TOPSHOT – US president Donald Trump delivers a speech at the Congres center during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, on January 21, 2020. (Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP) (Photo by FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images)
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President Donald Trump went off script to rant, complain yet again about the 2020 presidential election and he even appeared to confuse countries during his speech Wednesday to the World Economic Forum in Davos, with CNN’s in-house fact checker Daniel Dale describing the speech as a “barrage of false claims.”
The speech, which was the highlight of the president’s trip–which got off to a rough start when Air Force One had to turn back after a minor electrical issue–and found Trump telling world leaders that he did not intend to use force to take Greenland, which he appeared to confuse at times with Iceland:
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that Trump did not “mix up” Greenland and Iceland, but CNN’s Dale responded to Leavitt’s social media post by saying “we…watched the speech. He called Greenland ‘Iceland’ four times. In addition to the other moments in which he belittled Greenland as a ‘piece of ice.’”
In an appearance after the speech on CNN, Dale noted that Trump was wrong when he suggested that he “came up with” the idea of AI-related companies producing their own electricity, with Dale calling that claim–which the president has made before–“just pure fiction.”
DAVOS, SWITZERLAND – JANUARY 21: U.S. President Donald Trump appears on a large screen as he addresses the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the Davos Congress Center on January 21, 2026 in Davos, Switzerland. The annual meeting of political and business leaders comes amid rising tensions between the United States and Europe over a range of issues, including Trump’s vow to acquire Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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Trump repeated his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged,” and that he has ended “eight wars” so far in his second term in office. He also ranted about one of his favorite topics, windmills, with Dale describing the president’s claim that China has no wind farms “an up-is-down reversal of reality”:
In his remarks on Greenland, the president got his history wrong, Dale told CNN viewers. “Trump correctly noted that the US built military facilities in Greenland during World War II when Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany and unable to protect Greenland,” Dale said, “but he then complained, ‘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. But how ungrateful are they now?’”
Dale noted that Greenland was never a US possession that any president could “give back” to Denmark. In all, Dale said Trump “repeated numerous long-debunked false claims about foreign affairs, the economy and other issues.”
WASHINGTON, D.C – JANUARY 20, 2026: U.S. President Donald Trump takes a question from members of the press during a briefing in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, D.C on January 20, 2026. (Photo by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
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On Tuesday, as Trump marked his first full year back in office, Dale reported on what he described as the president’s “top 25 lies of 2025,” which included many of the same falsehoods Trump repeated in Davos. “To mark his first year back in office, President Trump is at the White House podium repeating many of the false claims on my list of his top 25 lies of 2025 – rigged 2020 election, 600% reduction in prescription drug prices, $18 trillion in investment, Venezuela’s emptied prisons – plus a bunch of others.”
One of the Democrats likely to run to replace Trump in 2028, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, was in Davos and told CNN that the speech “was remarkably boring and insignificant.”
Newsom said Trump didn’t have “anything new” for Americans, and dismissed the constant talk about Greenland as a distraction. “He was never going to invade Greenland,” Newsom told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “It was never real.”