Trump and Milei are leading dissidents inside the gates.

I’ ve never been to the Davos Conference, the annual January meeting of the world’s elite in Switzerland that’s run by the globalist World Economic Forum. But, to catch the shifting currents of debate, I’ve made an effort after each meeting to interview some of the corporate CEOs, hedge fund billionaires, left-leaning members of parliaments, and the heads of nonprofit do-good groups and intellectuals who make up so much of the Davos crowd.

Normally, Davos is a hotbed of planners and self-congratulatory humanitarians who dream up utopian schemes that then can be imposed from the top down by governments.

The elites of Davos “have a habit of believing things ordinary people instinctively find ridiculous,” says Matt Taibbi, a former contributing editor of Rolling Stone who has broken with the loony Left. “Their ‘experts’ even gather in places like Davos to concoct Swiftian parodies of upper-class condescension, like the World Economic Forum’s amazing ‘Let them eat bugs!’ plan.”

But the mood at Davos this year appeared to be different.

First, the normal parade of attending world leaders was smaller. Xi Jinping of China, Indian President Narendra Modi, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer were conspicuously absent. Only Olaf Scholz, Germany’s socialist chancellor, likely to be replaced after elections this month, reported to his Davos post.

This year “almost everyone at Davos is long U.S., short EU,” marvels the well-known Stanford University historian Niall Ferguson. “The new Davos consensus is that Europe cannot get its economic act together and never will, whereas America is rocking and rolling.”

The leaders generating buzz at Davos were Argentine President Javier Milei and Donald Trump. Trump addressed a packed Davos audience only three days after taking office. Speaking via video, he told the delegates that he was bringing “a revolution of common sense” to the world, warned them that tariffs on the European Union were coming if it refused to make trade concessions and boost its own military spending. As Business Insider reported, “the audience went from laughter to silence in seconds.”

As much as Trump’s blunt, campaign-style address may have rubbed Davos Man and Woman the wrong way, many conceded that he had a point. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte admitted at a breakfast meeting that Trump made fair points about European countries failing to meet their military obligations. “He is right of course, that the problem is not the U.S. and the problem is Europe,” Rutte said. He credited Trump for an improvement:

Thanks partly also to [Trump] and maybe to a large extent, we have seen this upturn in spending in NATO on the European side. He felt that basically the U.S was getting a bad deal and that Europe basically was funding its social model, its health care system, its pension system [while] we’re underfunding in defense.

Javier Milei, the fiery libertarian leader, also found a respectful audience at Davos, Last year, in his first visit, Milei was treated as an oddity on the world stage, with his message of liberty and anti-wokism. This year, Børge Brende, the president and CEO of the Davos meeting, praised Argentina for its “remarkable transformation” and called for the audience to give Milei an ovation.

Milei’s message was that the statist script of the last 40 years has run out: “I say to all global leaders, it is time to break free of the script . . . and that we make the West great again!”

He even cited Atlas Shrugged, the novel by Ayn Rand, and said that its plot was now a reality in many countries as the political class has become both a referee and an interested party in the redistribution of wealth.

Milei was effusive in discussing the changes President Trump and his team are making. “My advice would be for them to go all the way, to push it to the very limit, and do not give up,” he told podcaster Lex Friedman in November. “Do not let down their guard.”

Davos had better get used to more of that kind of stern talk. Before Davos convenes again next January, Canada will likely have replaced globalist Justin Trudeau with Pierre Poilievre, leader of the opposition Conservative Party. His platform is simple, even verging on Trumpian: “Make Canada the freest country on Earth.”

If elected, Poilievre may show up at Davos next year, but don’t expect him to have an entourage. He has said, “I will ban all my ministers from getting involved in the World Economic Forum, which is run by globalist Klaus Schwab” (of “The Great Reset” fame). He bluntly warned: “If any of my ministers want to go to that big, fancy conference of billionaires with the World Economic Forum in Davos . . . they better make it a one-way ticket because they won’t be back in the Cabinet.”

With Davos increasingly becoming a tarnished brand and a place where fewer “cool kids” on the international stage hang out, you know the political zeitgeist is shifting away from its priorities.