The Observer view: business leaders must speak up on Donald Trump

There was a rumour that during Donald Trump’s speech in Davos last week the mobile networks were going to be shut down. It was fitting, in that it was both factually untrue and metaphorically accurate. Mobiles worked, but Trump’s appearance switched off everyone’s networks. People couldn’t seem to think or talk about anything else.

During his speech, the conference hall hummed with resentment and disbelief. But no one spoke up or shouted out, even as things that would normally have made front-page news went unremarked. He mentioned bombing Iran, but said nothing about the thousands of protesters who have been murdered there. He repeated the outrageous claim that when the US needs its western allies, they are not there, forgetting 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan. When he described Somalis as a “low IQ people”, many rushed afterwards to “contextualise” the remark by suggesting he was referring to the Somali pirates. The transcript is clear. He was surprised by the intelligence of the Somalis.

When Trump said he would not use force to get Greenland, there was relief in the room, in the markets and around the world. Nato wasn’t going to break up. It turned out he had come to deliver an angry climbdown. The weakness of the playground bully had been exposed – but so had the hypocrisy of Davos.

He was introduced by the second-most prominent American at the summit, Larry Fink, a billionaire many times over as head of the world’s largest fund manager. Last year, Fink took over running the World Economic Forum and made the invitation to Trump his priority, moving inclusion and climate down the agenda to accommodate him. Fink may genuinely see Davos as a place for thoughtful disagreement and intellectual inquiry, but this is the same fund manager who led the corporate world up the hill and down the other side on “purpose”, who saw the light and then switched it off on sustainability, and who promised to champion diversity but did not stand up for it in Trump’s second presidency.

His preamble to Trump’s speech exemplified the call that the CEO class has made in the Trump era, namely to suck up rather than speak up. It is not as if they are comfortable doing so. In private, leaders of the most powerful companies sweat about surrendering their values for the value of their businesses. They concoct arguments about the limits of the authority and expertise of business executives and then, unbidden, recall how Germany’s corporate leaders bent the knee to the Nazis.

It is true that this year Davos played host to a serious debate. The subject was the meaning of America First, with Trump on one side and Canada’s Mark Carney and France’s Emmanuel Macron on the other. But so far the boss class is keeping its head down. If that is what it wants, the contempt that many people feel for Davos will be justified.

When Carney spoke, he reminded Davos of the shopkeeper in Václav Havel’s essay, The Power of the Powerless, who puts a sign in his shop window every morning telling the workers of the world to unite. He does not believe in the sign but persists with the ritual because he “lives within a lie”. It is time, Carney said, “for companies and countries to take their signs down”.

He is right that the rules-based order in which middle powers, such as Canada and Britain, could rely on the US has fractured, probably beyond repair. He is right that they must take the world as it is, not as they wish it to be – and that corporations as well as governments have no choice but to take a stand: speak plainly, act pragmatically and build new alliances rather than hanker for old ones. The moral lesson of the past week is that when they do, they command respect – even from the playground bully.

Photograph by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images