Davos – where MAGA toxic masculinity went to die

Emmanuel Macron’s big “beautiful sunglasses” – as even Donald Trump conceded – are everywhere. The shades that Macron wore during his speech at Davos now appear in Top Gun: Maverick memes, in AI videos and on the front pages of newspapers. Libération showed Trump reflected in the lenses. It was a light-hearted moment of chic – and cheek – in a world of relentless existential doom.

Macron’s look will be remembered in the same way as Bill Clinton’s classic appearance wearing Ray-Bans and playing the saxophone on Arsenio Hall’s talkshow, or even JFK who was rarely without his signature shades.

But behind the blinding blue glare of Macron’s “Pacific” model aviator reflectors – made in France bien sûr – and worn because of a minor red-eye condition, it was more than a fashion-meets-politico-pop-culture moment. It was a sea change. A stunning shift in the geopolitical zeitgeist – something you could almost touch.

That pendulum swing at Davos was in fact the sudden routing of Trump-driven toxic MAGA masculinity. And Trump knows it.

“What the hell happened?” he asked aloud in his plenary speech, even as he complimented Macron’s reflectors that trumped his bid for that “big beautiful piece of ice” in Greenland. He was possibly alluding to the swirl of conspiracy theories falsely claiming the French president had once again been “beaten up” by his wife Brigitte.

Suddenly, the shuffling 79-year-old, off-colour, foundation-smeared Trump, gripping the lectern and sporting a painfully bruised red-and-blue hand, with his sycophants trailing behind him, including Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and the cigarette-ravaged old lizard Nigel Farage broadcasting from “USA House”, looked like yesterday’s men. They were unable to control the narrative, forced to back down on Greenland, reduced to rolling back their cringe-worthy mafioso threats of land grabs and openly ridiculed for their Caligula-like posturing and bad suits.

It wasn’t just online. When commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said that “with President Trump, capitalism has a new sheriff in town,” he was roundly heckled by former vice president Al Gore. European Central Bank president and ultimate Boss Woman Christine Lagarde walked out. The Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes cut off JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon with a firm “let me finish”, obliging him to acknowledge that corporate America is ruled by “a climate of fear”.

This was not imperial chest-thumping or nostalgia – Canada’s Mark Carney and speechmaker of the year if not the decade warned us against that. What unfolded felt more like a rebirth of cool.

Helping spread the testosterone around, but at the same time like Macron making science and facts sexy again, California governor Gavin Newsom swaggered around Davos. Like John Wayne meets James Dean, the Democratic likely presidential hopeful kvetched about his banning from USA House and urged Europeans to stop being “pathetic”, to “develop a backbone”, even to “punch Trump in the face”.

Volodymyr Zelensky dared Europe to stop being a wimpy “salad”, and went further, warning it to stop indulging Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who consistently votes against EU interests and with Russia, even joking that Europe should whack him in the face. Orbán, of course, is the only EU leader on Trump’s risible “Board of Peace”.

There was Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz too – elegant, composed – warning darkly of a 1930s replay, then warmly embracing and kissing Macron to underline the endurance of the Franco-German couple. Merz’s gleam and his smile prompted a visibly green-eyed Trump to remark, with barely concealed jealousy, that he had a “great tan”. Even envy, it turns out, has a geopolitical register.

Der Spiegel captured the moment perfectly on its cover: Europe’s leaders in the dark ages, fighting off barbarians with wooden stakes, staring back under the blunt headline “Donald, enough is enough”. The image included figures rarely grouped together – Italy’s Giorgia Meloni alongside Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen – united by refusal to yield to Trump’s bully-boy tactics, his lust for power and his flagrant neo-imperialism.

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As usual, Davos was around 80% male. Trump had just one woman on stage when unveiling his so-called “Board of Peace”. This risible collection of autocrats, dictators and war criminals was haunted by the spectre of Vladimir Putin who may join and was the reason for Keir Starmer’s striking absence. Newsom mercilessly skewered this attempt to set up a rival to the UN in a doctored image of Trump’s new board, populated by Darth Vader, the Joker, Voldemort and Dr Evil.

Outside the Swiss Alpine bubble, women were doing the harder work.

Denmark’s delegation stayed away altogether. Prime Minister Frederiksen refused to budge in the face of Trump’s threats over Greenland. “We cannot negotiate about our sovereignty.” Sweden’s finance minister Elisabeth Svantesson called the blackmail “sad and totally absurd”.

Back at Davos there was the grotesque spectacle of the Palantir CEO and avowed recreational drug user Alex Karp. Jittery and aggressive as usual, he was menacing French journalists while peddling surveillance tools to expel migrants. Silicon Valley authoritarianism, stripped of its marketing gloss, its brittle tech-bro masculinism fully exposed.

Trump, meanwhile, retreated. His “Board of Peace”, lacking the presence of any major ally and no Europeans except Hungary, devolved into farce. He petulantly wrote to Carney withdrawing his invitation to join. Tony Blair’s presence on the board felt awkward. The absence of Britain’s current leadership was noted, though back in London, Starmer was already showing mettle of his own, publicly rebuking Trump’s pressure tactics and signalling that submission would not be Britain’s default posture.

What Davos displayed was not just theatre. European leaders were finally playing harder ball, and showing that strength and force of conviction are not just US characteristics.

As a new survey published by Le Grand Continent shows, since Washington’s Venezuela operation and its Greenland sabre-rattling, 73% of Europeans now believe the EU can rely only on itself for defence – from 62% in Poland to 81% in France. Europeans are no longer recoiling from the language of force: 63% support the deployment of European troops to Greenland in a defensive posture.