Upon meeting for their annual Davos meeting, World Economic Forum (WEF) leaders admitted they “lost” to President Donald Trump.
“Trump has done something no person in the world has ever done. A dead man, a dead politician, has risen. Four years ago at Davos, he’s buried and dead politically. He has now returned,” political scientist Graham Allison said. “This is the greatest comeback in political history. And then, therefore, he thinks he can do anything.”
“We need to also factor in not only who’s won, which is Trump, but who’s lost, which is to say us,” Yale University Professor Walter Mead acknowledged. “The epitome of the ‘us’ who is losing here is Europe. That the European Union and, by and large, its member states, have misread the direction where events were going.”
“The causes that it is interested in; climate, human rights, some others, as well as the methods of diplomacy that it prefers, are simply being gradually kind of marginalized as something new — not necessarily something better — but something new, moves into the center.”
Several key leaders are missing the WEF’s 2025 meeting, including those from the United States, Canada, Japan, the UK, France, and Italy. Germany’s Olaf Scholz was the only leader of a G7 nation to attend in person.
WEF Founder Klaus Schwab said ahead of the meeting that Davos is “unique in bringing together close to 3,000 decision-makers from governments, business, and civil society at the beginning of the year to address the challenges of a world in deep transformation.”
“Despite divergent positions and great uncertainties, the Annual Meeting 2025 will foster a spirit of cooperation and constructive optimism with the objective of shaping the forthcoming Intelligent Age in a more sustainable and inclusive way,” he said.
Last year, BlackRock Vice Chairman Philipp Hildebrand said a second Trump presidency would be a “great concern” to the globalist agenda.
“Certainly, from a European perspective, from a kind of globalist, Atlanticist perspective, it’s of course a great concern,” he said during an interview with Bloomberg.
European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde similarly said that another Trump presidency is a “threat.”
