Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Trump Is Helping To Make Elites Great Again

In Davos, the U.S. president will serve as a good backdrop for the appearances of more successful leaders.

January 16, 2018 at 7:00 AM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Triump of triviality.
Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg

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This article is part of the January 22, 2018 issue of businessweek.

There is no contradiction between President Donald Trump's decision this year to visit the World Economic Forum in Davos -- that ultimate congregation of elites -- and his populist politics. Rather, everything Trump has done so far promotes a slogan JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon coined half-facetiously at last year's Davos: "Make elites great again!" (#MEGA).

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin defended Trump's trip by saying he didn't think Davos was "a hangout for globalists." He needn't have bothered: Davos is a hangout for everybody who's anybody. Even the Russian communists didn't mind when their leader, Gennady Zyuganov, came in 1996 when it appeared he was about to beat Boris Yeltsin for the presidency. Davos is a stage on which any message, including an anti-globalist one, can reach the right ears. Not going simply means that someone else gets to deliver his message instead. Last year, when Trump didn't go, Chinese President Xi Jinping stole the show when he made the case for free trade, which Trump would have countered.