Trump might be entering the lion’s den on Switzerland trip — or maybe not.
DAVOS, Switzerland — When President Donald Trump arrived Thursday at the conference center where the world’s financial and political elite have been meeting, onlookers crowded a balcony and craned their heads to see the leader who has challenged the very international order that Davos represents. At first it was quiet. Then someone called out a question.
“Are you going to be treated well?” he was asked. “You tell me,” Trump replied. The reverse question was unasked but hung in the air: How was he going to treat them?
If he was not exactly entering the lion’s den, it was nonetheless a fraught moment for both sides as the America First president ventured into the lair of the weare-the-world banking titans, corporate magnates and international leaders who have spent decades preaching the virtues of global integration.
Rather than confrontation, both sides labored for conciliation, at least to a point. For one afternoon and evening, at least, Trump threw no protectionist grenades and even broached the possibility, however remote, that he would re-enter a Pacific trade agreement he scrapped last year, if it were renegotiated. For its part, the Davos crowd welcomed its top critic with a reception and warm words.
The mood was strikingly different from a year ago, when Trump was about to take office and the globalists meeting in this mountaintop getaway reeled in shock, panicked that his campaign promises meant the end of the movement they had nurtured for decades.
A year later, many of the business and political elites remain dismissive of him, privately rolling eyes and using words like “madman,” but there was excitement about economic growth, and the tax cuts and regulatory rollback he has ushered in.
The real test of how the two sides will deal with each other will come Friday when Trump addresses the World Economic Forum. Trump’s plan is not to stick his thumb in anyone’s eye, aides said, but to soberly promote his view that trade should be fair and reciprocal while selling his story of economic energy and soliciting foreign investment. Whether he will follow the script, they acknowledged, was anyone’s guess.
“The question is whether he’s here to be congratulated by the billionaires of Davos or to scold them on behalf of the people who elected him,” said Robert Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, a research institution in New York. “He will act like he’s doing both.”