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The Playbook Podcast

Trump descends on Davos

The Playbook Podcast

POLITICO

Politics, Government, Daily News, News

3.9699 Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2026

⏱️ 15 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

President Donald Trump is arriving in Davos today as the subject of nearly every conversation. Trump’s push to bring Greenland under U.S. control has dominated the discussion at the World Economic Forum, even as the president prepares to deliver a speech before those gathered in Switzerland on Wednesday. While the world will be parsing every word in his address, the real tea leaves to read may come out of Trump’s meetings with world leaders on the sidelines. Playbook’s Jack Blanchard and White House and foreign affairs correspondent Eli Stokols discuss the stakes of Trump’s trip, plus the big case to watch at the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:04.1

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0:07.9

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0:31.6

Today on the Playbook podcast, Donald Trump is in Davos for the most significant day of Western diplomacy in a very long time. Here in D.C., it's a huge day for the independence of the Fed as the Supreme Court considers

0:39.2

Trump's efforts to oust Governor Lisa Cook. And J.D. Vance and his wife Usher are having a fourth child.

0:46.2

Hello, I'm Jack Blanchard. And I'm Eli Stokels. It's Wednesday, January 21st.

0:52.1

Eli, great to have you with us. How you doing? I'm doing okay. How are you? I'm all right. Thank you. Eli,

0:57.9

of course, you are a White House reporter with a firm eye on foreign affairs, so I'm delighted you're

1:02.8

on the podcast this morning, because once again, pretty much as it has been the entire year so far,

1:08.4

all we're talking about in American politics is foreign affairs. Donald Trump

1:11.8

should have landed in Davos in the last hour or so about the time this podcast is going out.

1:18.3

Normally, Eli, I don't know if you've ever been to Davos, but it's normally like a bunch of CEOs

1:22.5

sitting around over cocktails and fine wines talking about businessy things and feeling very important.

1:28.2

It's not normally the place for high stakes diplomacy, but that is what we're going to see today.

1:33.7

Yeah, or really memorable speeches, as we saw yesterday from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

1:40.1

You're right. Usually this is a lot of glad-handing and sort of superficial conversations.

1:44.7

The stakes feel much higher this year, largely because of what Donald Trump has been doing and

1:50.0

saying in the last two weeks about Greenland. And I think there are a lot of leaders, heads of state,

1:56.0

from NATO countries, European countries, who for a year had been sort of trying to convince themselves

2:02.3

that they could cobble together the longstanding democratic order and that things would be okay.

...

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