President Donald Trump assailed Europe’s pursuit of green energy, bragged about axing wind projects and made a forceful case for U.S. ownership of Greenland during a speech to world leaders Wednesday.
Trump told a crowd of politicians and business leaders in Davos, Switzerland, that “certain places in Europe are not even recognizable, frankly, anymore,” and that Europe is “not heading in the right direction.”
In recent decades, Trump told the World Economic Forum, the United States and European countries “foolishly” followed paths of “increasing government spending, unchecked mass migration and endless foreign imports.” Those countries, Trump said, moved to replace “affordable energy” with “the Green New Scam.”
His comments come as Trump takes a victory lap celebrating his first year in office, which has been marked by dramatic swings on energy production and foreign policy. They also come at a turbulent moment when Trump’s quest for control of Greenland has escalated tensions with European allies.
Trump’s message: Other countries should follow his playbook of boosting fossil fuels and firing government bureaucrats.
“Instead of closing down energy plants, we’re opening them up,” he said. “Instead of building ineffective money losing windmills, we’re taking them down and not approving any. Instead of empowering bureaucrats, we’re firing them.”
Fired feds ‘love me’
The president similarly boasted at a White House press conference Tuesday about his team’s work purging federal employees during the first year of his second term.
“They’re going out and getting jobs in the private sector for two and three times what they were making in government,” Trump said Wednesday of those fired government workers. “So they started off hating me when we fired them, and now they love me.”
Trump credited his election with allowing the United States to avoid “the catastrophic energy collapse which befell every European nation that pursued the Green New Scam,” a term he uses to refer to policies to combat climate change and promote renewable energy. “Perhaps the greatest hoax in history, the Green New Scam, windmills all over the place,” he said.
“Here in Europe, we’ve seen the fate that the radical left tried to impose on America,” Trump said.
“There are windmills all over Europe,” he said. “There are windmills all over the place, and they are losers. One thing I’ve noticed is that the more windmills a country has, the more money that country loses and the worse that country is doing.”
Greenland’s minerals
Trump made a forceful pitch for the United States to control Greenland, referring to the island as a “big, beautiful piece of ice.” It’s “hard to call it land,” he said, “it’s a big piece of ice.”
Greenland’s reserves of rare earths and minerals have garnered attention as Trump has amplified his rhetoric about taking over the self-governing Danish territory.
But security — not minerals — is driving Trump’s bid, he insisted Wednesday.
“Everyone talks about the minerals,” and rare earth, Trump said. There’s “no such thing as rare earth. There’s rare processing. But there’s so much rare earth.”
In Greenland, “to get to this rare earth, you got to go through hundreds of feet of ice. That’s not the reason we need it. We need it for strategic national security and international security,” he said.
The “enormous unsecured island” lies in “a key strategic location between the United States, Russia and China,” Trump said. “That’s exactly where it is, right smack in the middle.”
He doesn’t plan on using force to take it, Trump said. “I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force. All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland.”
