Trump at Davos: A ‘New Yorker’ profile

For the next 90 minutes, above the sound of my chattering teeth, amid aromas of coolant and burnt coffee, snippets of conversation drift around the galvanised cathedral of flight.

“Everyone knows you won the election, sir.”

“Norway are very bad people for stealing your peace prize.”

“Eight wars . . . I thought it was nine?”

Without warning, the 47th president of the United States bursts from a conference room. Pursued by aides, as if escaping from a Roy Lichtenstein canvas, he hurtles towards me on a golf buggy. It screeches to a halt. Uncertain of protocol, I put out my hand. “Mr President, Henry Morris.”

He ignores the hand, stares at me incuriously, and points at the FIFA Peace Prize on the dashboard of his buggy. 

“Wow,” I say, eventually. He nods sincerely and closes his eyes. 

“Now, Mr President,” says chief of staff Susie Wiles, breathlessly catching up, “you know we can’t board the plane until we’ve finished getting you ready.”

“Susie, this is Harry Morris.”

“Henry.”

 “He’s come to write great things about me. Great things.”

“Of course he has,” says Wiles, kneeling beside his chair.

“Where are we going today, Susie?”

“We’re going to Davos, sir,” comes the reply of someone who has already answered this question several times.

“Davos. Great country.”

On a geopolitical level, I have never been more terrified. On a personal level, realising that the day here begins not with briefings but with medication, I begin to relax. The White House, once the focus of national authority, today has more in common with an assisted living facility within which Trump evokes Randall McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The system is his stage, chaos his art form. In this dynamic, with her laminated schedule and arsenic smile, Wiles becomes Nurse Ratched.

“Greenland. Tremendous place. Huge. Have you heard of it?  I’m thinking of buying it. Nobody else thought of doing that. I have.” 

Sentences from the Free World’s Leader arrive unheralded and fade before they’ve been introduced. 

Wiles stands with a jug, into which she has been emptying the president’s catheter. 

“It’s time to go, sir.” 

“Now would you look at the colour of that? Even my pee-pee is gold. I’m like Midas.” 

“It is very gold,” I reply, wondering not only if the Leader of the Free World has misunderstood the warning of Midas, but also whether he might have a urinary tract infection. Even so, my agreement seems to win his confidence. He nods to a secret service agent who reluctantly returns my clothes.

At 30,000 feet, with clinical lighting, TV at full volume, packed with people whose families have renounced them, it is clear why out of the president’s earshot, this aircraft has become Care Force One. We spend the first four hours watching movies, during which I become increasingly aware that my opportunities for interviewing him are dwindling faster than incriminating Epstein files. 

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Thus, at the denouement of Nutty Professor II – The Klumps, I squeeze past highly trained strategic nodder Marco Rubio and attempt to make eye contact.

“Nobody talks about the fact that $19 billion is missing in Minnesota. They’ve taken it. Somalians. A very low IQ people,” he is telling Rubio, who only just asked if he’d like the Jello-O with fruit cocktail, or tapioca for pudding. The president spots me. Gratified by a new audience, he produces a text from Emmanuel Macron. 

“They’re all messaging me, telling me what a great guy I am.”

We are back in conversation.

“Mr President, may I ask you some questions?”

“Quickly, it’s Transformers next. Michael Bay. Great director.”

“Mr President, with Nato’s future in the balance…”

“Nobody’s done more for Nato than me. When I arrived, Nato was a disaster. In Afghanistan, those other guys stayed back, the Brits, Denmark, a little off the front lines. And people weren’t paying — they weren’t paying their bills. I said, ‘you have to pay’, and suddenly they’re paying. Tremendous amounts of money.”

“Sir, I think 850 non-US troops died there.”

“Very sad, very tragic. Nobody respects dead soldiers more than I do. Trust me, I ended Afghanistan. But the fact is, they got themselves killed. Losers. They say it was the windmills. I would have ended it sooner if it wasn’t for these bone spurs.” He gestures at his elbows. Then, appearing to remember something quite important, points to his feet. Dan Scavino, the Weyland Smithers of neofascism, spots the exchange and interrupts us.

“Transformers are ready, sir.”

“Explosions. Very strong explosions. Nobody does explosions like Michael Bay.”

Helicopter Marine One takes us from Zurich to the World Economic Forum in Davos. As we approach, I can see the Congress Centre’s modern glass panels reflecting pristine snow and clear sky in equal measure, offering back to the alpine landscape a blunted, corporate version of itself. Inside, assembled CEOs, heads of state and tech founders talk of only one thing, until President Trump enters and their chatter switches from Brooklyn Beckham to Greenland. 

The president’s address begins as do all epics: with self-assurance and a shaky grip on facts. Ricocheting between windmills, rigged elections, and how bad others’ speeches were, it is a new Norse saga narrated by a man unbothered by geography, history, or syntax. 

However, in describing Greenland not as a land of glaciers and endurance, but an underperforming asset waiting in ice-bound latency for the arrival of a sufficiently confident ego, it is the interpreters who soon emerge as the real heroes. I can almost hear the skald’s quills scratching the parchment as he calls it Iceland for the fourth time, only belatedly to realise that this is in fact the sound of Susie Wiles using her first president-free time in 12 hours to clear wax off his hearing aids.

Trump tells the Swiss they’d all be speaking German if it wasn’t for America. As Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio fist-bump, I half expect a set of Brechtian subtitles to fall from the sky: Observe the billionaire address his enablers about the fate of the world.

Dazed, I wander into a roundtable called ‘Monetising Empathy at Scale’. Surfacing an hour later, my last quanta of hope banished, I realise that power here is neither natural nor inevitable, but theatrical, contingent and delirious.

I go outside for some air and lean on a cleaning trolley full of yellow bags, cleaning agents and mops. The blighted Englishman Nigel Farage is there also, smoking a Rothmans beneath a heat lamp and offering unsolicited commentary on how the mop bucket represents globalist overreach. He has less to say on the threat his great friend Donald Trump poses to Greenland’s national sovereignty. 

Appropriately enough, then, it is at this moment that the president emerges from a breakout space with Nato secretary general Mark Rutte and striding straight past Farage’s outstretched arm, triumphantly announces to the scantly populated smoking area that “a Framework for Arctic Cooperation” has just been agreed. 

The details are vague, but what was being sold hours earlier as an inevitable step in civilisational destiny seems to have been temporarily postponed by a brief chat beside a woodburner. One’s sense that the imminent collapse of Western order has been averted only by a very large canape budget does not impart much hope. 

On the flight home, with Hannity babbling soothingly on Fox News, Trump sleeps, mouth open, cuddling his FIFA award. Wiles drifts around the cabin with the quiet menace of Nurse Ratched, adjusting blankets, narratives, and blame, ensuring that even on a plane whose passengers have casually ended an 80-year-old transatlantic military alliance, the illusion of order is maintained.

In the early hours, I observe the president waking to put a thick Crayola line through Mark Carney’s name on his Board of Peace list. He turns, suddenly small, a child waking on a long car journey.

“Harry.” 

“Henry.”

“Whatever. Did I do good?”

It is the most dangerous question I have ever been asked. 

“Unforgettable, sir.”

“Good. Very hard crowd. Very rich. You know they’re very rich?”

“I’d heard.”

He nods, reassured.

“They need me, Huey. If I wasn’t there it’d all fall apart. Windmills everywhere.” He turns to the window, already drifting off again. “Make sure you write that.”
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