DAVOS, Switzerland — Donald Trump is coming back to Davos. This time, virtually.
The freshly reinaugurated U.S. president is to speak Thursday to an international audience for the first time after returning to the White House three days earlier, with a speech and question-and-answer by video conference at the World Economic Forum’s annual event.
The fourth day of the annual gathering also has featured Javier Milei, the brash Argentine president, and Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who became interim leader of Bangladesh after the longtime president was driven from power during a public uprising.
Business and tech whizzes will get their turns too. Dario Amodei of Anthropic, maker of artificial intelligence model Claude, and chief AI scientist Yann LeCun of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta will tackle the future of technology.
EU chief Ursula von der Leyen will take up energy transition with the head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol. A day earlier, a small group of pro-environment demonstrators staged a rally in which one placard read “Sun Baby Sun” — a retort in favor of solar power to Trump’s call for the United States to “drill, baby, drill” fossil fuels earlier this week.
Here’s a look at some of the main events Thursday in Davos:
Trump is no stranger to the gathering of CEOs, startup visionaries, government leaders, world-class academics and other elites who meet in the snowy Swiss town of Davos each January. He came twice during his first term.
His barrage of executive orders including calling for a U.S. pullout from the Paris climate deal, creating a new agency to collect tariffs and a pause in a TikTok ban have fed the chatter in the Davos Congress Center corridors.
His promotion of a business joint venture that could invest up to $500 billion in infrastructure tied to AI has drawn plaudits from tech-oriented executives in Davos, even if Trump ally and multibillionaire Elon Musk — who is not on hand — scoffed on his X social media platform that the partners “ don’t actually have the money.”
Trump also drew praise from the U.N. chief.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, during a question-and-answer session after his speech a day earlier that focused on the threats of global warming and ungoverned AI, credited Trump’s efforts before the inauguration to help win a ceasefire in Gaza.
“The negotiations were dragging, dragging, dragging. And then, all of a sudden, it happened,” Guterres said as he also praised efforts by Qatar and Turkey. “I think there was a large contribution of robust diplomacy of — at the time — the president-elect of the United States.”
Milei launched a diatribe against what he called the ills of “wokeism” and described a global struggle between libertarians — like him — and left-wing progressives. He slammed social welfare, feminism, identity politics and the fight against climate change.
“I have come here to tell you that while our battle is not won, there is now hope that our moral duty has been reborn as well as our historic responsibility to dismantle the ideological structure of this sick wokeism,” Milei said.
Trump and Musk are among leaders forming an alliance “of all the nations that want to be free,” he said.
“The common denominator for the countries that are failing is the mental virus of woke ideology,” he said. “It is the great pandemic of our time that needs to be cured. It is the cancer that must be cut out.”
In a message read by his envoy to Davos, Pope Francis praised technological advancements but warned about the dangers AI could pose to “human dignity and fraternity.”
“When used correctly, AI assists the human person in fulfilling his or her vocation in freedom and responsibility,” Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana said, reading the message.
“AI must be ordered to the human person and become part of efforts to achieve greater justice, more extensive fraternity, and a more humane order of social relations, which are more valuable than advances in the technical field,” he added.
The pontiff also expressed concerns about AI’s effect “on the growing crisis of truth in the public forum,” Turkson said.
Anxiety in Europe has grown that Trump might seek to quickly end Russia’s war in Ukraine through talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin — on terms that might be unfavorable to Kyiv.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, speaking at a breakfast on the sidelines of the forum hosted by Ukrainian tycoon Victor Pinchuk, urged Ukraine’s Western backers to keep up their support nearly three years into the war.
“If we got a bad deal, it would only mean that we will see the president of Russia high-fiving with the leaders from North Korea, Iran and China and we cannot accept that,” Rutte said. “That would be geopolitically a big, big mistake.”
Richard Grenell, Trump’s nominee as envoy for special missions, said by video from Los Angeles that Trump faced “a terrible mess” and “not a lot of great choices” in efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war.
“President Trump is somebody who has a credible threat and has already made clear that he’s going to pressure both sides to end this. He’s focused on trying to stop the killing,” the envoy-designate said.
Putting more pressure on Putin — economic or military — remained a “legitimate option” for Trump, Grenell said.
“I would say just give President Trump a little time,” he said.
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Associated Press writer Lorne Cook in Brussels and Joseph Wilson in Barcelona, Spain, contributed to this report.
