The Man Who Shrinks the World

How Trump forces global institutions to erase climate and equality to protect his fragile worldview.

The World Economic Forum in Davos bills itself as the place where global leaders confront humanity’s biggest challenges, climate collapse, geopolitical instability, runaway inequality, runaway technology, and the need for planetary boundaries. But this year, the headlines aren’t about the big themes. They’re about one man: Donald Trump. And not because he’s bringing ideas. But because he’s once again bringing conditions.

According to Financial Times reporting, Trump agreed to attend Davos only after the organizers gave private assurances that the program would downplay or scrub altogether the topics he finds most offensive: climate change, diversity, women’s empowerment, international development, and anything else that might suggest the world is made up of more than one person and it is not, in fact, him.

Davos had to promise not to be Davos.

Trump’s team reportedly pushed this line as early as the autumn: pare back the “woke” themes, or the U.S. president stays home. And the organizers, already wobbling under governance scandals and hungry for relevance, apparently signaled they could accommodate him. The WEF publicly denies any political influence, of course, but as one insider put it: the Americans wanted reassurance that Trump’s appearance at an “elite, progressive event” wouldn’t anger his MAGA base. And Davos, battered and pragmatic, seems to have obliged.

This is not how a leader interacts with global institutions. It is, however, how Trump interacts with reality.

To understand Trump’s demand that Davos neuter itself, you have to understand how Trump processes the world:

He does not respond to facts. He responds to vibes, specifically, his own.

Climate change isn’t a physical phenomenon measured by satellites, thermometers, and 150 years of peer-reviewed consensus. It’s an inconvenience to him personally, a storyline he finds uncomfortable, a narrative that contradicts his intuition. Diversity isn’t a cornerstone of democratic strength. It’s a threat to the notion that power belongs to people who look, sound, and think like him.

And international development finance, well, that just sounds like money going to other people.

Trump’s entire worldview is zero-sum. If someone else wins, he believes he must be losing. So any topic that acknowledges collective action, global cooperation, or shared humanity automatically becomes suspect. Science, by its nature, is a collaborative discipline. Reality is a collaborative project. But Trump doesn’t do collaboration. He does dominance, or, when dominance is impossible, he does erasure.

That is why he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement.
It’s why he suspended giant swaths of foreign aid, gutted programs for women’s and girls’ health and global development. And its why diversity initiatives were systematically dismantled, and why Davos, Davos!, was asked to water down its central themes just to secure his attendance.

It is neither policy, nor ideology, or even politics in the traditional sense. It is personal psychology scaled to the size of a global superpower.

The FT’s reporting on Davos pairs almost too neatly with another story that’s been bubbling up on LinkedIn, a surprising experiment where women rewriting their profiles to sound more “male-coded” saw engagement skyrocket. One woman saw a 724% increase in visibility simply by flipping her gender marker and adjusting her tone.

LinkedIn denies its algorithms use gender. But users, hundreds of them, are experiencing a platform where masculinity is rewarded even when artificially simulated.

It’s an accidental metaphor for Trump’s worldview: a world that reflexively elevates the male-coded, the dominant, the loud, the aggressive, regardless of merit or accuracy. A world where tone outweighs substance and confidence is mistaken for competence. A world that shapes itself around the man who demands the most space.

Davos is now doing on an institutional level what LinkedIn users have documented socially: bending pre-emptively to avoid triggering the insecure man in the room.

Because here’s the truth: You can’t talk about planetary boundaries with someone who refuses to acknowledge that planets have boundaries.

Officially, the theme of Davos 2026 is A Spirit of Dialogue. Unofficially, that dialogue appears to begin with: “How can we ensure the U.S. president doesn’t storm out because someone mentioned the existence of women or carbon?”

The WEF, still reeling from governance scandals and desperate to project stability, insists its agenda is untouched by political interference. Yet its own insiders admit it has become “more pragmatic” in a world where illiberal governments hold power. And Trump, whose political identity is built on rejecting global cooperation, knows exactly how to leverage that weakness.

He has done this before. In the UN. In NATO. In trade negotiations. In multilateral climate forums.
The formula is always the same: Threaten withdrawal. Demand concessions. Receive them. Declare victory. Call it strength.

Strength in Trump’s world is not the ability to face difficult truths, it’s the ability to silence them.

Every major scientific body on earth has warned that the next decade is decisive for the climate. Every economic and humanitarian institution is aligned on the stakes. Every global forum from COP to the IPCC to the WEF acknowledges we are approaching hard limits.

Except Donald Trump. Acknowledging limits is anathema to him. He cannot metabolize data that contradicts his intuition. Nor can he engage with science that doesn’t flatter him. Trump cannot participate in global cooperation without demanding the world shrink to his size, so the world, absurdly, shrinks.

In the end, the question isn’t how much damage one man can do to the climate.
We already know the answer. We watched it during his first term. We are watching it again. The real question is how many institutions will contort themselves to enable him.

Davos just gave us one more data point. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the planet does not negotiate its boundaries to avoid upsetting powerful men.