Davos elite nod along as Trump delivers ultimatum

World leaders, the bosses of the world's biggest companies and a sprinkling of celebrities gathered in the small Swiss mountain town of Davos for the annual World Economic Forum this week.

On the other side of the Atlantic, President Donald Trump was starting his political comeback as the new US president.

"Nothing will stand in our way", he declared, as he vowed to end America's "decline".

Towards the end of the gathering, President Trump was beamed in straight from the White House webcam to deliver his message of world domination directly to the global elite.

While he charmed, almost seduced the audience with a credible picture of a booming US economy about to scale new technological heights, he simultaneously menaced with threats of tariffs to those who did not choose to shift their factories into the US.

Trillions of dollars of tariffs for the US Treasury for those businesses exporting into the US market from foreign factories.

"Your prerogative" he said, with a smile not out of place in a Godfather movie. And then for one of his own, the Bank of America chief Brian Moynihan, a remarkable public lashing accusing the lending giant of "debanking" many of his conservative supporters.

He awkwardly mumbled about sponsoring the World Cup.

In this first week of his second term, most people at Davos were nodding along, as they cannot think what else to do, just yet.

Two worlds colliding, as the 'America First' President was beamed in like a 30-foot interplanetary emperor, into the beating heart of the rules-based international economic order.

It is one thing suggesting that trade deficits are a problem with your domestic electorate. It is quite another to suggest at an internationalist forum that a G7 ally, Canada, become a state of your nation, eliciting gasps in the audience, and not just from Canadians.

The address was, by design, charming and offensive. There was carrot and stick for the rest of the world.

As delegates absorbed the mix of threats, invites and on occasion, praise, many appeared to be trying to decide just how much Trump might damage the global trading system, whilst assessing just how far ahead his America is getting in this tech driven AI boom.

Davos has been for this first week the alternative pole of the Trump second term.

There was a coherence to his agenda to use every means to drive down energy prices including by pressurising the Saudis on oil.

This he said would not just help to lower inflation, but also drain Russia's war coffers of oil dollars to help end the Ukraine war, by economic means. The ceasefire in the Middle East has already bought Trump some geopolitical credibility in these circles.

Christine Lagarde, David Miliband, and John Kerry shuffled into the hall. Various bank chiefs assembled on stage to praise and then lightly question the President.

The bottom line was this: Is president Trump serious about what sounded like campaign trail threats to the world economic system? The answer will reverberate for the next four years and beyond.

The answer sounded like a most definitely, yes. However, this does not mean it is going to work.

Some leading US CEOs told me that they were preparing for tit-for-tat retaliatory tariffs to be applied to their exports. Their assumption was that the President's love of a rising stock market would restrict his deployment of tariffs.

But no one really knows. In any event, much is up for grabs. He has already withdrawn from the World Health Organisation.

In the promenades the whisper was of his Project 2025 allies suggesting US withdrawal from the IMF and the World Bank too.

The rest of the world does have some counter leverage, once it decides to get back up after the Trump whirlwind.

The Canadians are now briefing on their retaliatory tariffs. In conversations with both the British business secretary and EU trade minister, Jonathan Reynolds and European Union trade chief, Maros Sefcovic, I detected a desire for calm dialogue.

Both are making similar arguments to try to dissuade Trump from wider tariffs.

Mr Reynolds told me that as the US does not have a goods trade deficit with the UK, there is no need for tariffs.

Mr Sefcovic said that the US should really think about its services surplus too.

But do they not consider the threats to G7 and Nato allies Canada and Denmark (over Greenland) to be straightforwardly unacceptable and as absurd as France claiming back Louisiana? Sefcovic did not want to whip anything up.

Diplomats are making lists of US goods that Europe can now purchase to demonstrate "wins" for President Trump, from arms to gas to the magnets in wind turbines.

It might make some sense for the rest of the G7 to work in unison on retaliation against the tariffs, in order to concentrate the minds of Congress, and the competing factions inside the court of Trump.

There is no sign of that happening.

The US tech supremacy story epitomised by the broligarchy – including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, Apple leader Tim Cook, and Google chief Sundar Pichar - had top seats at the inauguration this week.

While the US is streets ahead of Europe, its standing against China is more uncertain.

One of the talks of Davos was DeepSeek's high performing, much cheaper AI model, made in China. The prediction that the tech bros would be tearing strips out of each other in the court of Trump began to come true within hours, rather than months.

Meanwhile, while most, though not all, here in Davos sounded rather seduced by Trump's tech-fuelled optimism, some in Europe also see a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attract top researchers who may be rather less than enamoured with the direction of US politics. It was openly suggested by the European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde.

Others sought solace in the fact that Europe no longer has to face Biden's massive green subsidies, creating a more level playing field again for Europe.

President Trump is changing the terms of world trade. The response of the rest of the world to this is as important as what the Trump administration itself decides.

24 January: The headline on this story has been updated to better reflect its content.