In between concerned and urgent speeches from world leaders, CEOs attended receptions in Trump’s honor. They joked about the best ways to praise him. They minimized his authoritarian speech as “bizarre” and “wild.”
This isn’t normal in any sense of the word. I think what the CEOs really mean to suggest is that they are being pragmatic. CEOs and executives are willing to adapt to the abnormal to operate if it means higher profits.
As a young associate, I once observed that, for enough money, many highly paid partners and business executives would be willing to don a clown suit and juggle. That was not a commentary on their ability to adapt or redefine normal. It recognized that for many elites, the only thing that matters is money. Dignity could be sold, humiliation endured, as long as the price was right.
So, as executives peacock around Davos, shrugging off Trump’s threats and adapting to his madness, we need to be clear-eyed about what they are doing. They may not be traveling alone in laughably small cars, but they are willing clowns selling themselves and their dignity to Trump.
In fact, there is nothing normal about targeting political opponents. There is nothing normal about threatening free and fair elections. There is nothing normal about threatening and intimidating NATO allies. And it is simply shameful to act like it is normal.
I wish the business community had listened more closely to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech. He referred the audience to former Czech President Václav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless.”
In the essay, Havel asks how the Communist system sustained itself. The answer, it turns out, lies in the everyman. A shopkeeper places a sign in his window each morning: “Workers of the world, unite!” His neighbors do the same. They may not believe it, but they are complicit.
It is the participation of ordinary people that keeps the system alive. That, Carney explains to us, is what is happening now.
“Friends,” the Canadian Prime Minister urged, “it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.”
Carney is right.
But our situation is actually much worse. The CEOs at Davos are not small shopkeepers. They are not living day to day, paycheck to paycheck. They aren’t powerless, and they aren’t simply putting up signs.
No. What makes this so much worse is that the audience at Davos is rich beyond imagination. They have influence over the behavior of thousands or millions of people. Some of them are in the business of making the signs.
For the CEOs, adaptive normalcy isn’t about falling in line. It is the race to the front of it.
Beyond Carney’s speech, I was also pleased to see President Macron making pointed references to Trump’s threats to world order.
After having his texts leaked by Trump earlier in the week, Macron ripped into Trump’s tariff threat:
“Competition from the United States of America through trade agreements that undermine our export interests, demand maximum concessions and openly aim to weaken and subordinate Europe, combined with an endless accumulation of new tariffs that are fundamentally unacceptable — even more so when they are used as leverage against territorial sovereignty.”
He ended on a note directly aimed at Trump: “But we do prefer respect to bullies. We do prefer science to plotism, and we do prefer rule of law to brutality.”
Meanwhile, during an official dinner, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was met with a very tough crowd. The president of the European Central Bank walked out during his speech. Lutnick was heckled by world leaders. Even better, he was booed by former Vice President Al Gore.
Yet, while the European leaders, with their own unique histories of combating fascism, stood tall, the cowardly clowns practicing adaptive normalcy continue to kneel before Trump. That is the sad state of the United States as we head into only the second year of Trump's second term. We must refuse to adapt and continue to call this out as abnormal. No doublethink allowed.
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