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Trump in the World That He Insults
The President is headed to Davos. How can someone so “America first” attend an event so globally minded?
Illustration by Tom Bachtell
The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, getting under way this week in the Alpine town of Davos, Switzerland, has long been known as much for its socializing and its parties as for its serious discussions of policy. But the organizers do their homework, and last Wednesday the W.E.F. released its Global Risks Report 2018, detailing how factors such as interstate conflicts, earthquakes, market bubbles, and a severe energy-price shock (“increase or decrease”) could affect the well-being of populations and businesses around the world. One recurring presence in the report, weaving through a crowd of potential panics and crises that, according to its assessment, he has made more probable, is a figure who is planning to elbow his way through the halls of Davos itself: President Donald Trump.
The report notes that, in addition to such globally devastating acts as the decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement, Trump has exemplified the rise of “charismatic strongman politics,” which has contributed to a “febrile” geopolitical environment. Among other things, the report says, this bending of policies to oversized personalities has increased the likelihood of a nuclear confrontation with North Korea. If you are in Davos to assess risk, in other words, just look for Trump. Attended by eight Cabinet members, he’ll be hard to miss.
Trump will not be entirely out of place, though, in terms of his importance or his self-importance. This Davos meeting, the forty-eighth, will involve some three thousand participants, more than half of them from the private sector: “members” of the W.E.F., who pay dues and are drawn from the world’s thousand largest companies, in revenues, and “partners,” at various levels, who pay a bit more to take part. They, along with invitees from the public sector, N.G.O.s, and the arts, are meant to shape “global, regional, and industry agendas.” About eighty per cent of the invitees are men.
The most recent U.S. President to have attended Davos was Bill Clinton, but so many heads of state and government show up that the W.E.F. had to perform triage in its guide to this year’s attendees, focussing on the G7 (six leaders will be present; Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, of Japan, won’t make it) and the G20 (Prime Minister Narendra Modi, of India, will deliver the opening speech; Trump will give the keynote address on the closing day). Although the guide mentions that several heads of African nations will be there, it does not name all the leaders who will have a chance to meet the man who called their countries “shitholes.” The leaders of various Muslim and Latin American nations, whom Trump has also belittled, will be present, too. (Celebrities such as Elton John, Cate Blanchett, and Shah Rukh Khan, the Bollywood idol, will also be attending; it wouldn’t be Davos without them.)
Mapping every nation that Trump has insulted is an exhausting task. It’s easy to imagine this year’s meeting playing out as scenes from a very dark screwball comedy: Trump tries to shake a gaggle of allies whom he has called deadbeats, in order to persuade Erna Solberg, the Prime Minister of Norway, to send more white people to America. But on the way he sees the French President, Emmanuel Macron, whose capital he has declared ruined by immigrant terrorists, then bumps into Mexico’s finance secretary, with whom he gets into a fight about paying for the wall. For a respite, Trump scans the room for Vladimir Putin, but, alas, the Russian President hasn’t been seen at Davos since 2009.
When Trump’s trip was announced, there was a flurry of questions, some gleeful, about how someone so “America first” could be headed to an event so globally minded. It is the kind of gathering where you can expect to—and this year will—find Al Gore. The stated goal is to create a “shared narrative,” whereas Trump doesn’t stick to the same story from one day to the next. Davos also celebrates the idea of negotiated solutions, such as the Iran nuclear agreement, which Trump has been seeking to undo. John Kerry, who closed that deal as President Obama’s Secretary of State, is also expected to attend.
Yet, as Trumpist hypocrisies go, the President’s Davos trip hardly qualifies. During the 2016 campaign, he boasted that he was “really rich” and a member of powerful circles that his voters could scarcely imagine, where only he would speak for them. But his populism was always putative. Though the social entrepreneurs and human-rights advocates in attendance might recoil from the idea, Davos in some ways really is Trump’s kind of place. Hobnobbing at an exclusive club in a resort town? After the Inauguration, the Trump Organization raised the initiation fee for Mar-a-Lago, the President’s Florida golf club, effectively marketing access to power. He may well think of Davos—where, for years, his former associate Anthony Scaramucci hosted wine tastings—as a Mar-a-Lago in the mountains.
Then, some foreign politicians harbor the hope, or the delusion, that Trump is persuadable. For example, there was consternation in the United Kingdom about Prime Minister Theresa May’s apparent difficulty in scheduling a meeting at Davos with Trump. Two weeks ago, he tweeted that he was scrapping a planned visit to London because he didn’t like the real-estate deal that had made a new, more secure American Embassy possible. The British press wondered if he might have been more upset by reports that he won’t be invited to the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, who is known to be friendly with Barack Obama. Britain’s anxiety over this estrangement is fitful: some want Trump to stay out of the country; some are more anxious about losing the “special relationship”; others just want May to save what can be saved.
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This is what might be called the Davos dilemma: countries may scorn Donald Trump, but they are not quite ready to dismiss the President of the United States. Toward the end of the W.E.F.’s Risks Report, though, there is a section on responses to “stresses and shocks” which includes something called “transformative resilience”—meaning that it helps, in the wake of a crisis, to have a “capacity for change.” That sounds like good advice for Democrats, but it also might be a remonstrance about assuming that other countries don’t have options. Some Davos attendees might not wait for America to be the world’s leader again. As Trump expounds from the stage, they may find themselves thinking about how long they’ll need to keep listening. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the January 29, 2018, issue, with the headline “Trump in the World.”
Amy Davidson Sorkin is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.
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