"In Trump 1.0, perhaps this would have been no more than one of his Twitter controversies, in which he posted some crazy graphic of himself leading a rump group of world powers to overthrow the United Nations as the new permanent chairman of the global board of directors. In Trump 2.0, his alternate reality is not just a social-media post or the subject of an over-my-dead-body fight with his latest panicked national security adviser, but an in-person photo op featuring the President, a real-life logo copied from the U.N.'s, and a random assortment of world leaders who were willing to buy a seat on Trump's committee for a cool billion dollars."
"My favorite moment was when—after bragging about how "everybody wants to be a part of" the board that every other major world leader, with the possible exception of the war-mongering pariah Vladimir Putin, refused to join—he claimed that the group he himself had dreamed up was some distinguished independent organization that had solicited his chairmanship."
"I highly recommend watching the fully livestreamed event, a show one might caption "Donald Trump and his pretend League of (Lesser) Superheroes, with himself as a bizarro Superman in charge of the world.""
Trump held a Davos photo op called the "Board of Peace," complete with a logo modeled on the U.N.'s and a curated group of leaders who paid to participate. The event echoed earlier controversies, such as the Greenland dispute, and transformed a potential social-media stunt into a physical spectacle. Attendees included countries like Belarus and Qatar, while Britain, France, Germany and other major allies stayed away. Trump framed the board as an independent organization that had invited him to chair and boasted about his peacemaking credentials during the presentation.
Read at The New Yorker
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