PANIC over Trump presidency: World business leaders say a second term will have serious issues, scramble to put plans in place:

Donald Trump is thousands of miles away from the snowy gathering of global elites in Davos, Switzerland, but he’s the talk of the World Economic Forum taking place there. 

On the same night he won the Iowa caucus, the world’s top business and economic leaders gathered for the summit’s opening event, where they expressed their concern that a second Trump term would lead to the return of American isolationism and a threat to trade and climate policies around the world. 

‘You know, we’ve been there before, we survived it, so we’ll see what it means,’ 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.’ Trump last attended Davos in 2020, when he made a dramatic entrance by landing with a squadron of helicopters. 

But he was a popular topic of conversation for this year’s attendees.

Many at the gathering of leaders from business, governments, civil society, faith groups, academia and the arts wondered if the 2024 presidential contest in the United States would end up a repeat of the 2020 election and what the outcome would mean for the rest of the world. 

‘Every question I’ve gotten as I’ve walked up and down the [Davos] Promenade today is, ‘is he coming back?’,’ Tim Adams, president of the Institute of International Finance, told CNBC.

‘So, I think there is a lot of interest in that question and what does that mean, and who would be in the key positions,’ he added.

As president, Trump championed a series of tax cuts seen as a benefit to the wealthy and enacted international trade policies that hurt U.S. industry while simultaneously alienating allies. 

And several attendees at Davos echoed comments made Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, last week where, in an unusually candid interview, she said Trump’s re-election would be a ‘threat.’

‘If we are to draw lessons from history, looking at the way he ran the first four years of his mandate, it’s clearly a threat,’ she told French television.

‘Just look at the trade tariffs, the commitment to NATO, the fight against climate change. In these three areas alone in the past, American interests have not been aligned with those of Europe,’ she added.

Trump attended the World Economic Forum in Davos twice as president, where he pushed his ‘America first policy.’

Republican Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, a Trump ally, told Politico that the global elite ‘should be afraid’ of the former president. 

‘If Trump stands for anything, I think it’s the rejection of their ideology, of the material benefits that come from it,’ he said. 

Other business leaders expressed concern about how Trump would handle relations with China. The economic showdown between Washington and Beijing has become a red flag to the business world.

Trump started a trade war with China with a series of tariffs on imports. China retaliated with tariffs of their own. 

One of the reasons President Joe Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco last year was to show the business community the two sides could work together for the greater econonic good. 

‘The slight reengagement that we’re seeing through the Biden administration are an indication to me that the U.S. is looking to stabilize [relations with China],’ Bill Winters, CEO of Standard Chartered, told CNBC.

‘If Trump becomes president, we know that he’s a transactional president, and there’s probably a transaction in there someplace, that keeps the economy on an even keel, without fundamentally disrupting that relationship. But of course, we watch all the time, and we’re well aware that there could be either unintended consequences or accidents,’ Winters said.

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