Man Bites Davos
Jan. 22, 2026
By Frank Bruni and Bret
Stephens
Mr.
Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer. Mr. Stephens is an Opinion columnist.
Frank Bruni: Welcome, Bret, to the second year of Donald Trump’s
second residency in the White House. You and he are both marking the occasion
in Davos. What’s it like this time around — to be an American in a Europe that
he’s doing his demented best to turn from ally to enemy? Must be a chill in the
air that has nothing to do with the Alps and the altitude.
Bret Stephens: Regards from the Magic Mountain, Frank. The mother of a
friend of mine used to carry around a stack of business cards that read, “I
apologize for my husband’s behavior on the evening of__________.” She meant it
as a gag. But I think the Americans here in Davos could seriously use something
like that: “I apologize for our president’s craziness on the
morning/afternoon/night of___________.” Maybe it’ll help convince our European
friends that we haven’t all lost our minds.
Frank: How hopeful of you — and how quaint — to cling to the
phrase “our European friends.”
Bret: Unlike members of the Trump administration — who are here
in force, by the way, from the president to the secretaries of state, Treasury,
commerce, energy, to, of course, Kellyanne Conway — Europeans aren’t reducing
every American to a political caricature.
Frank: It’s so fascinating and so revealing that Trump and his
accomplices are there in droves. Like schoolyard bullies, they’re most
desperate for respect from the people they pretend to have contempt for. They
playact superiority to camouflage their insecurity. They can blather all they
like about the rationale for insisting on the acquisition of Greenland, but
what’s really driving Trump is his compulsion to prove to the world just how
big and bold he is. Which, of course, shows how small and sad he is.
Bret: I’ll leave it to our readers to psychoanalyze the
president’s compulsion to demonstrate, uh, bigness.
Frank: I suspect that many of our readers will enjoy that, but
I’ll remind them that we’re a family newspaper.
Bret: Putting Dr. Freud to one side, it’s striking how
clearheadedly and defiantly Europeans are reacting — like a spouse who didn’t
want the divorce, but is willing and ready to move on with life. Ursula von der
Leyen, the European Commission’s formidable president, gave a speech Tuesday
worthy of the Ivana Trump memoir: “The Best Is Yet to Come.” Though, come to
think of it, I hope Europe’s future is a bit brighter than the first Mrs.
Trump’s.
Frank: Not just from von der Leyen, but from many world leaders
in Davos, we’ve heard statements so extraordinary we really must memorialize
them. From the Belgian prime minister, Bart De Wever: “Being a happy vassal is
one thing. Being a miserable slave is something else.” Trump is the feudal lord
in that framing. From the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney: There’s a
“breaking of the world order.” Trump is the sledgehammer.
Bret: And
then there was Trump’s speech, for which I was in the audience. It was like a
geopolitical version of a Mafia shakedown. “You can say yes and we will be very
appreciative, or you can say no and we will remember.” That was Trump’s message
to Denmark on the subject of ceding Greenland. It was like watching a scene
from “The Sopranos.”
Frank: Only if someone drained “The Sopranos” of all energy and
focus. I know that Trump had a rough, interrupted flight to Davos. I’m sure he
didn’t get enough sleep. But even factoring all of that in, we should be
unsettled by what we saw and heard. He confused Greenland for Iceland — which I
guess is understandable in the context of also repeatedly calling Greenland a
big “piece of ice.” He mumbled and he meandered. He’s mastering a whole new
oxymoron: logy logorrhea.
Bret: He also terrified. Going into the speech, I was almost
sure that what he really wanted was to gain some control of Greenland’s mineral
resources. Leaving the speech, I was absolutely sure he means to take the whole
island, and that his negotiating tactic will be to tie Danish cession of the
territory to America’s continued participation in NATO.
Frank: Who the hell knows? Greenland kind of got lost in all the
all-purpose chest-thumping. “The United States is keeping the whole world
afloat.” “Without us, most of the countries don’t even work.” Does cringing
burn calories, Bret? If so, I just lost five pounds.
Bret: Sadly for me, the pastries here are free as well as
delicious. They’re also a lot more soothing than Trump’s Truth Social posts
claiming that everything has now been solved and everything’s cool with our
on-again, off-again European allies.
Let’s switch to domestic politics,
Frank. Thoughts on Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor, writing that he
was being asked whether he was a “double agent for
Israel” during his vetting to be Kamala Harris’s No. 2?
Frank: It’s a question as deeply offensive as it is idiotic, and
it makes clear how inept and adrift the Harris campaign often was. I can see
why Shapiro wanted to share it; he has surely and understandably been outraged
and wounded by it for a long time. But I wonder, Bret: Was it politically wise
of him to divulge that and so much else about Harris in his new book, “Where We
Keep the Light: Stories From a Life of Service,” which comes out on Tuesday and
is clearly part of the preamble to a 2028 presidential bid?
Bret: I have no idea whether the revelation will help Shapiro,
but it was morally important for him to put it out there for the factual
record.
Oh, and speaking of
Minnesota, I know we both agree that what ICE is doing there is appalling. My
cynical question is: Will the administration benefit or suffer politically from
this?
Frank: I’ll answer that after saying this: Harris definitely
should have chosen Shapiro over Walz, because Shapiro has been the more
impressive governor. And she seems to have resisted him for reasons that
reflect poorly on her. But the 2024 election didn’t turn on that decision. Will
the 2026 midterms turn on the ugly spectacle of federal overreach and
aggression in Minneapolis? Right now, what’s happening there indeed appears to
be hurting the administration, and justly so. But we have to see how it does or
doesn’t fit into the next nine and a half months. We’re a long, long way from
November.
Bret: I
wish U.S. elections turned more often on moral questions. But, usually, the
only question that counts is the one Ronald Reagan asked in 1980 during his
famous debate with Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” And
here the jury is out. The job market is soft; college graduates are having a
hard time finding jobs; and it’s getting harder than ever to buy a first home.
At the same time, economic growth is strong, inflation is level, consumer
spending is robust, and — Greenland jitters aside — markets are up overall. All
of which means the verdict that regular Americans may make about this
administration may differ markedly from that of, say, a pair of Times
columnists.
Frank: Are you really and truly suggesting that we’re not
perfect proxies for the average voter, Bret?
Bret: Well, I don’t watch football, I’ve never hit a golf ball,
I don’t like beer, my favorite rock band is from Canada, I grew up in
Mexico City, and I went to prep school in New England. Other than that, I’m a
totally typical American.
Frank: I watch too much football, I drink everything and I live
outside the Acela corridor — in purple North Carolina, no less — so maybe I’m a
one-man focus group!
Bret: Does Chapel Hill really count as “purple”?
Frank: You and your chromatic nit-picking! In any case, I want
to offer an anagram of your wish about elections and moral considerations. I
wish more of us took the “are you better off” question to mean more than
economics, more than material goods. None of us will be better off if the
United States estranges our western European allies and impersonates Russia.
None of us will be better off with a metastasizing ICE as the goon-squad instrument of an erratic president.
None of us will be better off with a thoroughly politicized Justice Department
and the medical nostrums of the public health quacks whom MAGA elevates.
And all of that will, in time and in turn, have profound economic
consequences.
Bret:
Everything you say is right and true and maybe, probably, it will help
Democrats in the midterms. That’s when ideologically or morally motivated
voters like you and me feel especially keen to make a statement.
Frank: Indeed, and I hope Democrats can simultaneously emphasize
the economy and make clear to voters that other dynamics demand their close
attention.
Bret: But it’s also worth thinking about how Americans who
don’t share our views see it. They see a “resistance” movement in Minneapolis
that seems to think that disrupting church services is OK because they don’t
like the pastor. They see the administration getting rid of a food pyramid that
encouraged people to eat a lot of carbs, which helped Make America Fat. They
see the administration getting rid of a local despot without getting stuck in a
regime-change mission. And they see a Democratic Party that is obsessive in its
loathing for Trump but doesn’t seem to have a clear agenda, or any agenda at
all, for doing things better.
Frank: I do not think a new food pyramid will Make America
Skinny — though Ozempic and its kinfolk might, pending cost and access.
Bret:
Here’s something better: Make America Dream Again. I’ve been thinking about it
because I’ve been following the progress of the Artemis II mission — the manned
mission to the moon that will launch sometime in the next few weeks will take
off from Pad 39B of the Kennedy Space Center. I was too young to ever watch the
Apollo program. But I grew up obsessed with names like Aldrin, Anders, Bean,
Borman, Cernan, Collins, Conrad, Duke, Irwin, Lovell, Mattingly, Schmitt, Shepard, Young, and, of course, Armstrong. Now the
names are Glover, Hansen, Koch and Wiseman — three great Americans and one very
cool Canadian. They’ll be flying around the moon, much like Apollo 8 and 10, in
preparation for a moon landing, ideally before the decade is out. It’s a
reminder that, much like in the late 1960s, we can uplift ourselves in
otherwise dark times.
