Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about US politics

and the Trump presidency, or as we journalists call it, the gift that keeps on giving.

I'm Freddie Gray. I'm deputy editor of the spectator. I'm joined today by Daniel W. Dresner,

who is Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and who also writes for the Washington Post.

And we're going to be talking about Donald Trump at Davos.

Daniel, we learned the day before yesterday that President Donald Trump will attend the Davos World Economic Forum.

And this was broken by the New York Times, and the immediate reaction was sort of sniggering an immediate sense that this was two worlds colliding.

Trump, the America first nationalist, protectionist, anti-elitist, drain the swamp president, going to see the most sort of elite, neoliberal

event you can imagine. But you said in a very interesting piece on The Washington Post that

you don't think necessarily he'll go down that badly. Can you explain what you're thinking?

Well, I think I'm, my explanation was relative to expectations. As you say, the sort of first instinct

everyone would have would be that this is going to go very, very badly. After all, as you say,

the the normal attendees at the World Economic Forum, you know, whatever you think neoliberalism is,

usually it starts with whoever attends Davos. And, you know, indeed,

in the United States, Samuel Huntington, when he wrote the book Clash Civilizations,

you know, set up as his straw man, something called Davos man. You know, the idea of someone who was

a true plutocrat who would go and really didn't think of themselves as a citizen of any

particular country and then would go to these kind of confabs and rub shoulders with other people.

That obviously sharply contrasts with Trump's sort of America first brand of populist nationalism.

And indeed, there's a scenario where you can see him going there and trying to make the case for this and acting in a generally boorish manner, as Trump has tended to do on the global stage.

So I don't mean to say that it's going to go swimmingly. But there are ways in which Davos actually works for Trump in that if there is anything that Trump craves,

it's celebrity and acceptance by elites. And my hunches is that at least on the surface,

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