Trump Says “Sometimes You Need a Dictator” After Alarming Davos Speech

President Trump, who has a lengthy résumé of authoritarian tendencies, thinks that sometimes “you need a dictator.”

“We had a good speech, we got great reviews. I can’t believe it, we got good reviews on that speech,” Trump said on Wednesday, speaking of the long-winded, indignant, and incredibly boring address he gave earlier that day at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“Usually they say, ‘He’s a horrible dictator-type person,’ I’m a dictator,” Trump continued. “But sometimes you need a dictator! But they didn’t say that in this case.… It’s all based on common sense, it’s not conservative or liberal, or anything else.”

This kind of talk—which Trump has all but normalized—sheds further light on his aggressive, antagonistic approach to diplomacy, especially after he spent the morning threatening Europe, Canada, Greenland, and, bizarrely, Iceland.

“As I [have] always said, he is at his most honest when he is at his most malevolent and depraved,” George Conway commented on X.

Donald Trump’s Greenland fixation has frustrated Europeans enough that the European Parliament has suspended work on a trade deal with the United States.

The legislative body was looking at removing import duties against American goods, as part of an agreement made between the U.S. and the European Union over the summer at Trump’s golf course in Turnberry, Scotland. In order for the deal to be implemented, the Parliament and EU governments have to approve it, and the Parliament’s trade committee was going to vote on proposals on January 26 and 27.

But now, everything has been put on hold. The news came as Trump used his Wednesday speech at the World Economic Forum to triple down on his threat to seize Greenland (even though he mistook the territory for Iceland several times). Last week, Trump threatened to levy tariffs on eight European allies that oppose the U.S. annexing Greenland.

The deal was already facing some opposition over the fact that it favors the U.S., as the EU would be dropping most of its tariffs while the U.S. would keep a base rate of 15 percent. However, it was on track to be approved with conditions, including an 18-month sunset clause and the ability to respond to any surges in American imports.

Trump has refused to hear any reason on Greenland, telling reporters Wednesday, “You’ll find out,” when asked how far he is willing to go to take over the territory. Not only is a trade deal stalled, but European pension funds in Denmark and Sweden are exiting U.S. Treasuries. With Europe beginning to respond with economic measures against the U.S, will Trump budge at all on Greenland, or double down on his tariffs?

At least one person has been absolutely thrilled by Donald Trump’s recent push to acquire Greenland: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The U.S. leader’s relentless quest to annex the Danish-controlled territory has put America at odds with some of its strongest allies. Over the long weekend, Trump announced a new wave of retaliatory tariffs against European countries that oppose his Greenland takeover, cautioning other NATO members against participation in a joint military exercise on the island.

That sparked a celebration in Moscow, which has worked for decades to dismantle the European-friendly intergovernmental military alliance.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov acknowledged Tuesday that NATO was in “deep crisis,” a reality that he said he couldn’t have previously imagined, reported The Wall Street Journal. Lavrov also rejected Trump’s warnings that Russia would attempt to occupy Greenland if the U.S. did not do so, telling the paper that the Kremlin had no such plans.

Trump has claimed that America “needs” Greenland “for defense.” But what exactly the White House stands to gain from controlling Greenland isn’t clear, especially in light of the fact that myriad existing treaties already give the U.S. unfettered access to Greenland as a military base.

NATO, which currently encompasses 32 member nations, has practically defined world order and global trade since the end of World War II. Originally formed to defend against the threats of the Soviet Union, the alliance has since morphed into a powerful collective bloc that has both weakened Russia and diminished European defenses (in exchange for American nuclear protection) as the largest peacetime military alliance in world history.

Much to the chagrin of defense strategists, Trump has proved a vocal critic of the Western military and trade alliance, repeatedly insisting that the Unites States has gotten a bad deal, in which it gives more than it receives.

“It’s a five alarm emergency that’s dividing North America from Europe,” John Foreman, a former U.K. defense attaché in Moscow and Kyiv, told the Journal. “Russia must be sitting back thinking Christmas just keeps coming.”

Power players in Moscow have definitely taken notice of Trump’s efforts, opting to encourage the U.S. leader rather than dissuade him. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rubbed Trump’s ego earlier this week, claiming that Greenland’s annexation would “undoubtedly go down in the history books.”

“And not only in the history of the United States, but in world history,” Peskov said.

The vast majority of the American public opposes Trump’s proposed northern expansion. A YouGov survey published Tuesday found that 72 percent of polled voters do not support a military takeover of Greenland. Even Republicans were far less likely to support the measure, with 52 percent opposed compared to 22 percent in favor—a detail not lost on The Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, which chose to lead its site Wednesday with the Journal’s report.

As Donald Trump delivered rambling remarks touting his new world order at the World Economic Forum in Davos, yet another European country announced that it had sold off billions of dollars of U.S. Treasuries.

Alecta, a Swedish pension fund, revealed to Reuters Wednesday that it had been slowly selling off its U.S Treasuries for about a year. “Since the beginning of 2025, we have reduced our holdings in U.S. government bonds in several rounds, and together the reductions account for the majority of our holdings,” said Alecta’s chief investment officer Pablo Bernengo.

Bernengo said that the decision to sell off American assets was “related to the reduced predictability of the policy pursued in combination with large budget deficits and growing government debt.”

Alecta reportedly sold between $7.7 billion and $8.8 billion worth of U.S. Treasury bonds over the course of last year, according to Dagens Industri, a Swedish business daily.

News of this major divestment comes just one day after AkademikerPension, a Danish pension fund, announced that it would sell $100 million in U.S. Treasuries because of “poor [U.S.] government finances.”

While Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent earlier Wednesday dismissed Denmark’s holding of U.S. bonds as “irrelevant,” Europe collectively holds roughly $8 trillion of U.S. bonds and equities, providing it with a potential lever to fight back against Trump’s unchecked threats and tariffs—should it choose to pull it.

Former U.S. allies in Europe have started to push back against Trump’s repeated and unwelcome efforts to acquire Greenland (sometimes Iceland) from Denmark. A key group of European Union members blocked a trade deal with the United States Wednesday, after Trump threatened to take over Greenland and levy a 35 percent tariff on any European country that did not support his imperialist ambitions.

As President Trump headed to the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday evening, MAGA congressional Republicans—and a pro-Russian Romanian right-wing nationalist—were at the Kennedy Center taking a bite out of a Greenland-shaped, American-flag-covered cake.

Representative Anna Paulina Luna could be seen in one video of the event alongside fellow Representatives Andy Ogles and Abe Hamadeh. Also in attendance was George Simion, the leader of Romania’s far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians party. Simion, who lost the 2025 Romanian presidential election, has been accused of acting as a Russian agent, and was even banned from Ukraine for pushing a “unionist ideology that denies the legitimacy of the state border of Ukraine,” according to Politico. Now he’s joined MAGA in its imperialistic venture on Greenland, something the anti-NATO Kremlin likely has little issue with, especially if it can get in on it too.

“We cut it!” Luna said after making the first slice.

“We will be there for all the free people in the world,” Simion says as he makes his cut, before mumbling under his breath about having to “get rid of Macron.”

This is yet another mockery of Greenland’s sovereignty as the Trump administration claims again and again that it will move to take Greenland, regardless of any international protest.

“This is how some in the US view Greenland and its people—as a cake to be cut up and shared with smiles and laughter,” the European Commission’s Antoine Bondaz wrote. “Sorry, but this is deeply disrespectful and frankly pathetic.”

“Putin must be celebrating this. These are the enablers who are literally handing the United States to Putin,” chimed activist Fred Guttenberg. “Next, they will suggest that we call ourselves the Soviet Republic of America.”

It seems that President Donald Trump’s brilliant plan to help Iranians is to hold his wavering, mysteriously bruised finger over the big red button.

During an exclusive interview Tuesday with News Nation, host Katie Pavlich asked Trump for his response to “taunts” and threats from Iranian leadership. The president, who appeared genuinely confused throughout the interview, had recently advocated for new leadership in Tehran, following widespread antigovernment protests.

“Well, they shouldn’t be doing it, but I’ve left notification if anything ever happens, we’re gonna blow the hell—the whole country’s gonna get blown up,” Trump slurred.

Amid escalating state violence against protests, Trump urged protesters to keep demonstrating and take over their institutions, promising that help was “on the way!”

When no actual help materialized, Trump claimed that he’d talked himself out of ordering a military strike on Iran, after its government allegedly canceled thousands of scheduled executions.

Still, more than 3,900 people were killed, and 24,000 were arrested in the violent crackdown on protesters in Iran, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi published an op-ed Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal warning that Iran would not hesitate to respond to any attack from the U.S. “with everything we have.”

He also blamed Trump for fanning the flames of the protests, which Araghchi claimed had been taken over by foreign and domestic terrorists.

“The U.S. has tried every conceivable hostile act against Iran, from sanctions and cyber assaults to outright military attack—and, most recently, it clearly fanned a major terrorist operation—all of which failed,” Araghchi wrote. “It is time to think differently. Try respect, which will allow us to advance farther than one may believe.”

Donald Trump said, during his remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, that he could crush the housing market if he wanted to.

“I am very protective of people that already own a house, of which we have millions and millions and millions. And because we have had such a good run, the house values have gone up tremendously, and these people have become wealthy. They weren’t wealthy,” Trump said. “They’ve become wealthy because of their house, and every time you make it more and more and more affordable for somebody to buy a house cheaply, you’re actually hurting the value of those houses obviously, because one thing works in tandem with the other.”

Trump went on to say that he could easily crush the housing market by making it easier to buy homes.

“Now if I want to really crush the housing market, I could do that so fast and people could buy houses. But you would destroy a lot of people that already have houses. In some cases, they’ve mortgaged their house and the mortgage would be very low, and all of a sudden the mortgage without any changes becomes very high and they end up losing the house,” Trump continued, adding that “we should be paying the lowest interest rate of any country in the world because without the United States we don’t have a country.”

Trump’s alarming assessment of housing affordability shows that he still thinks like a landlord and property developer concerned about the value of his own assets. At a time when people are concerned about affordability in their lives, particularly when it comes to owning or renting a place to live, the president seems more concerned with people who already own property than those who are struggling.

In Trump’s own hometown, newly elected NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani was elected in a landslide on an agenda of freezing rent and making the city a more affordable place to live for everyone. It’s quite evident that Trump thinks doing that would “crush the housing market” and hurt the people who really matter to him: those wealthy enough to own a home already.

President Trump used his time at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday in Davos to admonish Canada as its leaders look to other world powers for more coherent and consistent partnership.

“We’re going to build the greatest golden dome ever built … that’s going to just, by its very nature, going to be defending Canada,” Trump said, referring to his far-fetched plan to build a defense system covering the entire North American continent, a larger version of Israel’s short-range Iron Dome.

“Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way. They should be grateful also, but they’re not,” Trump continued. “I watched your prime minister yesterday, he wasn’t so grateful. They should be grateful to us.… Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

The Trump administration has shown increased aggression toward NATO and North American allies alike, eroding years of soft power and diplomatic relations.

“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically,” Carney said at his Tuesday speech in Davos. “And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

“This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods. Open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes,” Carney continued. “We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick faced a tough crowd at the World Economic Forum in Davos—and was heckled by a surprising, but familiar, former U.S. vice president.

During an official dinner Tuesday night, Lutnick reportedly launched into a tirade criticizing Europe, inviting jeers from the forum’s major members, heads of state, and other dignitaries.

“We are here at Davos to make one thing crystal clear: With President Trump, capitalism has a new sheriff in town,” Lutnick said, according to the Financial Times.

Multiple people reportedly started heckling Lutnick’s speech—including former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who started booing the secretary, two executives told the Times. Amid the chaos, Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, walked out of the dinner.

The hosting WEF chairman, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, ended up calling off the event before desserts had been passed out, one source told Reuters.

The U.S. Commerce Department claimed that Gore was the only one who booed.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum Wednesday, Trump continued the American posturing as he tried to take credit for Europe’s existence in a winding, incoherent address.

What are Donald Trump’s goals for 2026? They’re all over the place.

The president was asked about his goals in regard to getting his agenda through Congress ahead of the midterms, and he gave a meandering answer about his own executive orders.  

“We passed so many executive orders. I have great executive orders that are really common sense and good. I mean, like water coming out of a sink. The water wouldn’t come out. They had all sorts of ridiculous restrictions. I took all of that off,” Trump said to Katie Pavlich on NewsNation Tuesday night. “Coming out of the shower head, you’d stand under the shower, there’s no water coming out, so I passed—so many things like that. 

“Straws. They don’t have to be paper anymore. They don’t have to melt in your mouth.… I’d like to have that all confirmed by Congress,” Trump continued, before adding that he got more important things accomplished through executive order, and would like to have all of his executive orders confirmed by Congress, estimating that 35 to 40 percent of his executive orders have already become law. 

“So you want your executive orders codified in law, so to speak,” Pavlich said. 

“Ideally, we get ’em codified and we get ’em codified soon, yes,” Trump replied.

Trump is well known for rambling and meandering around reporter’s questions, even in friendly interviews. But the vagueness indicates he’s either fully checked out or he’s hiding his agenda, as Trump and his inner circle are unlikely to settle for simply turning his many damaging executive orders through Congress. 

Getting Trump’s agenda through Congress will be a tall order. The president could barely get his own budget through Congress last year, and ended up causing a lengthy government shutdown. Trump’s executive orders also would have to survive court challenges, and some of them may not even get through the right-wing Supreme Court.