided you agree to sell him the backyard for a bag of magic beans. This is the “new normalcy”: a world where the absence of a literal military invasion is framed as a grand gesture of transatlantic cooperation.

Naturally, the speech wouldn't be complete without the requisite derision of European allies. Trump’s disdain for the Continent is perhaps the only consistent intellectual thread in his chaotic worldview. To him, Europe is a sclerotic retirement home, a collection of ungrateful debtors who have the audacity to expect the United States to pay for their security while they complain about the quality of American chicken. His assertion that NATO should not “stand in the way” of U.S. expansionism is the final, surgical cut to the heart of the post-war order. NATO, we were told for seventy years, was a shield for democracy. Under the Trumpian lens, it is merely a restrictive covenant that prevents the homeowner from building an illegal extension into the neighbor’s garden.

One must admire the sheer, unadulterated honesty of the greed. There is no pretense of “spreading democracy” or “humanitarian intervention” here. It is a land grab, pure and simple, justified by a belief that everything—mountains, ice, people, history—has a price tag. The Davos crowd, those weary globalists with their carbon-offset private jets, sat in stunned silence as the American President treated the map of the world like a Monopoly board. They want to talk about the Fourth Industrial Revolution; he wants to talk about who owns the dirt. It is a collision of two different kinds of absurdity, and as an observer of the human comedy, I find myself rooting for the ice to melt faster, if only to put us all out of our misery.

In the end, this Greenland gambit is the perfect metaphor for our collapsing theater. We have a world leader treating a sovereign territory as a souvenir, a military alliance being told to sit in the corner while the adults discuss property lines, and a global elite that is powerless to do anything but sigh into their espresso. Trump’s “peaceful” expansionism is not a sign of restraint; it is a sign of total contempt for the rules of the game. He isn’t trying to break the system; he has already realized the system is a hollow shell, and he is simply moving in the furniture. We are all living in a property brochure now, and the lease is up.