President Trump’s date with elites he affected to hate
▶ Joyce Karam reports from Washington on the president’s visit to the World Economic Forum
Donald Trump cultivated an anti-elitist message while blazing a path to the presidency.
A year after assuming office, his arrival this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos – the epitome of elite gatherings – will run contrary to much that he espoused on the campaign trail.
In a gathering dominated by the rich, the US president will be in his comfort zone; balancing audiences will be his toughest task.
“The working men and women in the world are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos,” Steve Bannon, former strategist and campaign manager for Mr Trump, said in 2014.
Now cast from the White House, Mr Bannon is no longer the president’s political guide, but the rhetoric remains the same: “America First.”
Mr Trump has implemented the biggest corporate tax rate cut in history – from 35 per cent to 21 per cent.
Andrew Bishop, deputy director of research at Eurasia Group, the political risk consultancy, said the president “will be simultaneously addressing three distinct audiences: the Davos crowd, his base and Chinese President Xi Jinping”.
It was Mr Xi who stole the show at Davos last year, something the US president is likely to want to reverse. China may be Mr Trump’s Achilles’ heel, because it is “the only country in the world with a long-term global economic strategy today, and there’s nothing Mr Trump can say on Friday that will bring the US up to speed with Beijing any time soon”, Mr Bishop said.
“China has its strongest president in decades, while at the same time the US has one of its weakest over the past century. That creates a fundamental imbalance in the global order.”
Ahead of the trip, Mr Trump imposed tariffs on imported solar panels and washing machines.
His Davos speech is expected to repeat his campaign themes against free trade and open borders.
But Gary Cohn, director of the White House National Economic Council, dismissed the idea of a clash between “America First” and the distinctive embrace of a global economic order at Davos.
“The president believes we can have truly win-win agreements. America First is not America alone,” Mr Cohn said.
Noah Rothman, associate editor at Commentary magazine, said the populist display was largely cosmetic.
“Mr Trump has conspicuously declined to pursue most of the hard-line anti-free-trade policies he advocated after reportedly being convinced that they would hurt more Americans than they would help,” Rothman told The National.
Having already appointed several Wall Street executives to key positions in his government, Mr Trump this week got approval from the Senate for another – Jerome Powell, a monetary dove and former investment banker, as new chair of the Federal Reserve.