Frederick Kempe
It’s well known that US President Donald Trump is the man of the moment. Less understood is that he’s both the product and the purveyor or our emerging era. It is one characterized by more government intervention, less common cause, more mercantilism, less free trade, and more big-power swagger.
That is my takeaway from the first week of Trump’s second presidency and my thirtieth visit to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting. It remains the most consequential gathering of global political, business, and civil society elites, this year boasting more than three thousand participants from 130 countries.
In my three decades of attending the forum, never has a single individual dominated discussions like Trump did this past week.
That was true even before Trump arrived with a splash last Thursday, though only virtually, delivering his speech to a standing-room-only audience from a colossal screen. More than any of some fifty heads of state and government who spoke this week, he held the attention of his mostly skeptical audience with his self-congratulation, comic timing, derision of former US President Joe Biden, and audacious appeals to global elites for deals and deference.
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