United States president Donald Trump received a courtesy visit from his ambassador to Ireland, Ed Walsh, as Air Force One sat on the tarmac at Shannon Airport on Thursday afternoon. After the aircraft refuelled, the Americans flew back to Washington in high humour, leaving in their wake a bewildered and beleaguered set of European leaders and governments to figure out if the sanctity of the postwar US-European alliance is truly dead in all but name – or whether they’d simply been walk-ons in another episode of the Trump show.
What had just happened? A “rupture” according to Canadian prime minister Mark Carney in a magisterial and sobering speech delivered on Tuesday. “It was an incredible time in Davos,” enthused Trump via his social media platform last night. Incredible in the literal sense.
On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal led reports that Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank, found a dinner speech delivered by US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick so repellent that she simply walked out. If so, it was an eloquent response and it could be asked why others didn’t follow suit as several Trump emissaries chided the Europeans before the president himself lambasted old allies during his long, already infamous speech on Wednesday, returning with a coup de grace on Thursday morning by unveiling the motley crew who will form his “Board of Peace“. For Lagarde, the vulgar, barnstorming seizure of the forum by the US delegation marked a clear line in the snow.
“This is a wake-up call, a bigger one than we have ever had,” she said.
“And I think that Europe is going to look at its strengths, look at its weaknesses and do, you know, a big Swot analysis and decide what do we need to do.”
It was an unfortunate and unintentionally comical line that reinforced the Trump administration’s perception of the European leaders as a cohort of slow-moving, passive bureaucrats, unwilling to stand up for themselves or force change. Nothing surer to send a cold chill down the spine of Trump than a European strategic framework analysis.
In Bette Midler’s immortal observation, when it’s three o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London. At least Trump took time to praise the craftsmanship of Swiss watchmaking. Apart from that, he cast a mood of ominous foreboding, framed around the big reveal, during his Wednesday speech, that he would not use military force to take Greenland, after all. By nightfall, a deal deemed favourable to Trump was announced, although details remained hazy, and an imminent tariff trade war was called off – for now.
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Much of the subsequent commentary and blizzard of political podcasts and interviews concentrated on the assumption of superiority of the American guests: the insults and disrespect and flabbergasting sense of entitlement with which the US delegation, wrapped in that outrageous demand that Denmark should cede Greenland, assumed ownership of the week. But to the Americans, the visit was a triumph. Lutnick, during his half-hour fireside at Davos, was eager to set the mortally offended European sensibility in context in his specific brand of 1980s Wall Street argot.
US president Donald Trump on a video monitor as he addresses the World Economic Forum in Davos. Photograph: Doug Mills/The New York Times
Asked about another possible clash of transatlantic viewpoints, Lutnick said: “Well, then we will be back for another tit-for-tat, which was how we began and it will end with a very positive conversation with Donald Trump and Ursula von der Leyen, which is what happened last time. So, you can start with a kerfuffle but in the end, the United States and Europe are great allies. We are great allies with Canada. It doesn’t mean you don’t have an argument. It doesn’t mean you don’t disagree. But it doesn’t change the fundamentals that the US knows who our allies are. And if we are going to have a kerfuffle, so be it, but we know where it is going to end. It is going to end in a reasonable manner, and that in our view prior to Donald Trump taking the helm of the US, the world was taking the piss out of us, and we were exporting the strength of our economy to the rest of the world.”
Not a seismic postwar rupture, then, but a kerfuffle. Through the mad theatre of Davos, European countries got a sense of the nonstop psychological onslaught of messaging through Trump’s speeches and tweets and lectures from cabinet members through which the administration dominates – and overwhelms – the airwaves and frequencies within the US. It never stops. Long before he arrived back in Washington on Thursday night, Trump was lining up imminent attack lines, eyeing up “deranged Jack Smith”, the former special counsel tasked with investigating Trump in 2024, firing another broadside at California governor Gavin Newsom and teasing, for the first time in a while, about a third term run. As far as the Americans were concerned, they had come to Davos to deliver home truths and succeeded in that. Tomorrow is a new day.
Us president Donald Trump sits in between Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan (left) and Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, during a signing ceremony for the ‘Board of Peace’ in Davos. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
“What happens is everybody speaks to each other and nobody says a darn thing,” Lutnick told Fox News on Thursday night. “And they got this whole globalist view that they want to make the world a better place, And what that means is: let’s take the richest country in the world and lets pick ’em apart.”
Scott Bessent, meantime, was preoccupied with the appalling quality of the food. “A couple of years ago one of the recommendations of the Davos elite was that we could all be eating bugs and insects. Let me tell you, after a couple of days of the food here I may switch to bugs and insects.”
The sight and sound of Trump and company delivering crass insults are nothing new. Throughout his political life, he has used crude language and nicknames to attempt to cow or humiliate political opponents, journalists deemed hostile to the administration, former allies and even current cabinet members.
Newsom, the governor of California, is among the front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. His presence at Davos expanded his self-appointed role as the disruptive conscience of the shattered post-Biden Democrats. Shortly after arriving in Switzerland, he unexpectedly added to the battering of European morale by upbraiding leaders for their appeasement and flattery of Trump. Later, he told the gathering at his official Davos interview that an 11th-hour decision to cancel his scheduled appearance at a speaking event at USA House was no coincidence.
“That’s what is happening in the United States of America – freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech. It’s America in reverse. They are censoring historical facts, they are rewriting history, they are censoring books – 340 books in libraries and schools banded. Any institution of independent thinking is under assault by the Trump administration. People disappearing quite literally, no due process. Windows being smashed, seat belts being cut off; knocking on doors, racially profiling US citizens … so was it surprising the Trump administration didn’t like my commentary and wanted to make sure I wasn’t allowed to speak? No. It’s consistent with their authoritarian tendencies.”
US president Donald Trump speaking at the ‘Board of Peace’ meeting during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images
On Thursday, the White House issued a report on the stunning decline of the US national murder rate, which fell to a 125-year low in 2025. The reasons behind the success are almost certainly myriad and the results of many years of work. But the stat belongs to Trump’s first year in office and so the administration is entitled to make its claim that it is “reversing the carnage and chaos” of the Biden years. Still, by nightfall the headlines revolved around the clashing interpretations of the detention of a five-year-old child by Ice agents in Minneapolis. New poll figures show a broad slump in support for Trump. For all of the excitement of expansionism, dreary domestic travails await.
But the narrative and points of focus and attack shift quickly with Trump. This is the issue for Europe’s leaders right now. The Trump administration works as an endless series of entirely unpredictable and, often, unconnected days. Compelling as Carney’s speech was, it may be premature to assume that three-quarters of a century of US-European trade and trust have been severed by the volatile expansionist ambitions of a president with a short attention span – and plummeting domestic support. “I think these relationships are dormant,” Newsom said. “They are not dead. Don’t fall prey to that.”
And Carney’s argued new dispensation overlooks the fact that almost half of the voting public in the United States are just as aghast as the Europeans, and still regard this period of time as an aberration.
“His speech was dangerous, disrespectful and unhinged,” said Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, another Davos attendee and another likely front-runner for the Democratic nomination.
“You saw him call into question alliances that have kept the world stable for my entire lifetime. You saw him make fun of world leaders in the room whom we call friends. You saw him ramble on. He even tried to do stories. This is really concerning, and for the United States, frankly embarrassing.”