‘He literally thinks everyone is as ignorant as he is’: Donald Trump is rewriting history to claim Greenland, and it doesn’t get worse than this
Donald Trump’s visit to Davos on Wednesday, on the occasion of the World Economic Forum, was chaotic to say the least. From the moment he got on the stage to the time he got down, there wasn’t a single thing that he said that made sense. Two things could have happened here: either he didn’t know what he was saying, or he was just lying to manipulate people (in this case, world leaders) into submission.
A specific moment from Donald Trump’s speech at the recently held World Economic Forum in Davos is gaining significant attention online, especially on platforms like X (formerly Twitter). In it, he can be seen discussing Greenland’s history, saying that the United States gave the territory “back” to Denmark after World War II. He also claimed that if the US had not taken such a step, then the people of Switzerland would currently be speaking German and a “little Japanese.” His exact words in this context were:
After the war, which we won, we won it big without us, right now, you’d all be speaking German and a little Japanese perhaps. After the war, we gave Greenland back to Denmark. How stupid were we to do that? But we did it. But we gave it back. How ungrateful are they now?”
A quick internet search will tell you that Donald Trump’s claims are nothing but blatant lies, or, as I mentioned previously, probably a result of poor research. Here’s the reality behind his assertions. At no point in history did the United States own Greenland. In 1941, while the Second World War was still ongoing, the US signed an agreement with Denmark promising to defend it against German occupation. To achieve this goal, the US established several military bases in the territory, resulting in the nation’s significant presence on the land. However, this does not mean that the US owned Greenland at any point, as Trump claims.
This is not the only way Trump embarrassed himself on the world stage. He also said a bunch of other things that put Americans to shame. Discussing one of his favourite topics, China, Trump said that the country had no wind farms despite making “almost all of the wind mills.” Like his claim about Greenland, this one is also untrue. Based on an article published by Forbes on January 12, 2026, China, according to a country analysis brief released by the Energy Information Administration in May last year, had added 76 gigawatts of wind energy in 2024.
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