How Trump turned Davos into Mar-a-Lago

Davos is a quaint town of about 11,000 inhabitants in the Swiss Alps that every January undergoes an out-of-body experience, when it hosts the World Economic Forum (WEF). Last Tuesday, as Donald Trump was flying in, a group of local citizens carried 450 big torches up the mountain. That night, they lit them just under the summit of the Grüniberg and the words NO KINGS burned in the snow, visible from town.

Then Trump landed, and spoke. Some called the speech "a monumental climbdown" and others saw in it the "end" of a "four-day Greenland crisis that roiled global markets and endangered the transatlantic alliance". But it was possibly Swiss watchmaker Swatch that best captured the essence of the long, rambling address. In a full-page advert published in several Swiss newspapers the next day, it unveiled a new plastic watch which has just four words printed all over it: "Myself Me and I". Their timing was impeccable. 

The most telling paragraph in Trump's talk came when he said about Greenland: "We probably won't get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be, frankly, unstoppable. But I won't do that. Okay? Now [smirk] everyone’s saying, ‘Oh, good’, because people thought I would use force. But I don't have to use force. I don't want to use force. I won't use force". It was an appalling moment. He looked like a king rolling his moustache around his finger while casually saying "meh, I don’t feel like it today".

Rather than an exposition of policy, the rest was a 90-minutes long display of self-importance and contempt for others. A list of his achievements and pretend-achievements to claim that he has made America "the hottest country anywhere in the world". (He did not mean the climate.)

The words printed on that watch also sum up what Davos seems to have become, at least this year: a Trump-shaped Alpine hole, a winter branch of Mar-a-Lago, smack in the middle of Europe, in a country that’s not a member of the EU. Everything revolved around the US president. Those who elbowed to get into the room where he would speak. Those who reacted. Those who tiptoed around him. Those who paid tribute: "Davos would not be Davos without you", the Swiss President told him right after Trump had insulted, during his speech, the previous Swiss President.

And then those who flew in just to meet him. Those who, during a ceremony hosted not by anyone from WEF but by the White House Press Secretary, signed documents he put in front of them to create a so-called "Board of Peace" with him as Chairman for life, a US-centred logo, and a membership mostly of autocrats including at least one sought by the ICC for war crimes. Those who applauded the preposterous plans for a futuristic "New Gaza" full of luxury skyscrapers and global commerce infrastructure, but without the involvement of any Palestinian. This week one in four attendees at Davos were American, the biggest US delegation ever. The WEF itself had purged the conference’s programme, by and large, of the themes Trump doesn’t like: climate, renewable energy, inclusion. Basically, the WEF gathering was taken over. Call it Mar-a-Davos, minus the gold adornments. Maybe next year we will see those, too.

I say Mar-a-Lago and not the White House on purpose. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the centre of power in the US has shifted from Washington to Florida. The White House gets a new (golden) ballroom, and an Ultimate Fighting Championship event for Trump’s upcoming 80th birthday in June, and of course the public humiliations of foreign leaders that he sees as "great television". In short: the representation, the spectacle. While the actual dealing happens at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump, rather than the institution of the Presidency, is in control. Davos, as much as the so-called "Board of Peace", offers him two more structures for exerting power personally, without institutional strings and constraints.

Even if it has long been perceived as the place where CEOs, politicians and billionnaires hashed out plans for the world, Davos has never been only that. I’ve worked for a few years for the World Economic Forum, and - sometimes on the main stage, oftentimes in less visible rooms - there was real and useful work happening there. Coalition-building. Nelson Mandela sharing the stage with South African President F.W. de Klerk. Once we even tried to create a Davos code on digital privacy to rein in big tech companies. It was an often criticised but important organisation, a rare place where the world could talk with the world. Observing this year’s proceedings remotely however, the feeling was more that of a court where the urgency of global challenges felt overshadowed by the theatre of power and influence, of being on the right side of the king, while possibly many, deep inside, struggled to find the sense of it all.

In this dynamic of a global stage being taken over by autocratic performance, there were, happily, a few cracks. Those from where "the light gets in", as the song goes. The anonymous Davos resident who brought the torches up the mountain. EU Commission head Ursula von der Leyen showing signs of a new energy by announcing the "28th regime", a key element of a plan to re-ignite Europe’s economy. Or the fact that the most-viral talk of the week wasn’t Trump’s, but Mark Carney’s. The Prime Minister of Canada indicated a four-step way out of the toxic relationship that Western countries have with the United States. First, recognise that it’s not a crisis, but "a rupture of the world order, and the beginning of a brutal reality". Second, don’t submit: "there is a strong tendency for countries to accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety. It won’t". Third, lift the veil: "stop invoking the rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised". Fourth, come together: middle powers "are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that embodies our values, like respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of states". He got a standing ovation. A real, spontaneous one.

And then, a private dinner where US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was reportedly heckled and several people walked out, including president of the European Central Bank Christine Lagarde. She is rumoured to be the lead candidate for the job of president of the World Economic Forum when she steps down from the ECB at the end of 2027. I am not sure I know what to think of the fact that a twice-former-central-banker (Carney) and a current central banker (Lagarde) have come to embody the "resistance". But I like to think that both of them looked up at those torches burning on the mountain, and felt a quiet joy.

Bruno Giussani is a Swiss writer, author of the upcoming "Our Minds Under Siege: How to Avoid Being Manipulated in the Age of AI". He's the former global curator of the TED conferences, and the former head of digital strategy at the World Economic Forum.