Trump Heckles Europe Before Heading to Davos

 

Trump Heckles Europe Before Heading to Davos

 

As European leaders try to engage with the American president over Greenland and the future of Ukraine, he is mocking them as weak.

 

Michael D. Shear Jeanna Smialek

By Michael D. Shear and Jeanna Smialek

Jan. 20, 2026

Updated 11:08 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/20/world/europe/davos-trump-europe.html

 

President Trump and his entourage will be in Europe this week. And they are showing their contempt.

 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, already hobnobbing with elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, had a sharp retort when reporters asked him about European leaders’ efforts to block Mr. Trump from seizing Greenland.

 

“I imagine they will form the dreaded European working group,” Mr. Bessent said, calling it their “most forceful weapon.”

 

It is no secret that the president and his aides view Europe as a weak, ineffectual collection of nations dominated by liberal leaders and tangled in bureaucracy. His administration’s official national security strategy, released last month, said Europe had lost its “civilizational self-confidence” amid a “failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”

 

But rarely has the mocking been so overt.

 

Early on Tuesday morning, as Europe’s leaders continued to wring their hands over the president’s latest threats to Greenland, Mr. Trump posted an apparently A.I.-generated meme that showed him hoisting an American flag while standing on the island.

 

“Greenland. U.S. Territory. Est. 2026,” the meme read.

 

Mr. Trump had not even arrived in Switzerland yet. But as he prepared to speak there on Wednesday, he continued to heap dismissive scorn on the leaders he was about to greet.

 

When reporters told Mr. Trump that President Emmanuel Macron of France was not going to join the American-led “Board of Peace” overseeing Gaza, Mr. Trump waved aside Mr. Macron’s opinions as irrelevant, saying he would be “out of office in a few months.”

 

“I’ll put a 200 percent tariff on his wines and Champagnes, and he’ll join, but he doesn’t have to join,” the president said, flexing the power of the American market and underscoring France’s vulnerability to his whims.

 

He also posted flattering messages from Mr. Macron and Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, on Truth Social — showing just how much European leaders are heaping praise on Mr. Trump in what appears to be an attempt to keep him engaged.

 

“I will use my media engagements in Davos to highlight your work,” Mr. Rutte wrote in the message that Mr. Trump shared.

 

“Let us try to build great things,” Mr. Macron said, though he also noted: “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland.”

 

Mr. Trump also targeted Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, giving him his signature all-caps treatment as he complained that the United Kingdom had decided to give up sovereignty of Diego Garcia and the other Chagos Islands, while retaining control of a U.K.- and U.S.-operated military base there.

 

In 2024, the United Kingdom relinquished control of the islands, a remote archipelago it had held since the colonial era, to Mauritius. At the time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised the deal, which came after years of negotiations, and after a court found that Britain had acted unlawfully by detaching the archipelago from Mauritius in 1965.

 

“Our ‘brilliant’ NATO Ally, the United Kingdom, is currently planning to give away the Island of Diego Garcia,” the president wrote on his social media site, accusing Britain of doing so “FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER.”

 

He added that international powers “only recognize STRENGTH” and that giving away the island was an “act of GREAT STUPIDITY.”

 

Mr. Trump’s heckling has troubled European leaders, many of whom are hoping to communicate with him on the sidelines of the Davos meetings. Leaders from across the 27-nation European Union will also gather in Brussels on Thursday evening to discuss how to respond to his latest threats on Greenland.

 

As the United States looks like a more and more volatile ally — and a hugely unpredictable one — European leaders are saying the continent must move away from its tight ties to America.

 

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive arm, said during a speech at Davos on Tuesday morning that the old way of doing things was over.

 

“Nostalgia will not bring back the old order,” she said, arguing against “playing for time — and hoping for things to revert soon.”

 

She added, “If this change is permanent, then Europe must change permanently too.”

 

But so far, Europe has mainly been trying to accommodate Mr. Trump and keep him at the table — worried that he’ll pull back needed American support from NATO or Ukraine — even as he mocks them as weak.

 

Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, called global leaders “pathetic” on Tuesday for failing to stand up to Mr. Trump, saying that Europeans needed to have a “backbone.”

 

“I should have brought a bunch of kneepads for all the world leaders,” he told reporters in Davos. “I mean, handing out crowns — I mean, this is pathetic — the Nobel Prizes that are being given away. It’s just pathetic.”

 

Michael D. Shear is a senior Times correspondent covering British politics and culture, and diplomacy around the world.

 

Jeanna Smialek is the Brussels bureau chief for The Times.