Deep in the Swiss Alps, where the air is as thin as the moral fiber of the attendees, the annual high-altitude vanity project known as the World Economic Forum has once again provided a stage for the world’s most expensive puppets. This year, the lead act was Donald Trump, a man who views international diplomacy through the lens of a 1980s Atlantic City casino liquidation sale. He stood before the so-called 'Masters of the Universe'—a collection of technocrats and billionaire vultures who pretend to care about the climate while their private jets clog the Zurich tarmac—and delivered a performance that was less a policy speech and more a hostile takeover bid for reality itself.

The media, specifically the perpetually worried voices at France 24 and beyond, are currently in a state of high-octane pearl-clutching over the President’s apparent disregard for 'soft power.' It is a charmingly quaint concern. Soft power, for those who didn't spend four years at a Georgetown cocktail party, is the polite fiction that other countries like us because we produce good movies and occasionally fund a library in a country we’ve recently bombed. Trump, being a creature of pure, unadulterated transactional greed, has no use for such nuances. Why bother with the illusion of friendship when you can simply treat the entire planet like a failing strip mall? To Trump, the US economy is a glowing scoreboard, and the rest of the world is just a collection of deadbeat tenants who are late on their security deposits.

His address at Davos was a masterclass in the kind of boorishness that makes the European elite reach for their smelling salts. He didn't just ignore the globalist script; he used it to wipe the grease from a Big Mac. He spent his time lambasting allies and NATO as if he were an insurance adjuster looking for reasons to deny a claim. The message was clear: if you aren't paying the protection money, don't expect the heavy lifting. The Right loves this, of course, mistaking this schoolyard bullying for 'strength,' oblivious to the fact that isolationism is just another word for burning your bridges while you’re still standing on them. Meanwhile, the Left decries the 'erosion of norms,' as if the 'norms' of neoliberal exploitation were somehow sacred before an orange real estate developer started saying the quiet parts out loud.

Then we have the Greenland situation—the ultimate piece of performance art in this tragicomedy. Trump’s insistence on negotiating for the world’s largest island is the perfect synthesis of his psyche. He doesn’t see a sovereign territory or a strategic Arctic outpost; he sees acreage. He sees a big white space on the map and his first instinct is to wonder if he can put a gold-plated hotel on it. He assured the Davos crowd he doesn't want to use 'force' to take it, which I suppose is the closest thing to a humanitarian gesture we can expect from a man whose entire worldview is built on the premise that everything is for sale if the seller is desperate enough. The Danish are offended, the Greenlanders are confused, and the rest of us are left to wonder if we’ve slipped into a timeline scripted by a particularly nihilistic episode of Looney Tunes.

The irony of Davos is that both the speaker and the audience are equally grotesque. On one side, you have a President who treats the Department of State like a pawn shop. On the other, you have the globalist elite who are horrified by his lack of 'regard for soft power' only because it makes their own exploitation of the working class look less sophisticated. They prefer their pillaging to be done with a smile and a white paper on sustainability, not a loud-mouthed rant about trade deficits and island-buying. They are all, without exception, part of the same machinery of rot. Trump is just the rust that has become sentient and started yelling at the gears.

As the analysts at France 24 dissect the 'meaning' of this speech, let us be honest: it means nothing and everything. It means that the post-war order is not being dismantled by some grand ideological shift, but by the sheer, petty boredom of a man who prefers the aesthetics of a boardroom brawl to the tedium of governance. It means that 'soft power' was always a myth we told ourselves to feel better about the hard power that actually runs the world. And it means that we are all trapped in a theater where the actors have forgotten their lines and decided to just start throwing the furniture at each other. Whether you’re a fan of the populist clown or the technocratic vultures, the end result is the same: the slow, agonizing decline of a civilization that is too stupid to realize it’s already dead.