Yet the boon from the tax changes may be short-lived, according to other VIPs gearing up to hear what Trump has to say when he addresses the forum at the end of the week, almost certainly to tout his “America First” stance on domestic and foreign policies.

“The tone that I sense here is that it is a bit of the world against the U.S. right now,” said Raymond Nolte, the New York-based chief investment officer of Skybridge Capital. "I don’t think the rest of the world, and to some degree some of America, know what to make of Trump or how to negotiate with him. He’s just such a wildcard that it makes trying to figure him out extremely difficult.”

The U.S. dropped out of the top 10 countries in Bloomberg’s Global Innovation Index for the first time this year. Meanwhile, public trust in the U.S. is collapsing, according to a global survey by public-relations firm Edelman, with the world’s largest economy placing dead last in a 28-country index of educated elites’ trust levels in institutions.

‘Jaws Dropped’
Trump, the first U.S. president to attend the summit since Bill Clinton in 2000, is a deeply polarizing figure among the Davos set, a strident critic of a trade-led global order that most genuinely believe is the surest route to international prosperity. The forum’s program is packed with earnest discussions of global challenges that Trump has ignored or visibly scorned, from encouraging collaboration to fight antibiotic-resistant infections to taking steps to slow climate change.

“When it was announced that President Trump was coming I think jaws dropped because this wasn’t seen as his crowd,” said David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group. “This is seen as the center of the globalization movement and he hasn’t been seen as the biggest supporter of globalization.”

Rubenstein said Trump could either use his Davos speech to double-down on his arguments that globalization has hurt Americans, or claim he’s been misinterpreted and that he actually supports internationalism.

Opposing Protectionism
One imminent test is the future of the North American Free Trade Agreement Trump is threatening to end. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used a late-day speech on Tuesday to announce the conclusion of talks on a new Pacific free trade deal that may help reduce Canada’s reliance on its southern neighbor and largest export market. Trump pulled the U.S. out of negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership immediately after taking office.  India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi also warned against protectionism and isolation during his Davos address.

NAFTA’s fate is one of dozens of uncertainties without which, some business leaders believe, a fundamentally strong global economy could be doing even better.

“Imagine what the economy could do without this,” KPMG International chairman Bill Thomas said in Davos. “What uncertainty does is, it makes people sit on their money.”

Lurking beneath the optimism among the Davos crowd is a palpable anxiety. Many attendees suggested the benign mood could be a misleading prelude to an economic crisis that could follow a truly destabilizing turn in world affairs or sudden pickup in interest rates.