Wednesday was the day of the opponents at the annual World Economic Forum gathering in Davos. Donald Trump and Argentina’s Javier Milei tore apart the WEF agenda.

One declared globalism officially failed, the other wielded an intellectual-ethical scalpel through the decayed body of the establishment.

Norwegian Børge Brende has been the chairman of the World Economic Forum since last year.

He took over after a heated internal personnel debate from the WEF’s founder, Klaus Schwab, who for decades dominated the agenda of this shadowy institution for political will-shaping.

Schwab did so with undeniable success.

The WEF has become an ideological melting pot of European politics, from which socialist concepts long proven costly in blood and failure continue to resurface—now repackaged as morally renewed, dressed in green.

Whether it’s the EU’s climate-socialist agenda, peculiar ideas like the 15-minute city to restrict individual mobility, or digital control currencies designed to make hidden capital controls palatable—the WEF has always been a source of centralist fantasies of political power.

Take the vision of the digital identity of the new global citizen, who no longer exists as an individual but as a managed data set—this too originates in Davos think tanks.

Every person would possess a centralized, supranational digital existence where financial behavior, health status, and political reliability are consolidated into a controllable unit. The culmination of the “transparent citizen,” the final chapter of individual dignity and freedom.

Mobility, nutrition, housing—all are turned into moral tests. The CO₂ footprint replaces personal judgment; deviation is social misconduct. Davos has grown in the haze of its control fetish into the symbol of a leadership claim by a detached pseudo-elite.

Hour of the Antagonists

Informal political organizations like the WEF live on media presence. Continuous coverage is their lifeblood, which makes inviting the most powerful political figures—like US President Donald Trump or South America’s rising star, Argentina’s Javier Milei—practically inevitable.

Brende, Schwab, and the roughly one thousand invited guests surely anticipated what the appearance of the two might bring. And they were not disappointed.

Trump, outside his MAGA orbit hardly known as a master orator of refined rhetoric, declared the World Economic Forum agenda officially failed in his own unmistakable way.

He mocked European energy policy, spoke openly about the continent’s self-destructive migration policies, and presented an economic record that made even seasoned technocrats sit up: 5.4 percent growth in the last quarter, full deregulation of the energy sector, and a radical downsizing of the federal bureaucracy by 250,000 employees.

These were blows to the heart of central planners and declared friends of the “big state.”

Heavy on main clauses and rich in imagery, Trump dismantled the Davosites’ fantasies of omnipotence one by one. Planning versus growth, moralism versus prosperity, control versus dynamism—every certainty was exposed like a warped political myth.

His ultimate checkmate came with the sober reminder of Europe’s total dependence on the American military apparatus. Those who cannot defend themselves, the unstated message implied, should be cautious in delivering moral lectures. Greenland salutes.

The outraged media response that followed proves one thing: he hit the mark. And, in essence, did nothing less than openly lay out the conditions of this system’s potential capitulation.

Milei Delivers an Ethical Bankruptcy

Where Trump brought a rhetorical sledgehammer, Milei immediately followed with the elegant intellectual foil.

The organizers had clearly hoped to tone down the disruption of their feel-good gathering by seating the two opponents consecutively. But the double act only amplified the effect—and the message.

Milei opened with a jarring statement: “Machiavelli is dead.” Its meaning, however, was unmistakable.

The politics of public manipulation and technocratic governance, which have become a guiding principle in EU Europe, do not lead to order but to their own crisis.

The state, Milei insisted, must be guided by moral principles and make individual liberty the starting point of political action. This was the maximum confrontation with the WEF agenda. The gauntlet had been thrown.

He pressed further. One hundred fifty million people, he alleged, had lost their lives in the name of socialism over the past century; the survivors lived in poverty.

Justice, he argued, belongs only to free-trade capitalism: voluntary exchange and the absolute respect for property rights, founded on meritocratic values. This is the recipe for a prosperous civilization.

These words carry weight. In two years, Milei literally turned the helm of his nation: he restored Argentina to growth, radically cut the bureaucracy, and brought inflation under control.

Who would have expected that intellectual rigor and ethical grounding could one day inhabit the presidency of a nation as significant as Argentina?

Milei also answered the crucial question of our time: How can the current cultural crisis be overcome? Only by returning to the sources, he diagnosed—Greek philosophy as the inspiration of thought, Roman law, republican principles, and above all Judeo-Christian values. Together, these civilizational achievements form the recipe for a Western comeback.

Milei did not miss an opportunity to deliver a late retort to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

A year ago, Merz had called Milei a politician who tramples his own people and promotes a divisive agenda, and continues to foster an anti-business climate. For Milei, however, entrepreneurs are precisely those who drive the innovation of a free-market economy. Politics must stop harassing those trying to build a better world.

In this light, Merz and his government are indeed a burden for anyone striving forward in life, living by values, and resisting the rhetorical trap of vulgar WEF-style socialism.

The Turning Point Has Arrived

Trump and Milei are merely the most visible representatives of an increasingly influential conservative turn. Even if the European press still portrays the American president as a deranged villain and destroyer of a socialist utopia, the message he and Milei deliver is gaining traction.

The cultural and economic crisis of our time is above all a crisis of statism and faith in the strong state. Its seductive arts inevitably lead to megalomania and scenarios of submission—with the civilizational fracture we see today as a consequence.

In Argentina and the United States, the repair work is already underway. The open question is no longer whether a course correction is possible, but when Europeans will follow the example of these two.

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Thomas Kolbe, born in 1978 in Neuss/Germany, is a graduate economist. For over 25 years, he has worked as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.