Trump turns on the charm to push his message of ‘America First’
President appeals to the corporate barons in Davos with his gloriously seductive fiscal largesse
DONALD TRUMP declared the US “open for business” at Davos yesterday as he reassured global business leaders that “America First does not mean America alone”. Face to face with some of his harshest critics, in the temple of globalisation, the US president turned on the charm in a speech delivered in unusually conciliatory tones.
“As president of the United States, I will always put America first. Just like the leaders of other countries should put their countries first also. But America First does not mean America alone,” he told the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Mr Trump at times offered a message of obligation that was – on the surface – not far removed from the “stakeholder” philosophy of Pope Leo XIII’S Rerum Novarum, the doctrine that first inspired the WEF gathering.
He reminded the business and political elites in the room of their “duty” to the ordinary working people who made them rich and put them in
‘Trump shouldn’t really be very likeable, and yet they do in fact like him’
there. He launched into a paean to the “forgotten voices”, embellished with claims that African-american and Hispanic unemployment rates in America have touched the lowest in history.
The moral pitch sat oddly with his regressive tax reform and his assault on health insurance for the striving poor, and the cracks appeared when he could not resist boasting that Wall Street has hit 84 fresh records and generated $7trillion of extra wealth since his election.
Mr Trump sought to play down his image as a protectionist, vowing to promote a global trade system that works “for all nations”.
He pushed a model of bilateral deals – which can be “terminated” easily if they move out of kilter – but left the door open for a revival of the Transpacific Partnership if the terms are right.
Yet the caveats were icily clear. “We cannot have free and open trade if some countries exploit the system at the expense of others. We support free trade, but it needs to be fair and it needs to be reciprocal,” he said.
“The United States will no longer turn a blind eye to predatory behaviours. We will enforce our trade laws and restore integrity to the trading system,” he said.
Klaus Schwab, the eminence grise of the WEF, gently pleaded with Mr Trump not to pull back from the global institutions that the United States built after the Second World War and that have held the ring for 70 years, insisting that his personal leadership is “absolutely essential” if the planet is to avoid descending into Hobbesian chaos.
“The great sycophant meets the great narcissist,” quipped one delegate drily. Dr Schwab pointedly stated that the forum is a collection of proud and diverse sovereign nations that must somehow work together for their own collective survival.
The reality is that the three political stars of Davos over 2017 and 2018 have been Mr Trump, China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi. All of them are hardline nationalists, each harking back to a lost past.
The EU trio of French, German and Italian leaders exuded civilised moderation, yet no longer seem to command the epoch. They almost sounded like the voices of a genteel backwater.
The billionaires doing deals in Davos instinctively gravitate towards power, and most have little difficulty adapting to pro-business populists who oil the wheels. The Trump boom speaks for itself. “Everybody is making money,” said Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of Blackstone.
These corporate barons are beneficiaries of the statistics that the WEF dutifully compiles each year: that the average chief executive earns 303 times as much as their workers, compared to 30 times as recently as 1988. “Trump shouldn’t really be very likeable, and yet they do in fact like him,” said Robert Shiller, the Nobel economist.
The president has set their companies free, eliminating 20 “burdensome regulations” for every one new rule, or so he claimed in Davos. He has slashed corporate tax rates from 35pc to 21pc, and is spreading fiscal largesse with such abandon that the budget deficit threatens to breach 5pc of GDP at the top of the cycle.
This all smacks of Gatsbyesque depravity – if not Latin American Peronism – but it is gloriously seductive while it lasts.
“America is roaring back”, said Mr Trump. “America is open for business.”
It is hard to argue with the allure of power, money, and soaring equities.
A few inside the hall hissed at Mr Trump, breaching the etiquette of the forum. They were all journalists roped into a special pen. Nobody cares about them.