The annual migration of the world's most self-important parasites to the snowy peaks of Davos has, quite predictably, devolved from a circle-jerk of neo-liberal platitudes into a collective panic attack. The cause? Donald Trump’s recurring fever dream of turning Greenland into the world’s largest refrigerated annex of the United States. It is a spectacle of such profound, multi-layered stupidity that it serves as a perfect epitaph for the twenty-first century. On one side, we have a man who views the entire planet as a collection of distressed properties in need of a gold-plated logo; on the other, a gaggle of European leaders and career politicians who believe that expressing 'concern' is an actual substitute for power.

Trump’s obsession with Greenland is the ultimate 'Florida Man' move on a planetary scale. It is the manifest destiny of a man who spent the eighties trying to put his name on every gold-plated toilet in Manhattan, now applied to a tectonic plate. The sheer, blunt-force trauma of his diplomacy—demanding a sovereign nation hand over its territory as if it were a failing Atlantic City casino—is enough to give any remaining diplomat a terminal migraine. But let’s be clear: this isn't about strategy, rare earth minerals, or the Arctic's melting shipping lanes. Those are the justifications used by the 'experts' who have to pretend there is logic in the chaos. For the orange-hued real estate broker-in-chief, this is about the primal urge to acquire. It is the territorial pissing of a billionaire who is bored with terrestrial golf courses and wants to start collecting glaciers.

Then we have the Davos set. The World Economic Forum, that congregation of the 'enlightened' few who fly private jets to discuss carbon footprints, has been rocked by the sheer vulgarity of the proposal. The reports from the forum indicate that European leaders have abandoned the refined language of statecraft for the visceral comfort of profanity. It is the last refuge of a continent that has traded its sovereignty for a sense of moral superiority and a declining birth rate. When they swear in the face of Trump’s threats, they aren't showing strength; they are showing the frail indignity of the powerless. They are like a HOA board discovering that a neighbor wants to park a monster truck on his front lawn. They can quote the bylaws all they want, but the monster truck doesn't care about their feelings or their neatly manicured hedges.

Adding to this theater of the absurd is California Governor Gavin Newsom. The Golden State's golden boy, preening in Davos, has taken it upon himself to represent the 'resistance.' Newsom is a man who never saw a mirror he didn’t want to lecture, and his presence at the forum is a masterclass in performative anxiety. He is 'concerned.' He is 'warning.' He is doing everything except anything that actually matters. Newsom’s role in this play is to provide the aesthetic of opposition for the cameras, ensuring that he looks very serious and very presidential while the actual world-movers ignore him in favor of the next round of appetizers. He represents the Democratic party’s favorite strategy: looking fabulous while the house burns down.

Behind the shouting and the swearing lies the grim reality of global trade. The threat to Greenland is just a symptom of a larger, more terminal disease. The post-WWII order, that fragile web of treaties and 'rules-based' systems, is being dismantled by a man who thinks rules are for people who can't afford better lawyers. The Europeans are terrified because they’ve realized that the 'international community' they worship is just a hallucination that only exists as long as the United States agrees to keep the lights on. If the U.S. decides it wants to trade its role as the global policeman for the role of global landlord, there is absolutely nothing the 'enlightened' elites of Davos can do about it besides use four-letter words in French and German.

The irony is that the Greenlanders themselves are, as always, an afterthought. To Trump, they are tenants; to the WEF, they are symbols of climate change; to Newsom, they are a talking point. No one in this alpine bubble cares about the people on the ice. They only care about the precedent, the trade war, and the optics. It is a battle between two different ways to ruin the world: the crude, transactional greed of the American Right and the hollow, performative moralizing of the globalist Left. Both sides are equally useless, equally self-serving, and equally committed to ensuring that the rest of us remain trapped in their respective delusions. In the end, the Greenland crisis isn't a geopolitical event; it’s a psychodrama for the world’s most powerful toddlers. And we, the unfortunate spectators, are expected to take sides in a fight over who gets to hold the shovel while the planet continues its slow, inevitable slide into the abyss.