Running as a populist, Trump excoriated Wall Street denizens like Goldman Sachs as enemies of the people. Last week he attended the annual World Economic Forum, known familiarly as Davos. What in the name of all that is holy was our “man of the people” doing in the belly of the beast?

Well, it turns out that scorn for Wall Street and the money power was just campaign rhetoric. His ostensible purpose was to make the case to the global economic elite that America was open for business thanks to him, and to beg them to bring jobs and investments to our shores.

But these green eyeshade guys surely knew that the rest of the world actually grew faster than America last year, and that this president was an unreliable partner with policies that were bad for business. In fact, Trump may have advertised his appearance in Davos as just business, but, like the Corleones’ business transactions, it was also deeply personal.

Trump made it from Queens to a gaudy fool’s gold tower in Manhattan, but he has never gained respect from the real movers and shakers. He was never an invitee to Davos, like the heads of global businesses like Google, Pfizer, BP, Alibaba, Siemens, P&G, or of immense philanthropies like the Wellcome Trust and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Trump’s mom and pop real estate business was not in their league. He was, of course, intimately familiar with the money shufflers who make up a majority of Davos members – Barclays, UBS, Swiss RE, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman. But not as an equal, as a supplicant. They own, he owes.

To them he had to go, hat in hand, to try to build his empire, and when he faltered and fell into one bankruptcy after another they turned off the spigot and forced him into the hands of shadier lenders, including the Russian oligarchs who may come back to haunt him.

Now, even though he is president, and has provided these contemptuous creditors with a huge windfall in the form of corporate and personal tax cuts as well as favored treatment for hedge funds, are they grateful? No. Invited speakers included such heads of state as Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Narendra Modi, but Trump was forced to crash the party. He was not formally invited.

Trump was shunned, in part, because Davos is a PR stunt to burnish the image of pirates and Trump seemed sure to lower the tone, having never learned put a respectable face on his crass pursuit of wealth and notoriety. But also, because part of the agenda at Davos is a discussion of serious policy issues that might affect the future economic well-being of its attendees.

This year, the topics included climate change and threats to the world’s food supply, a worrying popular backlash against globalism and income inequality, AI, robotics and job loss, and mass migration. Clearly, they felt Trump would have had nothing constructive to contribute at Davos to such discussions, or any interest in learning from them.

And he tacitly agreed. He was only interested in forcing people who scorned him in the past to acknowledge his present puissance. The same yearning for respect, if not respectability, caused him to put so many billionaires bigger than himself in his cabinet. So, having claimed to have made America Great Again, he got on his helicopter and flapped away.

No doubt one of the topics behind the scenes at Davos after he left was how big a threat Trump poses to the world order that Davos seeks. Those gathered, after all, actually constitute one of those malign, alien, secret societies that isolationist conservatives always imagine are plotting to rule the world in ways inimical to heartland America.

But the people at Davos aren’t just imaginary spooks like SPECTRE, the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, or the Elders of Zion. They do rule the world, and it’s no secret. They have immense power, and they have various historical antecedents.

The Medici began as mere moneylenders, but they soon ruled Florence and went from lending to Popes to being Popes. The Rothschilds’ money was sufficient to decide which side in European wars would prevail, and the United States Government once had to lean on J.P Morgan to stay solvent.

The corporate elite today, as always, seeks what’s good for itself. Michael Pye in “The Edge of the World,” describes a precursor, the Hanseatic League of the Late Middle Ages. It was made up of seagoing, trading merchants from as many as 200 towns and cities around the Baltic and the North Seas.

“It was too loose a model for a nation or a true confederation. What makes the Hansa seem modern is something quite different. It is the abstract idea of trade, business, money as a profession and a force without roots in the world or responsibilities, ready to go anywhere in pursuit of profit and deals…Money rules.”

The Hansa were not above rigging markets, engineering trade monopolies, controlling prices, scuttling competitors and starving ungrateful customers into submission. On the surface that sounds like Trump, but the modern Hansa of Davos proceeds in a much more silent, subtle and hidden way to manage markets, trade and earn profits. They do not seek the limelight, but shun it.

As the crash of 2008 approached, a Goldman may have been enthusiastically touting dangerous credit instruments to its customers while simultaneously selling them short for its own profit, but it didn’t advertise this duplicity. And it didn’t seek ruin, but prosperity. The bank’s motto is to be “long term greedy.”

And there the Davos crowd parts company with a penny ante buccaneer like Trump. They take the long view, he the short. He ran by appealing to prejudice, racism, anti-semitism, misogyny, a distrust of science, a refusal to believe in climate change, nostalgia for the past, fear of the future, social and economic divisiveness. He won by playing on fears, and promising the impossible.

The Davos illuminati seek to minimize carelessness, unpredictability, disorder, volatility, disruption and division. Stoking populist anger is bad for business and possibly fatal for elites. They prefer order, rationality, safety and calculation, a low profile and big payoffs. Their time horizon is measured in decades or centuries, Trump’s gratifications must be instant.

Unlike the Medici, Davos attendees don’t become popes or presidents. On occasion, they may buy a family member a Senate seat, but generally they rent their public servants. So, they will tolerate Trump as long as he provides a return on investment, but ruthlessly short him the moment he proves unprofitable.