President Trump will join fellow billionaires and heads of state at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, even as his nationalist ally, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, refuses to attend and will not let his ministers go.
The Davos meeting, scheduled for Jan. 21 to 24, is criticized for its elite deal-making and cosmopolitanism, which critics say undermine the sovereignty of nations. American presidents have typically avoided the event.
Trump, who touts himself as a populist, canceled his visit to the January 2019 confab amid the border security fight and shutdown, but next month he will make his second appearance as president at the annual celebration of internationalism.
Not so for Johnson, reelected as prime minister with a majority of 80 last week. Johnson said he plans to “get on with delivering the priorities of the British people,” a No. 10 official said, and has banned ministers from attending. “Our focus is on delivering for the people, not champagne with billionaires,” a government source told the Daily Mail.
Ahead of his 2018 visit to Davos, concern abounded among regulars who saw the president’s America First policies and pointed anti-internationalist rhetoric as a threat to the gathering.
These were quickly soothed. Trump “calmed the room with his speech,” president of the Atlantic Council Fred Kempe told CNBC at the time. The mood had been “a hot room” ahead of the president’s arrival. “I’d say 99% of them would have voted for Hillary Clinton had they had a vote,” Kempe said about the others in attendance. “They were ready to bite, ready to boo, ready to hate what he said.”
Headlines from the week were equally sanguine. “No fire and fury,” Quartz said. “Trump and Davos: Not Exactly Best Friends, but Not Enemies Either,” the New York Times wrote.
By the time of Trump’s departure, many viewed Trump’s bellicose positions as bargaining postures, instead. The president arrived a “party wrecker,” left “a pragmatist,” the New York Times said.
The experience stood in contrast to the fiery rhetoric that draws Trump’s “Front Row Joes” — loyalists who line up days ahead of schedule after cross-country drives and red-eye flights — for his rallies.
Trump defenders rail against what they call the “party of Davos,” as did Raheem Kassam, former adviser to Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage and current co-host of Steve Bannon’s impeachment podcast. Davos enemies such as Bannon and Kassam denigrate “unelected bureaucrats” working against the White House’s political agenda, a “permanent political class” thwarting policy. Ex-Trump adviser Bannon is well documented in his disdain for party of Davos “propaganda,” which he chides as antithetical to the president’s policies.
Davos, by comparison, hosts pop-up shopfronts occupied by such Beltway-familiar names as Palantir Technologies, awarded a $111 million Army contract on Tuesday, flanked by a Philz, the San Francisco coffee shop, and Facebook, where Trump adviser and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel sits on the board.
