Donald Trump is thousands of miles away from the Alpine Swiss town of Davos but talk of his possible return to the White House is on everyone’s lips even before the annual shindig of the global elite has kicked off.
On Monday, in the subzero temperatures of Iowa, he’s set to cement his status as the Republican frontrunner in the first GOP contest of the 2024 election. His crushing lead over rivals appears unsurmountable and polls show Trump and U.S. President Joe Biden facing off and in a dead heat.
Last seen mingling with the Davos crowd in 2020, when he made a dramatic entrance by landing with a squadron of helicopters, Trump is the last U.S. leader to have shown up at the World Economic Forum but has remained a popular topic of conversation for attendees ranging from CEOs, financiers and policymakers. “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.
The former Swiss National Bank president shared the assessment of European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, who last week said in plain language unusual for a central banker that another term of Trump would clearly be a threat. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, of course, is no stranger to political shocks having come within a whisker of becoming president himself almost a quarter of a century ago. These days he’s better known for being a climate warrior but he shared some caveats about assuming Trump is an inevitability even as the Republican candidate.
“I don’t think that it’s a foregone conclusion,” he told Bloomberg Television in Davos. “I’ve seen a lot of surprises over the years. Something tells me this may be a year of significant surprises. I hope it’s the case because I don’t want to see him re-nominated and re-elected.”