President Donald Trump is set Wednesday to speak at the World Economic Forum, directly addressing an audience that has been put on edge by his intensifying aggression toward the allied territory of Greenland.
Trump’s speech is scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. ET. The address will be bookended by meetings with other world leaders attending the five-day summit in Davos, Switzerland, the White House said.
Trump, facing a tough midterm election cycle centered on Americans’ cost-of-living concerns, previously said he will speak at Davos about proposals to make housing more affordable.
But it’s his increasingly belligerent stance toward Europe, as he and his administration persist in trying to acquire Greenland from Denmark, that has already taken center stage.
Trump and his aides have refused to rule out wielding the U.S. military over Greenland. And the president recently said he will slap increasing tariffs on a slew of key European allies until an agreement to sell the Arctic island is inked.
U.S. markets plummeted in the first trading session following Trump’s latest tariff threat.
U.S. officials, speaking at Davos on Tuesday ahead of Trump’s arrival, sought to calm fears about the president’s actions.
“Everyone take a deep breath,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC’s Joe Kernen. “Do not escalate … President Trump has a strategy here. Hear him out, and then everything will be fine.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC’s “Money Movers” that America’s “tariff deals, our trade deals with Europe, with the U.K. — these are durable and stable.”
“You can have a fight with your allies. You can disagree with your allies. It doesn’t stop them from being your allies or your big trading partners,” Lutnick added.
Trump said at the White House before departing for Davos, “We have a lot of meetings scheduled on Greenland, and I think things are going to work out pretty well.”
His expansionist push has nevertheless stoked alarm and outrage from Europe’s leaders and citizens alike.
“People are worried, people are afraid, people are bewildered,” Naaja Nathanielsen, Greenland’s minister for business and mineral resources, told CNBC on Tuesday when asked how residents there are reacting to Trump’s actions.
That assessment aligns with recent opinion polls, which show Greenlanders overwhelmingly oppose being absorbed into the U.S., and protests that have sprung up in solidarity with the territory.
A delegation from Greenland and Denmark, meanwhile, said after meeting with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio that they have a “fundamental disagreement” with the Trump administration.
But Trump, who has long sought to make Greenland a part of the U.S., has so far refused to take no for an answer.