Government Shutdown Means Trump May Not Attend World Economic Forum In Davos

With Congress still unable to reach a budget agreement and re-open the federal government, Sunday night, President Donald Trump’s plans to be the first U.S. president in nearly two decades to attend the World Economic Forum were cast into doubt.

On Saturday, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said Trump was looking at his attendance at the annual event held in Davos, Switzerland, on a “day-by-day basis.”

Trump’s plans of a weekend trip to his resort in Florida were also cancelled. “The president will not be going to Florida now and we’re taking Davos, both from the president’s perspective and the Cabinet perspective, on a day by day basis,” Mulvaney said, Reuters reported.

Trump was scheduled to host a one year anniversary of his inauguration at his private Mar-a-Lago club, with tickets costing $100,000 per couple, the proceeds of which will be directed toward the Trump re-election campaign and the Republic National Committee (RNC), CNBC reported. According to a report by CNN, RNC staffers were setting up cameras at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday so that the president could address the guests via satellite.

The World Economic Forum will begin Tuesday and will run through till Friday, and so Trump could still make it later in the week if the shutdown ends in time, according to two senior administration officials, Politico reported Sunday.

The Senate has another vote scheduled for noon Monday, but it is not certain that the budget gets passed and the government re-opened.

Trump planned to send a serious contingent to the Alpine town, consisting of no less than eight Cabinet-level delegates and at least seven other top-ranking officials, according to the Washington Post. The last time a U.S. president graced the occasion was when former president Bill Clinton attended it in 2000.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who is leading the delegation, was scheduled to leave for Davos on Monday ahead of the president’s arrival but had to reconsider as the shutdown persisted past Sunday night.

The delegation of heavyweights includes Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, senior adviser Jared Kushner, top counterterrorism and homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert, USAID Administrator Mark Green, and FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb.

Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn are also scheduled to join Trump if indeed he is able to make it.

Politico quoted a senior administration official as saying: “It would not look very good to have a bunch of senior people in Switzerland if the government is still shut down.”

Experts have found the decision to send top officials surprising if not confusing. The conference tends to focus on a “center-left push for more international engagement on trade, climate change, refugees and other pressing, cross-border concerns,” reported Washington Post, in sharp contrast to Trump pledging to champion the “forgotten men and women” during his inaugural address approximately a year ago.

“It’s confusing,” said Vali Nasr, dean of Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. “Here you have a populist president who stands in opposition to everything Davos stands for. It’s not easily understood why he’s going. Is it just perennial vanity because he’s heard over the years it’s where the billionaires hang out? Or is it because there’s a larger economic, political, and ideological message at play?”

Nasr, referring to former president Barack Obama’s decision to decline attending the event (Nasr served in the Obama administration as senior adviser to U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke), said, “It was understood that he didn’t want to be associated too closely with the 1 percent.”

“I don’t think it’s a hangout for globalists,” Mnuchin, defending the decision, told reporters last week. “I think the idea is that the economic team will go over and talk about the America First economic strategy.”