(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump is thousands of miles away from the Alpine Swiss town of Davos but talk of his possible return to the White House is on everyone's lips even before the annual shindig of the global elite has kicked off.
On Monday, in the subzero temperatures of Iowa, he's set to cement his status as the Republican frontrunner in the first GOP contest of the 2024 election. His crushing lead over rivals appears unsurmountable and polls show Trump and US President Joe Biden facing off and in a dead heat.
Last seen mingling with the Davos crowd in 2020, when he made a dramatic entrance by landing with a squadron of helicopters, Trump is the last US leader to have shown up at the World Economic Forum but has remained a popular topic of conversation for attendees ranging from CEOs, financiers and policymakers.
“You know, we've been there before, we survived it, so we'll see what it means,” BlackRock Inc. Vice Chairman Philipp Hildebrand said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “Certainly from a European perspective, from a kind of globalist, Atlanticist perspective, it's of course a great concern.”
The former Swiss National Bank president shared the assessment of European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, who last week said in plain language unusual for a central banker that another term of Trump would clearly be a threat.
Former US Vice President Al Gore, of course, is no stranger to political shocks having come within a whisker of becoming president himself almost a quarter of a century ago. These days he's better known for being a climate warrior but he shared some caveats about assuming Trump is an inevitability even as the Republican candidate.
“I don't think that it's a foregone conclusion,” he told Bloomberg Television in Davos. “I've been through the process, I've run four national campaigns over the years and seen it from that perspective. I've seen a lot of surprises over the years. Something tells me this may be a year of significant surprises. I hope it's the case because I don't want to see him re-nominated and re-elected.”
He even issued a warning about not overplaying the importance of the Iowa vote.
“I'm not sure they're as significant as some believe, he said. “There have been so many examples – last time in 2016 Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucus, and then it mattered not a whit. We've seen others win the Iowa caucus on the Republican side and then disappear.”
--With assistance from Laura Millan and Zoe Schneeweiss.
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