I was hoping to round up President Trump’s speech in Davos, Switzerland in this report today, but as I write this, Trump is still speaking and it looks like he’s gone off script: he’s not looking at teleprompters but at the audience and he’s clearly ad-libbing which could go on a while.
The prepared remarks - the part Trump appears to have read off the teleprompters - was interesting but not surprising in substance. Already before departing for Davos last night, Trump announced he was leaving the Nation behind in such an awesome condition, like nobody’s ever seen it before. That’s how his speech in Davos started, right after WEF Chairman Larry Fink introduced him. Inflation is down, economic growth is yuuge, $18 trillion in foreign investments are coming into the United States, hundreds of factories are being built, etc.
Trump spoke about reforms in the U.S. including reduction of Federal bureaucracy (cutting 275,000 government jobs), axing 129 regulations for every new piece of regulations introduced, allowing investors who build industrial facilities in the U.S. to expense 100% of their investment in the first year (as opposed to amortizing them over 38 years or longer), etc.
Shortly into his speech, Trump spoke about Venezuela and expressed effusive praise for Venezuela’s current leadership. Doubtless, those remarks will have been very disappointing to those who hoped to see the nobel prize laureate Maria Corinna Machado installed as Venezuela’s president. Then Trump spoke about Greenland and I believe he left nobody in doubt that he is dead serious and determined to get Greenland for the U.S.
With respect to Ukraine, Trump made it clear that it’s Europe’s problem and underscored yet again that it was a war that never would have happened if he were president and that the only reason why it did happen was because the 2020 elections were rigged. Then he dropped the news: “people will be prosecuted. I guess I’m breaking news…”
That remark was made almost in passing, as though he wasn’t meant to say this, but he almost certainly did mean to say it: without a doubt, this will make many people in the United States very nervous, starting from former President Obama on down the command chain.
Trump wasn’t nearly as abrasive to his Davos audience as he was in his famous 2019 speech. In fact, he went out of his way to be friendly and compliment the attendees as “great leaders” etc. But he did take a fairly strong swipe against Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney saying that Canada basically owed its existence to the United States, that Carney was ungrateful and that he should keep that in mind the next time he makes a speech.
Mark Carney delivered his own remarks to the Davos gathering yesterday. To my mind, that speech was much more interesting than that of President Trump. For one thing, Carney seemed much more at ease than he has been in public lately. Perhaps this was because he was on friendly turf and once more looked like his old smug self. But his whole speech pretty much amounted to a defensive reassertion of Canadian nationhood, sovereignty and integrity and a critique of Donald Trump and his administration bordering on a call to action for everyone to stand up to the big U.S. bully.
But the comical part of Carney’s speech was that it sounded so formulaic, I’m convinced that whoever wrote it for him used AI. Again and again he’d pronounce those hollow, word-salady sentences: this thing is not just XYZ but much more than XYZ… Here are a few examples:
So… diversification internationally is a material foundation for honest foreign policy? Okay, then. That can’t be a human-generated sentence (unless the human is a high school student just looking to pass an exam). Whatever the case, Carney was happy enough to go with it. With an air of Harvardite sophistication and a sprinkle of smugness, at first blush, it sounded clever.
However, the underlying theme of Carney’s remarks was not just anxiety but defensiveness (I made up that sentence myself). It may have foreshadowed one of the most consequential changes shaping up over the next three years of Trump’s term. He announced them, at the White House a few months ago:
Map of the Western Hemisphere Trump put up for the European leaders may have seemed like trolling at the time. Now we know that Trump is entirely very serious and determined about U.S.A.’s territorial acquisitions (notice, even the territory of Venezuela is shown as covered with a U.S. flag). It’s really a rupture, not a transition…
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By Independent News Roundup