The Davos Plutocrats Warm Up to Trump - "We Are All Adjusting to His Abnormal Behavior"

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/business/dealbook/donald-trump-davos.html

The Davos Plutocrats Warm Up to Trump
C.E.O.s have come to accept the president, in spite of his populist views and governance-by-Twitter style. Tax cuts and a record stock market speak volumes.
By Andrew Ross Sorkin
Jan. 20, 2020

DAVOS, Switzerland — The last time President Trump arrived at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, his trip was treated with deep skepticism, if not disdain, by the business and political leaders who gather once a year in this ski town in the Swiss Alps. It was 2018 and even with his newly enacted tax cuts, his populist, antiglobalist rhetoric and Twitter outbursts were more than enough to make the event’s collection of plutocrats uneasy.

This time is likely to be different.

With the stock market at record highs, two trade deals announced and the possibility that Mr. Trump may be in office for another four years, there is an increasing sense that he will be accepted, if not embraced (although some attendees may roll their eyes behind his back) when he arrives on Tuesday, even as he faces an impeachment trial.

As anathema as it may be to some participants, Mr. Trump may be the new Davos Man.

The Davos forum, marking its 50th year, has always sought to foster a sense of multilateral unity. But Mr. Trump, along with his counterpart in Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is seemingly moving the world into a tariff based, decoupled universe, based on bilateral negotiations and diplomacy by tweet.

To the surprise of many Davos regulars, the economic results have yet to prove as disastrous as they expected — and, at least in the short term, have seemingly proven to be quite positive. (The long-term effects, of course, are still unknown.)

Even Mr. Trump’s most ardent detractors acknowledge that an acceptance of the president is settling in among the Davos crowd.

“We are all adjusting to his abnormal behavior,” said the investor Anthony Scaramucci, Mr. Trump’s onetime spokesman turned enemy who has been a Davos regular for over a decade and hosts a wine tasting party that has become a hot ticket for the boldfaced names. “The economic strength helps their cognitive dissonance,” he said.