U.S. President Donald Trump attends a reception with business leaders during the 56th annual World Economic Forum (WEF), in Davos, Switzerland, January 21, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
After weeks of authoritarian threats to crush protests with the military, cancel elections, conquer foreign countries, and send masked agents door-to-door to round up anyone who can’t prove their citizenship, Trump on Wednesday told an already uneasy room full of world leaders that “sometimes you need a dictator.”
The offhanded comment came in the middle of a rambling speech at the reception dinner for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, in which Trump congratulated himself on a different rambling speech he’d given earlier that day at the summit.
“We had a good speech, we got great reviews. I can’t believe it, we got good reviews on that speech,” Trump said of the widely mocked address in which he continued to demand the US take over Greenland (which he repeatedly referred to as “Iceland”) and made new tariff threats against Canada and Europe if they resist the annexation.
“Usually they say ‘he’s a horrible dictator-type person,’ I’m a dictator,” Trump continued. “But sometimes you need a dictator! But they didn’t say that in this case... It’s all based on common sense, it’s not conservative or liberal, or anything else.”
Spoken like a dictator https://t.co/f1lBD0bapL
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) January 21, 2026
At least twice over the past month, Trump has suggested that the 2026 midterm elections should be canceled, since his party is likely to lose.
The first time he brought up the idea, on the five-year anniversary of the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, he seemed to back off the idea for fear of being called a dictator by his detractors: “I won’t say cancel the election; they should cancel the election, because the fake news would say: ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator.”
But if being called a dictator was the only thing holding him back from attempting to suspend democracy, he no longer appears to care.
As political commentator Charlotte Clymer wrote on social media, “Trump is now openly referring to himself as a dictator” in front of the whole world.