Alastair Campbell's diary: Heckling Trump in Davos

The first thing I noticed, approaching Davos, was a line of empty ski lifts, ferrying nobody above snowless green hills. Climate change, Donny… you know, the thing that is opening up the Arctic for rare earth and mineral exploitation, prompting your fear that Russia will one day wage war to seize Greenland, or is it Iceland, or could it be both?

When I say climate change, of course I mean the “green new scam,” because climate change, like any suggestion that Vladimir Putin helped to get you elected, is a “hoax”. You love the H- word, don’t you? But the real Russia hoax, when it comes to your new Greenland obsession (and well done on getting Epstein and ICE SS tactics out of the headlines for a few days) is this: if Russia is your enemy, such that you need to abuse, humiliate and even threaten to invade a loyal Nato ally like Denmark, why are you being so helpful to Vladimir Putin when it comes to getting his hands on Ukraine? Big inconsistency there, Donboy.

There are so many inconsistencies and paradoxes about Trump. He is the most powerful man in the world, yet so, so needy. He has an extraordinary story to tell, yet cannot tell it without industrial-scale lying. He surrounds himself with sycophants, yet no matter how low they bow, they must bow a little lower next time. Close up, it is a monstrous, horrible spectacle.

For his Davos speech, I was sitting a few rows behind secretary of state Marco Rubio. Little Marco indeed. It was my first experience of Trump’s long, rambling, meandering speeches, a mix of lines written for him on the teleprompter, and departures from the script to reheat his greatest hits.

So inevitably his amazingly successful first term figured large – “you lost” I suggested, loudly enough for some “shushing”, not loud enough to reach him; his creation of the greatest economy the US has ever had – a factchecker’s paradise; the rigged election, sleepy Joe, Somali pirates, wars he’s ended, windmills, blah blah blah blah to the point that by the end most people were scrolling on their phones, or chatting, or just turning to each other to headshake or mouth “WTF”.

But for Rubio, for treasury secretary Scott Bessent, for commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, for Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and the dozens of other sycophants, money-movers, grifters and hangers-on who are part of the Trump travelling circus, they have to hear this drivel day after day, meeting after meeting, and then debase themselves further by tweeting out how inspiring he was, how the audience loved it, how only he could do the amazing things he is doing for America and the world.

As the droning at the lectern came to an end, and he walked to a chair for a Q&A session with World Economic Forum CEO Børge Brende, the sycophants tried to get a standing ovation going. They failed. The only people standing were those, dozens and dozens of them who, like me, had had enough, and were heading briskly for the door.

If he was pathetic – and truly pathetic you must be to litter a speech with a series of humiliations of friends and enemies alike, calling out leaders who are scared of him, insulting the IQ of an entire country, pretending not to know who leads the country that he was in, or whether she was a PM or a president, just that she was “a woman” who kept begging him over tariffs – then I’m afraid the audience was pretty pathetic too. Me included, I guess. Friends watching on TV were pinging in their messages… “start a slow handclap” … “shout out some real-time fact-checking”… “throw a shoe”… “DO SOMETHING!!!”

I was in a bit of a bind. I really did hope that there would be a reaction in the hall that would show the millions of Americans back home who loathe what he is doing that they are not alone, and that far from America being GREAT and RESPECTED (his CAPS) again, he is doing huge damage to their country’s standing in the world. But I didn’t particularly want to do anything that would be characterised as some kind of attention-seeking grandstanding, or risk being hauled out by a few of the dozens of secret servicemen hanging around.

So I heckled at just under double the normal speaking volume, hoping others would go with the vibe. “Not true,” I exclaimed to some of his bogus economic stats, and his claim to have spent $350bn on Ukraine. “What about 9/11?” I said, more loudly given how much the UK became involved in its aftermath, when he talked of other Nato countries having done nothing for America. And a solid boo when he made his racist, white supremacist gag about Somalia. A few joined in, but then again, as Sinatra might say, too few to mention.

The sharpest intake of breath came for his “if it wasn’t for the US you’d all be speaking German and a bit of Japanese,” but even amid the disgust, there was tittering and chuckling, and not just from the official sycophants.

Shortly before Trump came on stage, I had been speaking to Al Gore, who was in the fourth row, right in front of the lectern. Such a huge and rational, fact-based figure in the climate fight, how must he feel, hearing Trump’s climate denialism, windmill fantasies and his big lie that the Chinese don’t use wind turbines themselves, merely make them to sell to “the stupid countries?” Another insult for many of the leaders in the room.

“Great heckling spot,” I suggested to the former US vice president. “I’m not sure that’s the best way to deal with this guy,” he replied. I think he got in my head, so once my mini-heckles didn’t take off, I just folded into the bored, phone-scrolling, WTF-ing crowd. Probably the right thing, because I still think sole protest would have been easily characterised as attention-seeking and silly. But a big part of me went to bed later, wishing I had just stood there and yelled out: “Can you please stop lying, stop bullying, stop being corrupt, stop pandering to Putin, stop allowing your infantile narcissism to dictate US policy, and fuck off back to America!”

Later I was moderating a dinner, on AI and Global Health, at Davos Golf Club, which was rebranded for the week as “Goals House,” run by Freuds PR firm, aimed at keeping alive the Sustainable Development Goals. These have come under enormous pressure from The Orange Man Boy with his loathing of climate talk, diversity and inclusion, and his decision to end 14 million lives prematurely by 2030, including four million children under five, by scrapping the once great USAID. (Thank you UCLA for the modelling.)

I chaired a “fireside chat” with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and foreign secretary Yvette Cooper, then a discussion around the dinner table, at which I had the absolute pleasure of sitting next to actress Carey Mulligan, an ambassador for War Child.

Amid all the talk of the rules-based order being over, I set my own rules for the discussion. Given virtually every conversation in Davos had contained the word Trump at some point, Rule One was that his name must not be mentioned. Rule Two, that nobody was allowed to say the words “the problem is”, because we needed to focus on solutions. And Rule Three, no speaker could go over two minutes, and I had a stopwatch.

Singer John Batiste did slip in a “the problem is”, and UN humanitarian under secretary Tom Fletcher clocked in at two minutes four seconds, but both spoke so well that I forgive them.

Running alongside the glass-fronted venue was the icy road between Davos and Klosters, and as the debate unfolded, I spotted the ridiculously large Trump convoy driving by. “It is a known fact of diplomacy,” I told the assembled gathering, “that the size of a convoy is in inverse proportion to the size of the penis of the leader being convoyed.”

Childish, I know, but the activist protester in me, that I had held in check earlier, could no longer be contained. And technically, I didn’t break my Rule One, because I never used his name.

Fifa president Gianni Infantino was right at the front for the speech, and is very much part of the Trump scene as we head towards the 1936 Olympics – sorry, I mean the 2026 World Cup, in June. He, and the trophy, were the star attractions at one of the dinners I was invited to. I had a short chat with him at the drinks beforehand, jointly celebrating the three incredible goals scored by Scotland against Denmark to qualify for the first time since 1998.

Knowing however that there was a gaggle behind me waiting to push in for a moment with Mr President, I did take the time to tell him that, due to the conduct of his new best friend, the other Mr President, I had decided not to go. He sighed. “How worried are you about a European boycott if this Greenland madness carries on?” I asked him. He shrugged. “It won’t happen. This Greenland issue will be resolved. We will resolve it.”

So perhaps it was him, not Nato general secretary Mark Rutte, who secured the partial climbdown, and got the tariff threat against eight European countries, for now, removed.

I left Davos on Thursday morning, and by the time I was in the Zürich airport lounge, Trump was centre stage again, and the TVs set to CNN were showing his speech and the signing of the new charter for the Board of Peace. That’s the thing that started out as part of the postwar Gaza peace and rebuilding plan, and has somehow morphed into a United Nations-destroying, money-making venture for Trump Inc, Witkoff Inc, Kushner Inc, and all the other Incs that have been spawned by the self-styled Great Peacemaker.

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Even given the fact that airport lounges tend to be replete with people who think they are more important than anything on the telly might be, it was interesting that I was literally the only person taking any notice at all. During the non-stop coverage, not one single person followed me to the screen.

Now don’t get me wrong, Trump is the most talked-about, written-about person on the planet, and I know from our podcast numbers that if he is the main subject, we will get more listeners than if we are talking about the ups and downs of the UK government, for example. But I am not convinced that the scale of coverage given to him by the world’s broadcasters is matched by genuine demand among the planet’s eight billion inhabitants.

There was one standing ovation at the event, just the one, and so Canadian prime minister Mark Carney became the third person ever to be greeted in this way at Davos. The first was Nelson Mandela, for being Nelson Mandela. The second was Volodymyr Zelensky, not long after his country was invaded, and again this week. So Carney is the first person ever to be given a standing ovation for what you might call a normal political speech.

His was the only speech, apart from Trump’s, that I attended in person, and very early on, I sensed we were witnessing one of those addresses that may well go down in history as a key moment. Of course, whether that is so depends largely on how his career pans out, and how the new world order of which he was speaking, develops.

But as a speech, in one moment in time, and a perilous moment at that, it was without doubt the very best I have seen in a long while. It had a clear and compelling argument. It had a clear and strong structure. It mixed historical and current analysis in a way that sought to make sense of the future. It was brave. It was bold. It was very well written, and it came as no surprise to learn he had written it himself, during some of the 26 hours he had spent on a plane as he went from Canada to China to Qatar to Switzerland.

I know Mark Carney pretty well, and recall fondly a day we spent travelling to see Burnley v Everton – he has Liverpool family connections – at a time when he was still making the call about whether to enter the political fray. I was pressing him in that direction, pretty sure that if Justin Trudeau stayed, populist leader Pierre Poilievre, at the time soaring in the polls, was home and dry.

The only thing I was unsure of was whether his technocratic, central banker background, and his “Davos man” image would translate well into the much rougher world of politics. What we have seen, not just last week, but pretty much ever since he stepped up, is that he has formidable political skills. And whether on a stage at Davos, making a high-risk but wonderfully honest assessment of the effect of Trump on the world, or just hanging out with people for an Instagram post, the same relaxed, intelligent, empathetic character comes through.