Coming soon to Davos: A Trump stink bomb

[riversedge]

Coming soon to Davos: A Trump stink bomb

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/09/trump-davos-switzerland-economic-forum-331063

The president will take his populist show to the annual Swiss gathering of global financial, political and media elites.

By JOHN F. HARRIS and BEN WHITE

01/09/2018 06:54 PM EST

Updated 01/09/2018 07:35 PM EST

President Donald Trump will be the first sitting president since Bill Clinton in 2000 to attend the World Economic Forum. | Susan Walsh/AP Photo



The annual gathering of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, will be choking with the kind of people who disdain Donald Trump and genuinely regard his presidency as a menace to the planet. In other words: exactly the kind of party Trump loves to crash.

Lots of very rich people. Lots of media. Lots of fevered what-is-he-really-up-to speculation. At the psychological level, the appeal of Davos for Trump is obvious.

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What planners didn’t know was that some West Wing advisers were arguing that Davos would be the perfect venue for Trump to unleash an especially gassy stink bomb aimed at ideas — free trade deals, a more integrated global regulatory system, and all manner of liberal pieties cherished by global elites — he deplores.

One constant of Trump’s rise to power is his desire to command the attention, if not the approval, of the very establishment institutions he claims to be contemptuous of. No surprise that news of Trump’s Davos attendance was first leaked Tuesday morning to The New York Times, which Trump denounces and gives interviews to in seemingly equal measure.


Trump’s controversial closing ad of the 2016 campaign featured video of GOP boogeyman George Soros speaking at a WEF event and included Trump railing against a “global power structure” that was crushing the American worker.

In 2017, days before his inauguration, Trump and Trumpism — with his denunciation of free trade, immigration and international institutions — dominated the conversation at Davos. But the absence of actual Trumpites — with the exception of a wise-cracking Anthony Scaramucci and a media parade that followed him everywhere — was glaring.



.............................“I think it’s a brilliant move,” said Larry Kudlow, the conservative economist who could be Trump’s next National Economic Council director. “He can sell his economic growth policy on the world stage and maybe take some whacks at the World Bank or the IMF. Remember, he went to NATO and told them to pony up, and they did.”.............................................

Now Trump will be the first sitting president since Bill Clinton in 2000 to attend....................................

[dawg day]

1. What economic policy?

“He can sell his economic growth policy on the world stage and maybe take some whacks at the World Bank or the IMF. "

What economic policy? It's utterly incoherent-- cut taxes for the rich, treat corporations like people, unilaterally cut out trade treaties that took years of negotiation, give corporations incentives not to invest in workers....

His stupid fans in the US might think all that makes sense, but the Davos attendees aren't stupid. They know it's just standard GOP tax policy mixed with nonsense about trade, all done with maximum bluster.

They are going to be like all his friends, aides, and family-- "What an idiot!"

[Kingofalldems]

2. This will happen again:

[alarimer]

3. The people at Davos are a menace to the planet, or at least to people

People who actually work for a living, instead of accumulating wealth.

Trump has no coherent policy, true, but I wish media and other politicians would stop giving the rich fucks at Davos the time of day. Clearly taxes everywhere need to be much, much higher. That would solve pretty much all the problems the world has.

[louis-t]

4. Kudlow says he told NATO to "pony up and they did".

I wonder how true that is.