ANALYSIS
Asked how far he could go to acquire the Danish territory, US President says: ‘You’ll find out’
WASHINGTON – For a man claiming to have notched up “365 Wins in 365 Days”, Donald Trump did not appear to be in an especially celebratory mood on Tuesday.
Hours before he clambered aboard Air Force One and hurtled towards Davos for crisis meetings with European leaders on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum, the US President held court in the White House briefing room for 104 rambling, incoherent minutes.
On issue after issue, he evinced signs of dyspepsia and groused that his messengers are doing an insufficient job of proclaiming the achievements of his first year back at the helm.
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He fumed that his Department of Homeland Security was failing to convey the success that his masked, trigger-happy ICE and Border Patrol agents are enjoying as they engage in thuggish raids to sweep illegal immigrants, some of them allegedly “murderers and rapists”, off the streets. “We’re not promoting it…we need to do a much better job,” the US President railed.
He moaned that American voters were insufficiently informed about the health of America’s “booming” economy, its “super-high growth” and the country’s “trade deficit slashed by 77 per cent in one year”.
But as he crowed about the strength of the stock market, traders on Wall Street were letting their nervousness over the future of transatlantic relations do the talking. The S&P 500 lost more than 2 per cent of its value on Tuesday, even as the US President asserted that America “is the hottest country in the world right now”.
Trump brandished a binder detailing an apparent 365 achievements during his second term so far (Photo: Mark Schiefelbein/AP)
Of his efforts to cut the cost of prescription drug prices, Trump fumed that “you hear zero talk about it”, falsely claiming that The New York Times had buried the story “near the back of the paper”.
Revealing one possible explanation for his last-minute decision to hold a press conference on his 365th day back in the Oval Office, Trump suggested that “maybe I have bad public relations people, because we are not getting [the message] across”.
For the best part of two hours, he droned on, reading at times directly from a binder detailing the 365 signature achievements of his last 12 months. Mercifully, he did not dwell on item 245 on the list shared with reporters: “Signed an executive order to end the use of paper straws.”
European leaders watching from Davos could have been forgiven for wondering if thePresident had lost the plot. Time and again, he raged that he had been overlooked for the Nobel Peace Prize. “I’ve lost a lot of respect for Norway… I strongly believe Norway controls the Nobel Prize,” he said, even though it doesn’t.
Trump dismissed an offer by French President Emmanuel Macron to host an emergency G7 summit in Paris to discuss Greenland (Photo: Denis Balibouse/Reuters)
When it (finally) came to the issue of Greenland, Trump kept the world guessing.
After a morning spent approvingly reposting a social media message proclaiming the UN, Nato and Muslims are “the real threat” to the world, he demurred when he was asked how he plans to acquire Greenland. “You’ll find out,” he said.
Hours after Emmanuel Macron claimed the world was becoming a place where “international law is trampled underfoot”, Trump himself decided to tread all over Macron’s reputation. He dismissed an offer by the French President to host an emergency G7 summit in Paris to discuss Greenland, calling Macron “a friend, but he won’t be around much longer”.
Trump assured reporters that he would instead hold conversations with “people directly involved” in the Greenland issue, perhaps a reference to Nato secretary general Mark Rutte, who has previously referred to Trump approvingly as “Daddy”.
“I think something’s going to happen that’s going to be very good for everyone,” Trump predicted. “We will work something out where Nato is going to be very happy and we are going to be very happy,” he added, as though Nato and the United States were somehow distinct entities separated at birth.
For Sir Keir Starmer, there were only admonitions during Trump’s press conference.
The UK Government’s decision to hand the Chagos Islands over to Mauritius now gets the US presidential thumbs-down, despite US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s original description of the deal as a “monumental achievement”.
Trump falsely claimed that when he had previously approved the arrangement, Washington had believed the UK was “talking about the concept of ownership” of the islands. “They should keep it,” he said.
He warned the Prime Minister to “straighten out” the UK, arguing that the Government must control mass immigration, and embrace fresh drilling for North Sea Oil in a bid to cure what he called Britain’s “problem with energy”. Of Macron and Starmer collectively, he said they “get a little rough when I’m not around. When I am around, they treat me very nicely”.
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Earlier in the day, Trump threatened to impose 200 per cent tariffs on French wines and cheese unless Macron drops his opposition to French membership of the US leader’s proposed “Board of Peace” and agrees to pay the $1bn (£748m) entry fee. At the press conference, Trump revealed a determination to ensure the new board will rival the United Nations for primacy on the geopolitical stage.
“If the United Nations did more, we wouldn’t need the Board of Peace”, he said.
Is he ready to de-escalate tensions with America’s Nato allies and find an off-ramp in the row over Greenland? It was impossible to tell from Tuesday’s stream-of-consciousness invective. But Trump was clear that he is rethinking his decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
He said he now regretted calling it the “Gulf of America”, and instead insisted “it’s not too late” to revert to his initial plan and call it the “Gulf of Trump”. In Davos, meanwhile, European officials are wondering whether the hours ahead will yield any progress in bridging their own gulf with the US President.