Davos: Donald Trump to address World Economic Forum
Donald Trump is set to address the World Economic Forum in Davos in his first major global speech to world leaders and business people.
The newly-reinaugurated US President will remotely address the economic conference at the ski resort in Switzerland at 4 pm UK time on Thursday.
It’s unknown what Trump will discuss in his address. Still, topics such as ending the Russia-Ukraine war, the potential for tariffs, war in the Middle East, and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) could be included.
Since his return to office on 20 January he has signed a flurry of executive orders, including withdrawing the US from the World Health Organisation and the Paris climate agreement.
Trump has also moved to clamp down on immigration into the US, expand energy production – in line with his mantra ‘drill, baby, drill’ – and pardon more than 1,500 of his supporters who were convicted over attacks on the US Capitol on 6 January, 2021.
He will make a speech and a planned question-and-answer session via video link at the annual event.
It comes as NATO chief Mark Rutte has urged world leaders to “step up, not scale back” their support for Ukraine, with a view to “change the trajectory of the war” and put the country in the best possible position for peace talks with Russia.
While Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO), told an event at Davos that there was a “lot of hyperventilation” over tariffs, adding: “We need to take a deep breath.”
Okonjo-Iweala argued that tariffs “are very easy to use…so they are often used for solve problems that are not the fault of trade”.
While the UK’s business and trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds told journalists at Davos that he “detected a very optimistic message” in Trump’s inauguration speech – and said he did not expect the UK to be hit by tariffs as we do not have a large trade deficit with the US.
Other speakers during the event, which runs from January 20-24, have included EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen, German chancellor Olaf Scholz, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, UN secretary-general António Guterres, Pope Francis, and Argentinian president Javier Milei.