At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday,

U.S. President Donald Trump delivered a speech

heavily aimed at a domestic audience and focused on America’s economy, but which also made crucial reference to the many geopolitical storms that involve America today, from Greenland and Gaza to Venezuela and Ukraine. He said America is owed legal title to Greenland, though said he would not take it by force. He referred to the Russian president as “Vladimir,” the French president as “Emmanuel,” the former president of the Swiss Confederation as “a woman,” and the NATO secretary-general as “Mark,” and fondly remembered the time Mark Rutte called him “Daddy.” He called Greenland “Iceland” a few times. It all stood in contrast to the speech on Tuesday

by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney

— whom Trump also called “Mark,” but in a less conciliatory manner — which quoted both the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides (“the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”) and the modern corporate aphorism that “if you are not at the table, you are on the menu,” and was over in about 15 minutes with a standing ovation. Trump’s was well over an hour. The National Post annotates some of the key portions of Trump’s speech.

TRUMP: Today, after 12 months back in the White House, our economy is booming, growth is exploding, productivity is surging, investment is soaring, incomes are rising, inflation has been defeated, our previously open and dangerous border is closed and virtually impenetrable, and the United States is in the midst of the fastest and most dramatic economic turnaround in our country’s history…. People are doing very well. They’re very happy with me.

This is familiar Trumpian hyperbole, a theme that continued through the rest of his speech. Everything is the best ever, the biggest ever, more than anyone ever expected.

Public opinion polling

indicates Trump’s approval rating is at negative 19 points, down two points since last week, with 37 per cent approving, 56 per cent disapproving and five per cent not sure.

TRUMP: Just over one year ago, under the radical-left Democrats, we were a dead country. Now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world…. And this is all great news, and it’s great for all nations. The USA is the economic engine on the planet. And when America booms, the entire world booms. It’s been the history. When it goes bad, it goes bad. And I hope we all — y’all follow us down and you follow us up.

Trump does not usually use the folksy contraction of “y’all,” but he did here, with a muted chuckle.

TRUMP: I want to discuss how we have achieved this economic miracle, how we intend to raise living standards for our citizens to levels never seen before, and perhaps how you, too, and the places where you come from could do much better by following what we’re doing because certain places in Europe are not even recognizable, frankly, anymore. They’re not recognizable. And we can argue about it, but there’s no argument. Friends come back from different places — I don’t want to insult anybody — and say, ‘I don’t recognize it.’ And that’s not in a positive way. That’s in a very negative way. And I love Europe, and I want to see Europe go good. But it’s not heading in the right direction…. The United States cares greatly about the people of Europe. We really do. I mean, look, I am derived from Europe. Scotland and Germany, 100 per cent Scotland, my mother, 100 per cent German, my father. And we believe deeply in the bonds we share with Europe as a civilization.

Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was born in 1912 in Tong, a town on Scottish Hebridean Isle of Lewis near the main port Stornoway, and immigrated to America in 1930. His father, Fred Trump, was born in New York to German immigrant parents.

TRUMP: U.S. oil production is up by 730,000 barrels a day. And last week, we picked up 50 million barrels from Venezuela alone. Venezuela has been an amazing place for so many years, but then they went bad with their policies. Twenty years ago, it was a great country, and now it’s got problems. But we’re helping them. And those 50 million barrels, we’re going to be splitting up with them, and they’ll be making more money than they’ve made in a long time. Venezuela is going to do fantastically well. We appreciate all of the cooperation we’ve been giving. We’ve been giving great cooperation. Once the attack ended, the attack ended, and they said, “Let’s make a deal.” More people should do that.

On Jan. 3, in a military strike called

Operation Absolute Resolve

, American forces bombed Venezuelan air defences and sent a team into the capital, Caracas, to capture the autocratic leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores and transport them to New York for prosecution for narcoterrorism. The only U.S. oil company now operating in Venezuela is Chevron, whose executives have indicated a reluctance to invest further. Other oil companies have also resisted Trump’s urging, a week after Maduro’s ouster, to pledge immediate investment.

TRUMP: 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. China makes almost all of the windmills, and yet I haven’t been able to find any wind farms in China. Did you ever think of that? It’s a good way of looking. You know, they’re smart. China is very smart. They make them. They sell them for a fortune. They sell them to the stupid people that buy them, but they don’t use them themselves. They put up a couple of big wind farms, but they don’t use them. They just put them up to show people what they could look like. They don’t spin.

China’s state-run media outlet China Daily

reported last October

that the country had 520 gigawatts of installed wind power capacity in 2024, and is on track to add 120 gigawatts of new wind power generation annually for a capacity of 1.3 terawatts within five years. For comparison, Canada has about 18 gigawatts of installed wind power capacity.

TRUMP:
Would you like me to say a few words of Greenland? I was going to leave it out of the speech, but I thought — I think I would have been reviewed very negatively. I have tremendous respect for both the people of Greenland and the people of Denmark. Tremendous respect. But every NATO ally has an obligation to be able to defend their own territory. And the fact is, no nation or group of nations is in any position to be able to secure Greenland other than the United States. We’re a great power, much greater than people even understand. I think they found that out two weeks ago in Venezuela. We saw this in World War II, when Denmark fell to Germany after just six hours of fighting and was totally unable to defend either itself or Greenland. So the United States was then compelled — we did it, we felt an obligation to do it — to defend our own forces, to hold the Greenland territory. And hold it, we did, at great cost and expense. They didn’t have a chance of getting on it, and they tried. Denmark knows that. We literally set up bases on Greenland for Denmark. We fought for Denmark. We weren’t fighting for anyone else. We were fighting to save it. For Denmark, big, beautiful piece of ice — it’s hard to call it land, it’s a big piece of ice — but we saved Greenland and successfully prevented our enemies from gaining a foothold in our hemisphere. So we did it for ourselves also.

Nazi Germany invaded Denmark in the spring of 1940, prompting the U.S. to scramble a defence of its security and strategic interests in the Danish territory of Greenland, including mining. The U.S. entered the war a year and a half later, after
 being attacked by Japan.
 Greenland is land, and is generally regarded as the largest island in the world, and is mostly covered by ice.

TRUMP:
And that’s the reason I’m seeking immediate negotiations to once again discuss the acquisition of Greenland by the United States, just as we have acquired many other territories throughout our history, as many of the European nations have…. This would not be a threat to NATO. This would greatly enhance the security of the entire alliance, the NATO alliance. The United States is treated very unfairly by NATO, I want to tell you that. When you think about it, nobody can dispute it. We give so much and we get so little in return.

More than 150 Canadians died in the war in Afghanistan, which began in defence of the United States in 2001 with the first ever declaration of NATO’s mutual defence rule.

TRUMP: Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way. They should be grateful also. But they’re not. I watched your prime minister yesterday. He wasn’t so grateful. They should be grateful to us. Canada. Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.

This is a reference to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech on Tuesday, which did not name any specific country or leader, but described a “rupture” in geopolitics to which middle powers should respond by coordinating mutual support resistance and resistance to economic sabotage.

TRUMP: Our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland’s already cost us a lot of money. But that dip is peanuts compared to what it’s gone up. And we have an unbelievable future in that stock. That stock market is going to be doubled. We’re going to hit 50,000, and that stock market’s going to double in a relatively short period of time because of everything that’s happening.

Trump appears to mean Greenland, but said “Iceland.”

TRUMP: Until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me “Daddy.” The last time, a very smart man said, “He’s our daddy. He’s running it.” I was like running it. I went from running it to being a terrible human being. But now what I’m asking for is a piece of ice, cold and poorly located, that can play a vital role in world peace and world protection. It’s a very small ask compared to what we have given them for many, many decades.

This is reference to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. In June, amid the conflict between Israel and Iran, Trump criticized them both for breaking a ceasefire, saying they had been fighting for so long they “don’t know what the f–k they’re doing.” Afterwards, at a NATO summit, he compared the two countries to children fighting. Rutte took the analogy further and said

“Daddy has to sometimes use strong language.”

• Jesse Kline: Carney declares world order dead, just don’t ask him about China
• Chris Selley: Carney’s realpolitik brings a bracing end to Liberal preening and pretence

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

After seeing phone messages and videos that kibbutzim were being ravaged on October 7, Eli Sharabi thought surrendering himself to Hamas terrorists would save his British-born wife and two daughters. Instead, he spent 491 days as a hostage in Gaza and, upon his release in February 2025, learned they had been murdered minutes after he was dragged from their Kibbutz Be’eri home.

In Hostage, the first full-length memoir by a released hostage from that day’s massacre, the Yemenite-Moroccan Israeli recounts starvation, beatings and underground captivity in Hamas’s tunnels, alongside improvised quiet acts of defiance to keep other prisoners alive in spirit.

“I didn’t choose to be famous, you know, and unfortunately, it’s become like that. I would prefer not to be,” Sharabi told the Post on Tuesday, prior to a Toronto-area speaking event, which was organized by the Chabad on Bayview synagogue.

“But then it was very important for me to speak for the remaining hostages when I was released, and after that to write my testimony, the book, so nobody can in the future change the facts in the history. I think that was the best way to cherish my loved one’s memories for me.”

For him, the “hardest part” came when he heard of the death of his wife, Lianne, and his daughters, Noyia and Yahel, “and the part where I’m going to the graveyard to apologize, and to promise them that nobody will forget them,” he told the Post.

At the Chateau Le Jardin Event Venue, in Woodbridge, Ont., Sharabi told the audience that in writing the book, it was not difficult to recall every aspect of being a hostage. That will “be with me all of my life. It’s not something you forget,” he said.

Though conceding he was “not religious,” he began to say Jewish prayers while being held in the terrorists’ car, and continued to say prayers each day he was captive, including special Sabbath prayers and rituals.

“All these ceremonies just remind us how we are Jewish, which gave us lots of strength as a group,” he told the audience. “I found God again 50 metres underground. I felt someone protecting me,” he said, adding that there were at least ten examples of where he believed he was near death but “felt something keeping me alive. I’m really grateful for that.”

Sharabi, because of his fluency in Arabic, played translator between other hostages and the terrorists.

“It’s a very delicate relationship. They can change their minds in a second,” he said. “You have to start to learn how they react to everything.” He described “psychological terror” used against the hostages, including when they were told the government abandoned them, and that Israel had been destroyed. “You have to be very, very strong, day after day, to not pay attention to things like that.”

While in the tunnel, he saw “dozens of boxes of humanitarian aid” that he believes were stolen. His captors ate four to five times a day, though he only had one meal a day – consisting of a pita and a half, or a bowl of pasta, or a bowl of rice. On the day of his capture, he weighed 70 kilograms; at the day of his release, 44 kg.

After returning to Israel, during his first hot shower in 16 months, he “used probably all the shampoo bottles, and all the soap, and it was amazing. I will never forget this shower.”

In the days since his release, he said he gained a greater perspective about life.

“Appreciate everything, all the basic things in your life. Fifty metres underground, you understand what is really, really important in life. And it’s never material things. It’s never if you have a big house or a small house. If you have a flashy car or just a simple car. You don’t miss your bank account. You don’t care if you have a thousand dollars or a million dollars. You just want another five minutes with your family, with your friends. And you’re willing to pay anything for that,” he told the audience.

“Freedom is priceless,” he said, “to be able to wake up in the morning and not to ask any permission to go to a toilet, or have a shower, or open a fridge, or speak. You never forget after you lose that. When I’m in Israel, I try to open my day in the morning with a walk on the beach for an hour, and just look at that blue water. It’s just amazing for me.”

The lessons Sharabi carried out of the tunnels are not only about gratitude, but balancing hope for the Jewish people, against the rising tide of hatred.

“I know it’s not looking good for us now around the world, this rise in antisemitism. Sometimes it feels like 1940, not 2026,” he said.

After meeting members of Parliament, prime ministers and foreign ministers in various parts of the world, his message to them is: “They need to speak up with a stronger voice against antisemitism and every hate crime that happens against Jews around the world. It is their responsibility. I’m trying to wake them up.”

• MP’s petition to investigate Canadians who served in IDF is ‘antisemitic witch hunt,’ Jewish group says
• Antisemitic graffiti that called for the death of Jews in Toronto cleaned up, says city councillor

A former flight attendant from Toronto allegedly posed as a pilot and used a fake identification card in order to fly for free hundreds of times, according to American authorities.

The 33-year-old has been charged with wire fraud after falsely posing as a commercial airline pilot, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Hawaii Ken Sorenson said on Tuesday. He was indicted last October after being arrested in Panama and extradited to the United States. The man also posed as a flight attendant, although he was not working as one at the time, court documents said.

He pleaded not guilty this week, the Associated Press reported.

The man “presented a fictitious employee identification card to obtain hundreds of flights at no cost,” over a period of four years, Sorenson said in a news release.

It is alleged that the man also requested a jump seat in the cockpit of an aircraft, even though he was “not a pilot and did not have an airman’s certificate.” A cockpit jump seat is an extra seat that can be occupied by a pilot who is not scheduled to work,

Simple Flying explains

. The U.S. attorney’s office told National Post that although he requested to use the jump seat, there is no information to indicate whether he did or not.

The man worked as a flight attendant at a Toronto-based airline roughly between July 2017 and October 2019, according to court documents obtained by National Post. The airline was not specified.

Porter Airlines, which is headquartered in Toronto, and WestJet, based in Calgary, did not immediately respond to National Post’s request. Canadian airlines such as Air Canada and Flair told National Post that the man had not been employed by them.

Daily Mail

reported

that the man used a fake ID to secure free flights on an online booking system reserved for airline staff. This method was used to book flights on airlines that were headquartered in Honolulu, Chicago, Illinois, Fort Worth and Toronto, according to court documents.

Although the airlines were not named, National Post has reached out to Hawaiian Airlines, United Airlines, and American Airlines for comment.

If convicted, the man faces up to 20 years in prison, a fine of up to US$250,000, plus a term of supervised release, Sorenson said.

A motion to detain him without bail was filed on Jan. 16. He is currently in custody at the Federal Detention Centre Honolulu located in Hawaii, a search of the Federal Bureau of Prisons database indicates.

The trial by jury is set to begin on March 17.

In a separate case out of Florida last June, a 35-year-old man booked “free flights on an airline carrier’s website that were only available to pilots and flight attendants,”

a news release from the U.S. attorney’s office said

. He was found guilty of wire fraud and “entering into a secure area of an airport by false pretenses.”

He took more than 120 free flights “by falsely claiming to be a flight attendant.”

The story of convicted felon and author Frank Abagnale Jr., made popular by the movie Catch Me If You Can, echoes the allegations against the ex-flight attendant from Toronto. The hit Hollywood film, based on Abagnale’s memoir, tells the story of a young man who scams his way into getting free flights by posing as an airline pilot. The main character, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is eventually arrested by an FBI agent, played by Tom Hanks.

• Canadian airlines reassure flyers after water on many U.S. airlines harmful, study claims
• Air Canada crew member trapped in cargo hold of flight as passengers heard cries for help

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

Donald Trump said the U.S. won’t use military force in its bid to acquire Greenland for “national security” reasons.

During his lengthy speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday, Trump said the U.S. likely won’t be able to achieve its goal without employing “excessive strength and force,” which he said would be “unstoppable.”

“But I don’t have to use force, I don’t have to use force, I won’t use force,” Trump said.

The president broached the Greenland issue early in his speech and, despite repeatedly deviating to other topics, returned to it often.

He said he respects the people of Greenland and Denmark, but said “every NATO ally has an obligation to defend their own territory and the fact is no nation, or any group of nations, is in a position to be able to secure Greenland other than the United States.

He went on to say that were it not for U.S. intervention in WWII, Greenland would have fallen to the Germans, remarking to the audience that they’d now be speaking German or Japanese.

More to come.

• ‘Canada lives because of the U.S.,’ Trump says during Davos speech. ‘Remember that, Mark’
• Why France’s Emmanuel Macron was wearing sunglasses at Davos

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

DAVOS, SWITZERLAND AND OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney left the World Economic Forum in Davos without meeting President Donald Trump Wednesday as the U.S. leader warned Canada should be more “grateful” for its southern neighbour.

“Canada gets a lot of freebies from us by the way,” Trump told a WEF audience, after mentioning the U.S. plan to build a missile defence system called the Golden Dome. “They should be grateful also but they’re not.”

Trump’s remarks come one day after Carney delivered a striking speech in front of the forum, declaring the old rules-based order dead and called on middle powers to call out bullies and hegemons, without naming specific countries.

Trump said he watched Carney’s address. “He wasn’t so grateful,” said Trump. “They should be grateful to us, Canada — but they’re not. Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

Carney left Davos around 2 p.m. local time, almost exactly when the U.S. president arrived to deliver an over hour-long speech at the glitzy international summit. Carney’s office confirmed that the prime minister did not meet or talk with Trump Wednesday.

Carney was not the only leader to avoid Trump at the summit. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen also delivered a speech to the WEF on Tuesday and jetted out of Davos without seeing the U.S. president.

European allies have been on edge over Trump’s ambitions to take over Greenland, an autonomous territory which belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

During his speech, Trump said “I won’t use force” but reiterated that the U.S. will have Greenland.

“This enormous unsecured island is actually part of North America,” said Trump, while he called for negotiations with Denmark.

The president has threatened 10 per cent tariff starting in February on goods from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland over the Greenland issue. Countries in the European Union are mulling potential countermeasures against the U.S.

Carney has said he strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and the future of the territory should be determined by the people of Denmark and Greenland. During the summit, Carney also acknowledged the growing importance of arctic security among NATO partners and said Russia does pose a “prospective” threat to that region in the world.

While in Davos, Carney met with multiple world and business leaders over two days, including French President Emmanuel Macron, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Carney wraps up an eight-day international trip that included a visit to China, the first trip by a Canadian prime minister in over eight years. Viewed as a reset in relations between China and Canada, the visit also included a “landmark agreement” that will allow market access of Chinese electric vehicles into Canada in exchange for a lowering of Chinese tariffs on canola exports.

• Why France’s Emmanuel Macron was wearing sunglasses at Davos
• Trump posts map showing Canada and Greenland under U.S. control

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.