“Yes, I think Donald Trump has delivered on polarization,” said Deputy Prime Minister of Belgium Alexander De Croo during the panel, which was hosted by the World Economic Forum. | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images Davos panel: Trump's record on populist promises 'quite poor'

President Donald Trump’s combative personal style has allowed him to retain firm grasp of the populist political movement he rode to power a year ago, but he’s delivered scant results to his own supporters, according to world leaders and political scientists on a panel Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

With the U.S. president arriving at the annual gathering of the world’s wealthy elite later this week, Trump dominated the conversation among business, intellectual and political leaders for a second straight year.


This time, however, a year’s record in office suggests that Trump’s nationalist and anti-establishment rhetoric is less consequential than many Davos elites previously believed. He speaks to the grievances of his supporters, these observers said, but his policies — including a tax overhaul with benefits skewed toward wealthy Americans — have not addressed more enduring problems like rising inequality.

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“Yes, I think Donald Trump has delivered on polarization,” said Alexander De Croo, deputy prime minister of Belgium, during the panel, which was hosted by the World Economic Forum in partnership with POLITICO. “But on achieving something of the things he has said? I think the result is actually…quite poor.”

Jan-Werner Müller, a politics professor at Princeton University, agreed. He said Trump’s 2016 presidential victory related more to exploiting divisions on race and immigration — a deeply polarizing topic that recently led to a brief U.S. government shutdown — than to a surge of interest in populist policies.

“I don’t believe that there really is a ‘Trumpist’ movement in the U.S,” Müller said.

De Croo said political and societal polarization has created opportunities for countries like Russia to sway political leanings across the globe and shape policies in the U.S. and Europe.

U.S. intelligence agencies released a report last year concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a campaign of interference in the 2016 election. Russia has been also been accused of meddling in the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union, in the Catalan independence movement in Spain, and in elections in Hungary, Austria and elsewhere.

“Russian influence in the Brexit election, in what is happening in Catalonia, in what is happening in Hungary, it’s a reality,” De Croo said. “A part of the polarization we see is being pushed from the outside, and we should stop the naiveness that we have in the way that geopolitics is being played today.”

