Davos “Trump vs. Reality", Again
Donald Trump’s speech today was a greatest-hits medley of grievance, bravado, and that special brand of fact-free confidence that treats reality like an annoying heckler. If you’re trying to “make sense” of it, the trick is to stop expecting a coherent argument and start hearing it as performance: big numbers, bigger claims, and a constant insistence that only he can fix what he also can’t accurately describe.
He started where he so often starts: the 2020 election, once again labeled “rigged.” It’s become less a claim than a comfort blanket, something he drapes over any moment that might otherwise require him to accept a basic outcome. The problem remains stubbornly the same: he lost to Joe Biden, and repeated declarations don’t reverse vote totals.
From there, he leaned hard into the myth of Trump the economic wizard, claiming he secured “$18 trillion” in investment in his first year back in office. Eighteen trillion is an eye-watering figure also, according to available documentation, a fictional one. Even the White House’s own site reportedly cites $9.6 trillion in “major investment announcements,” and critics argue even that is heavily inflated. But why stick to a merely exaggerated number when you can double it and make it sound like every CEO on earth personally begged you to take their money?
Then came the promise he can’t resist making to seniors: “no tax on Social Security.” It’s clean, it’s punchy, it gets applause. It’s also not what the policy actually did. The 2025 bill created an additional temporary tax deduction for seniors, not a permanent end to taxation on benefits. And even the White House has implicitly acknowledged that millions of Social Security recipients will still pay taxes on their benefits. So yes, “no tax,” except for the millions who will continue paying tax. Details: always so inconvenient.
On inflation, Trump spoke as if he wrestled it to the ground personally. But the timeline doesn’t really cooperate with the self-congratulation. Inflation peaked at a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022 and then steadily fell during the latter part of Biden’s presidency, hitting around 3.0% year-over-year by January 2025, the month Trump returned to office. By December 2025 it was 2.7% year-over-year, still inflation, but hardly the apocalyptic firestorm he implies, and not a trendline that started with his return like some kind of economic sunrise.
And then: gasoline. Trump claimed that “in many places” it’s already down to $1.95 a gallon and that “numerous states” are at $1.99. This is the point where you start wondering if he’s getting his numbers from a roadside sign in 1998. According to AAA, no state’s average was below roughly $2.34 that day, and only 10 states averaged under $2.50. You can always find a cheap station somewhere if you squint hard enough and ignore averages, but “numerous states” at $1.99 is more fantasy novel than fuel report.
Prescription drugs got the full Trump treatment: a dramatic claim, he’s reducing prices “by up to 90%”, followed by an even more dramatic improvisation: “depending on the way you calculate … you could also say 5-, 6-, 7-, 800%.” Which is less a policy explanation than a man trying to crowdsource arithmetic in real time.
On foreign affairs, NATO was cast again as a protection racket where America pays and everyone else freeloads. He repeated versions of the line that other countries “weren’t paying anything” until he showed up. But NATO members were spending on their own defense before Trump’s first term, non-US members spent $292 billion in 2016 and an estimated $482 billion in 2024, by NATO figures. Also missing from the insult-comedy framing: NATO has benefits for the US, and the alliance invoked Article 5 after 9/11. That’s not freeloading; that’s allies showing up when it counts.
Even the budgeting details don’t match the story. The US contributes a smaller percentage to NATO’s organizational budget than Trump implies, about 16% when he returned to office in 2025, down from about 22% when he took office in 2017. But “we’re being robbed” is always a cleaner line than “the formula changed.”
Then we arrived at the geography portion of the program, where Trump repeatedly referred to Greenland as “Iceland,” as if the Arctic is just one big frozen branding opportunity. Greenland isn’t an empty slab of ice; it’s home to more than 56,000 people, and the population is overwhelmingly opposed to a US takeover. He also suggested Greenland was once something the US had and could get “back,” which is not how the history reads. The 1941 agreement allowing US military operations explicitly reaffirmed Danish sovereignty over Greenland. Later talk about the US being a “trustee” didn’t really fix the underlying problem: he’s selling a conquest vibe with a pamphlet-level grasp of the facts.
He also revived the claim that he personally originated the notion that AI facilities could build their own power plants. There’s no real basis for that; companies were already experimenting with on-site generation during the Biden years. But Trump’s speeches are less about who did what first and more about making sure every good idea eventually gets retroactively labeled “Mine.”
On wars, he repeated the line that he “settled eight wars,” including items that weren’t wars and at least one conflict that never actually ended. It’s a familiar pattern: broaden the definition of “war,” narrow the definition of “ended,” and you too can sound like a one-man Peace Prize committee.
And finally, his China-windmill claim: China makes “almost all” windmills, yet he can’t find wind farms in China. In reality, China is the world’s leading user of wind power, with massive wind farms operating and more capacity being added quickly. They’re there. The fact that he hasn’t “been able to find” them says more about his research methods than about China’s landscape.
The gist of the speech, stripped down, is simple: Trump wants credit for everything good, insists anything bad is someone else’s betrayal, and treats verifiable facts as optional accessories. The sarcasm isn’t hard to summon, he practically hands it to you. The harder part is remembering that this isn’t just a comedy of errors. It’s a political strategy: speak with absolute certainty, overwhelm the audience with claims, and dare anyone to untangle it all before the next applause line hits.
Sarge