By The New York Post Editorial Board
President Donald Trump in Davos just delivered some home truths to the assembled grandees of Europe, who unsurprisingly resent being reminded of what a basket case they’ve made of their continent in just a couple of decades.
Trump was blunt. Europe, he told the crowd, has squandered its inheritance.
Its ruinous energy policies have resulted in deindustrialization, “lower economic growth, lower standards of living” and “lower birth rates.”
Europeans, Trump explained, “are destroying themselves”: Attached to its postwar sense of itself as the world’s moral leader in the exercise of soft power, Europe has embraced a policy of cultural suicide and become a mass migration sump for the excess young male populations of West Asia and Africa.
This cultural destabilization has hollowed out European identity and destabilized civil society.
Trump’s comments followed remarks the night before from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who shocked a Davos dinner party by saying that “globalization” — the absolute sacred cow of the assembled — “has failed.”
The dogma of “net zero,” Lutnick told its faithful adherents, is damning Europe “to be subservient to China.”
The Davos crowd similarly bristled at Trump’s characterization of Europe (and Canada) — as freeloaders, but their vaunted and cherished social-democratic-welfare states have indeed been propped up for decades by America’s massive defense expenditures.
The Greenland question is driving the Euros crazy, yet their response — sending a few dozen paratroopers to perform military exercises on the icy expanse — only underlines the absurdity of the European claim to the island.
How come they’re ready to mount a vigorous defense of Greenland against a non-existent military threat from America, when they can’t find the will to stop small craft filled with African migrants from landing on their shores every day?
Fact: Absent American intervention, Russia or China would have no problem plucking at will the ripe fruit of Greenland to fulfill their Arctic ambitions.
Media boffins cluck over how Trump is disregarding Greenland’s “sovereignty,” but Greenlanders have no sovereignty: They remain, unaccountably, subjects of tiny Denmark.
Trump’s criticism of Europe and the globalist outlook of “Davos Man” was scathing. But “tough love” often is.
Europe is sinking under the weight of its leaders’ self-delusions; they need slapping in the face to wake up before it’s too late.
Trump simply gave Davos elites some ‘tough love’ — to finally wake them up https://t.co/DpQoLVaXGu pic.twitter.com/iPO4e3Hsao
— NY Post Opinion (@NYPostOpinion) January 21, 2026
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