It was President Donald Trump’s day at Davos yesterday. His speech was a long one. He looked tired. His flight had been delayed.

The early going was dedicated to a lengthy self-promotion of the United States’ Trumpian economy. Among the self-plaudits was a zinger about how, thanks to his “landslide” election victory and his energy policies, the US had avoided the “Green New Scam,” what he called “perhaps the greatest hoax in history.”

Mixed in with stuff about credit card debt and making the US the crypto capital of the world, there was a reminder about how the president had personally ridden to the rescue of the American economy, so that it now knows “virtually no inflation and extraordinarily high economic growth.” There was the usual tilting at whatever crossed his vision, including windmills, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron’s sunglasses (he has an eye infection), the tiresome Swiss (lady) president and her wheedling phone call, and the surprising intelligence of Somali criminals, despite their origins in an African non-state.

True to form, he veered into another disturbing diatribe about Greenland, the continuation of a spiel that began at the start of the new year. Trump apparently sees Greenland, an autonomous Arctic island territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, and shivers. It’s nothing but a massive ice sheet, apparently with no inhabitants, no desires, and no sovereignty. But it’s big—especially on Mercator maps, one of which hung as an AI-altered backdrop recently in the Oval Office, blazoned with an American flag pasted across its territory (Canada got the same treatment)—and it’s out there in the Arctic. It’s not terra incognita quite, but terra Americana. His prologue was that he wasn’t going to talk about Greenland but knew his audience would expect him to. Probably the truest thing he said.

His Greenland monologue required a rewriting of the history of World War II to include the preposterous idea that the US won the war all by itself. No “Grand Alliance,” no countries (such as the United Kingdom and Canada) who fought the Third Reich for two years before the US was forced into the war by Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, no Soviet Union, no Eastern Front. In the Trump rewrite, the US (also single-handedly) defended the ice island from a German invasion and then magnanimously handed it back to Denmark.

How........

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