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| President Donald Trump on a large screen during his video address at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos on Jan. 23. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images) |
| A lot has happened in the chaotic first two weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term. My colleagues are keeping up with the barrage of executive orders, bombastic proclamations and occasional backtracks we’ve already seen out of the Trump White House, as it sets about imposing its far-reaching agenda. But no single spectacle seemed to encapsulate the mood of Trump’s return more than his virtual appearance a week ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Trump beamed into a giant plenary hall in the heart of the Swiss mountain town, where hundreds of world leaders and well-heeled corporate executives waited to hear from him. He heralded the “golden age” promised by his presidency and spouted other hyperbole about both the failings of his predecessors and the imminent glories of his new term. The audience — including a selection of hugely influential CEOs who asked sycophantic questions of Trump from the Davos stage — chortled and tittered during much of the address.
My colleague David Ignatius, who was also in the room, wrote that Trump spoke “almost like a 21st-century emperor announcing edicts to his newly conquered princes and satraps.” Here was an imperial president, backed, as he had been on Inauguration Day, by a phalanx of billionaires who were hedging their bets on his rule yielding them a rich dividend — or fearful that being on his wrong side may harm their bottom line. After Trump’s speech, I ran into Agnès Callamard, secretary general of human rights group Amnesty International, who was bemused by what she had just witnessed. She forecast a couple of global trends emerging from Trump’s first days back in office, including “an obedience to the great new chief over there” and the inevitable “copycat behaviors” he may inspire among leaders elsewhere. Trump’s hard-line on migration, skepticism of climate science and opposition to laws and regulations protecting minorities like the LGBT community all constitute “an attack on political rights,” Callamard told me, and “we’re going to see a multiplication of that throughout the world in an environment that is already full of authoritarian practices and authoritarian individuals.” Trump’s imperiousness is often on show in his rhetoric. In Davos, Trump said he would “demand” that central bankers bring down interest rates “immediately.” Never mind that Jordan and Egypt have refused to accept Gaza’s displaced population — “they will do it,” Trump insisted Thursday. Colombia is not just going to take back deported migrants, Trump warned during his recent spat with Bogotá, but it’s going to take them back and “like it.” The tone matches the hopes of Trump’s most zealous backers in right-wing U.S. circles. Prominent ideologues, including figures tapped for positions within the Trump administration, have written about the need for an “American Caesar,” a strongman, a quasi-monarch, to bend the political system to his will — even if that means running roughshod over the institutional norms and checks that are supposed to temper executive power in a democracy. To that end — despite his denials on the campaign trail — Trump appears to be enacting elements of the right-wing “Project 2025” plan to dismantle and reshape federal government, purge the bureaucracy of potentially obstreperous officials and positioning more loyalists over the levers of power. Trump is “much bolder in breaking” with the traditional consensus on economics and politics in the West, Isabella Weber, a German economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me. Compared to his predecessors, Trump is “unbound by orthodoxies,” Weber said, which makes policymaking “extremely unpredictable,” and “which carves out this massive space for the oligarchs.” To wit, Trump is being aided in his work by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who has had a direct hand in offering hundreds of thousands of government employees the opportunity to resign as part of a bid to shrink the federal workforce, as my colleagues detailed. And Musk is just one of a number of billionaires in Trump’s orbit. Trump’s populist-nationalist campaign pitch has given way to the wealthiest Cabinet in U.S. history, replete with former CEOs and ultrawealthy financiers who share Trump and Musk’s zeal for deregulation. There’s a word for what happens when a handful of extremely rich people exert disproportionate influence over government: oligarchy. In an interview with the Financial Times, Lina Khan, the outgoing head of the Federal Trade Commission, warned that, “in our democracy right now there is an open question” on whether “monopolists in extraordinarily powerful firms are going to be able to corrupt the political process and interfere with legitimate law enforcement.” And last week in Davos, the international advocacy group Oxfam charted an accelerating worldwide phenomenon: “Billionaire wealth has risen three times faster in 2024 than in 2023,” it noted in a report. “At least five trillionaires are now expected within a decade. Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty has barely changed since 1990. Inequality is out of control.” An oligarchic class in a host of societies is exercising ever more power. “This is not a story just of inequality. It’s a story about what’s going to happen to the future of our democracies,” Amitabh Behar, executive director of Oxfam International, told me, adding that even institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank “are now saying that these levels of inequalities are not sustainable. So what you’re looking at is serious political instability, breakdown of social cohesion and compromised democratic institutions.” In his farewell speech earlier this month, President Joe Biden explicitly warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” Biden was “not wrong,” wrote best-selling French economist Thomas Piketty. “The issue is that he has done little to oppose the oligarchic drift taking place both in his country and globally.” Piketty urged U.S. Democrats, social democrats in Europe and governments in the Global South and to pursue stiffer taxation of the ultrarich that would finance major investments in public infrastructure, health and education. The trend lines point in another direction. “The idea of oligarchy is very critical, because you are seeing many of these oligarchs have enormous access to power,” Behar told me, scanning the global landscape. “They have ownership of media. They’re backing big parties, pretty much buying elections [in some places], and then getting massive space to achieve policy designs in a way which ensures more profits to them.” | ||||||