I’m writing this dispatch from Davos, Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting has attracted its usual mix of world leaders, billionaires, and celebrities. For once, though, the media’s attention is focused elsewhere, as Donald Trump took his oath of office in Washington and promised a new “golden age” for America.
The typical Davos attendee has been subject to much caricature. Samuel P. Huntington, a co-founder of this magazine, coined the term “Davos Men” in the early 2000s to advance one such description: people who “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations.”
On one level, Trump’s stunning comeback can be seen as a repudiation of the Davos Man. National loyalty and boundaries are very much back in vogue, with new tariffs and stricter immigration rules the bedrock of Trump’s vision for a second term. But contradictions abound. In his speech on Monday, Trump promised to be a “peacemaker and unifier” even as he repeated his expansionist plan to take back the Panama Canal and Canada and Greenland remain on high alert for further territorial claims by the president. So much for walls and boundaries.
What about “the elite’s global operations” that Huntington described as essential to the Davos Man? Judging by the attendees at Trump’s inauguration—there are already memes showing the men who run Amazon, Google, Meta, Reliance, Tesla, and Uber—the billionaire class is lining up for what they hope will be a spate of deregulation and tax breaks. If that means getting behind Trump’s nationalism, protectionism, and anti-DEI approach, so be it.
A big question for the next few days—and the next four years—is going to be whether Trump has more power over big business or the other way round. The answer isn’t as simple as it may seem. While Trump seems to have the loyalty of the world’s richest men today, he remains remarkably sensitive to market sentiment. I expect a seesaw tussle for influence.
