One by one, world leaders in Davos fall in line in Trump era

Flavia Krause-Jackson, Bloomberg News on Jan 23, 2025

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He’s not showing up in person, and his video address will come as the World Economic Forum is already winding down. But Donald Trump is still what everyone wants to talk about in Davos.

Fans like Argentine President Javier Milei are celebrating. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy is looking to his new U.S. counterpart with hope. Trump targets like German Chancellor Olaf Scholz are keeping their heads down.

There’s barely a conversation in this Swiss mountain resort that doesn’t feature an assessment of the new president’s plans.

“If you fail to understand the playing field that Trump is playing on, it will be hard to understand his vision,” Milei told Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait on Wednesday in Bloomberg House. “The guidelines he is putting forward will create a much better world.”

A libertarian purist and the first foreign leader to see Trump after his election victory, Milei sees no conflict between his free-trade views and Trump’s love for tariffs. “It’s not that he is a protectionist, but he knows the role the U.S. has in the world and consequently its commercial policy is part of its geopolitical strategy,” Milei said.

Other leaders weren’t quite so openly enthusiastic, but they signaled they’re ready to play by Trump’s rules.

“Listen to what President Trump has to say and act accordingly,” Finnish President Alexander Stubb said in an interview. “A country like Finland will certainly do that.”

Some were more playful. “If playing golf can help bring benefits to my country and my people, then I can play golf all day long,” said Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, eliciting chuckles from the audience.

A lot has changed in the course of a year. Last January, when Bloomberg Television’s Francine Lacqua asked European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde about the prospect of Trump reclaiming the Oval Office, she quipped that she needed another cup of coffee before answering the question.

The audience back then laughed. But no one is laughing now.

A chorus of leaders from the euro area this week cast aside past criticism in favor of the play-nice hymnal.

“We have to engage in a constructive approach in our relations with the new administration,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Bloomberg TV.

Last year, Mark Rutte attended the Davos gathering as Dutch prime minister while angling for his current job as secretary general of NATO, praising Trump for pushing Europeans to step up defense spending. That view — somewhat controversial then — is now widely accepted.

“In the end that Trump is starting the debate is good and he will always do it in his own way,” Rutte said in a BTV interview Thursday. “But that’s OK because that makes it possible for you to come to an agreement.”

The leader of one of the alliance’s newest members, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, chose his words carefully. “Politics is run in a different way in the United States compared to European countries,” he told Bloomberg TV on Wednesday.

Even leaders who’d found themselves targeted by Elon Musk, whose massive financial and social-media support for Trump helped earn him a spot in the president’s inner circle, tried to be polite.

Scholz answered a question on Musk’s increasingly overt support of the far right in Germany without mentioning the world’s richest man by name: “We have the freedom of speech in Europe — and in Germany, everyone can say what he wants even if he is a billionaire,” the German leader said.

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves laughed off Musk’s “trolling,” even as center-left governments such as hers are on the backfoot with Trump and trying to figure out whether to ignore or engage with Musk.

Attendees this week wondered whether Trump, who in 2018 landed in Davos by helicopter, might just surprise them in person. Poland’s outgoing president, Andrzej Duda, perked up at the prospect.

Trump “always thinks out of the box,” he said in an Bloomberg Television interview.

China — apart from handing out orange stuffed snake toys to celebrate its New Year — was keeping a fairly low profile, contrasting with the more overt showiness of the Gulf countries along the promenade.

“We don’t like to mix relationships when it comes to these issues,” Qatari Finance Minister Ali Ahmed Al-Kuwari said when asked about U.S.-China relations, making clear there was no picking of sides. “I understand the U.S. motives and moves but I think tariffs is a two-sided weapon.”

Ukraine’s Zelenskyy needs arms of a different kind for his war against Russia’s invasion. When it came to the prospect of a peacekeeping force if a truce were ever reached, he was blunt about Europe’s limitations.

“It can’t be without the United States,” he told Bloomberg in an interview. “Even if some European friends think it can be, no it can’t be. Nobody will risk without the United States.”

—With assistance from Alessandra Migliaccio, Cagan Koc, Manuela Tobias, Zoe Schneeweiss, Daryna Krasnolutska, Rebecca Choong Wilkins, Jenny Leonard and Andrea Palasciano.