This year at Davos — where the globalist elite gathers to bask in its own superiority, indulge in the ultimate luxuries of privilege, and make plans for the rest of us — there's a big, orange poop in their punchbowl. And in their trembling apprehension of what President Trump's second term would mean for their gilded lifestyles, the world's ruling class is being remarkably candid.
In a Friday commentary, Reuters's Peter Thal Larsen asserts that "the spectre of a second Trump administration will loom over many of the panels, bilateral discussions and drinks parties during the week." He points out that "Trump’s return could revive tensions with the European Union," which is true, before positing this howler: "undermining the Biden administration’s efforts to lead allies in taking a tougher stance towards China, the world’s second largest economy."
I don't need to tell PJ Media readers how absurd the notion is that Biden is somehow tougher on China than Trump was. But the concern about elevated tensions with Europe under Trump is real.
Larsen concludes, "delegates gathering [this] week will find it hard to avoid discussing the possibility of a comeback. This time they are less likely to make the mistake of underestimating his chances of victory, nor the disruptive impact that will have on the world." In fact, the only world that Trump 47 will disrupt is the cozy, rarified world of pampered globalists who don't have the same ability to dazzle Trump with their pedigrees as they have with the Biden-Kerry-Obama variety.
Bloomberg brings us direct quotes from some of the assembled nobility in a Monday report titled "Davos Elite Size Up the Global Risks of Another Trump Presidency." One of them stood out:
"You know, we've been there before, we survived it, so we’ll see what it means,” BlackRock Inc. Vice Chairman Philipp Hildebrand said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “Certainly from a European perspective, from a kind of globalist, Atlanticist perspective, it’s of course a great concern.”
Raising eyebrows even higher was the hyperbole uttered by European Central Bank (ECB) President Christine Lagarde in a French TV interview last week. Lagarde, who is naturally in Davos this week, was asked about a potential second Trump term.
“If we are to draw lessons from history, meaning the way he ran the first four years of his mandate, it’s clearly a threat,” said Lagarde. "Just look at the trade tariffs, just look at the commitment to NATO service, just look at the fight against climate change,” she added. “If only in these three areas in the past, American interests have not been aligned with European interests."
She's right, of course: normal Americans are uninterested in impoverishing ourselves to pay for Europe's pieties.
Lagarde added hopefully that she doubts that Trump’s reelection would be enough to end American support of the war on the EU's doorstep, insisting that “there are a number of members of the U.S. Congress who are deeply hostile to the atrocious war that Russia has waged against Ukraine and who will continue to finance and support Ukraine.”
In a Sunday report called "Europe wants to Trump-proof in case of a second term. But that is not an easy task," CNN really lays bare the true nature of EU snobs' worries. The piece begins with EU internal market chief Thierry Breton spreading a rumor at a European Parliament event last week. Breton claimed that in 2020, Trump told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that “if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.”
Multiple EU officials and diplomats noted to CNN that his sudden recollection came at a particularly sensitive time, as the EU attempts to build its own defense capabilities outside of the US-led NATO alliance. It is no secret that ammunition stocks across NATO member states have become depleted because of Western military support for Ukraine.
Whether Trump actually made these comments or not is largely immaterial to European officials. The former president’s views on America’s historic role in European security are well known. During his presidency, Trump regularly talked about defunding NATO while also complimenting authoritarian leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who are considered adversaries of the very same military alliance.
The reminder that Trump holds this view and the fact that he might soon return to the White House do, however, cause real concern and anguish in Brussels.
Partly, because his beliefs are rooted in the uncomfortable truth that European nations have underfunded their militaries for decades on the assumption that war was unlikely and that if the worst were to happen, the US would rush to their aid.
However naive that might sound, Trump trashed that assumption. And his hostility toward the Ukraine war effort has an impact even now, playing into the Republican Party’s reluctance to pass more US funding for Ukraine.
“When Trump came along it woke us up to the fact that the US might not always act in European interest, especially if it goes against American interest,” a senior EU diplomat told CNN. “It sounds naive saying it out loud, but that was the assumption a lot people made.”
The trouble, you see, is that the precious pantywaists of Europe have long been play-acting as some sort of highly evolved, post-violence civilization. Their whole gig was enabled by the prosperity and security they've been able to leach off their brash American cousins. But the truth is that the world will always have its share of violent people, and now the Russian wolf is snarling outside the EU's door.
And while I doubt that President Trump would sit by while Russia rampaged over the Continent, Europeans seem to think he would. I'm sure the memory of Biden's Afghanistan bugout is still fresh in their subconscious, too.
Related: Ukraine to Be 'De Facto Partitioned' in 2024, Says Top Prognosticator
At any rate, reality is setting in (emphasis added):
Another European diplomat said Brussels cannot get distracted by Trump as it did the first time around, nor can it pay too much attention if Trump raises the prospect of ending US support for Ukraine. “If he starts talking about that, there’s not much we can really do. We just need to be mature and carry on because however this war ends, it’s Europe that will bear the consequences, not America.”
The world was quieter, more stable, and more prosperous when Trump was president. Today, the world is a scary, destabilized place with war breaking out in new locations periodically. Even the pantywaists of Davos can see that, even if they still can't bring themselves to admit why.
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