Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast for Wednesday, January 21st, 2026. I'm Miles Parks, and I cover voting.

I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the White House. And I'm Domenica Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

And we are recording this podcast at 12.20 p.m. just a few hours after President Trump addressed the World Economic Forum,

a meeting of business officials and world leaders in Davos, Switzerland. And ahead of this

speech, Danielle, the White House was framing this as a speech on affordability that he was going to

address a thing that is on many voters' minds, the rising cost of living in America. But I gather he hit a lot more than that.

Yes, which, you know, is not surprising if you ever listened to a Trump speech, which I know we all have.

I've heard a few, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, as have our listeners probably. Yeah, because he always goes in many, many different directions, which is something

he did here. And I mean, first of all, one striking thing was that he got into a lot of

sort of campaign speech territory. He railed against Ilhan Omar, the Democratic representative

from Minnesota. He insulted Somalia and Somali people. He talked about the 2020 election and said it was rigged. So lots of stuff that usually fits into one of his stump speeches here in the U.S.

But of course, the thing that got the most attention quite understandably was Greenland, because in the run-up to Davos this year, Trump was really

antagonizing U.S. allies with continued insistence that the U.S. get to acquire it from Denmark.

A big headline coming out of this speech was that he did say that he was not going to use military

force to take Greenland. Let's just listen. We probably won't get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force

where we would be, frankly, unstoppable. But I won't do that. Okay? Now everyone's saying,

oh, good. That's probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force. I don't have to use force. I don't want to use force. I won't use force. Domenico, I still don't feel like this is exactly reassuring the international community on the Greenland issue. Well, right. I mean, Trump has vacillated back and forth on this. He started talking about Greenland early in his

presidency. Then it sort of went away. Then after Venezuela and the action that the U.S. took there

militarily, suddenly Greenland became another discussion point. Now, you know, look, there's a lot of

domestic politics behind this, too, because really there's very little support. You've heard

Republicans on Capitol Hill even say

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