US President Donald Trump is heading to Davos to attend the World Economic Forum, a gathering of political and business elites that Trump explicitly said ran counter to his "America First" world view.

When he was running for president over a year ago,  Trump promoted a stridently anti-globalist and anti-elitist message. 

Accepting his party’s nomination to run for president in July 2016, he told crowds that “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo.”

His recently-ousted adviser Steve Bannon specifically called out those in politics who he described as the “elites in Davos," a privileged club that "dictated" the working men and women in the world.

But now, Trump is ready to breathe in the rarefied mountain air of the Swiss ski resort. 

Speaking at a lunchtime meeting of the Economic Club of Washington, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who is accompanying the president, claimed he “didn’t realize it was the global elite”, saying this trip was no different from global gatherings like the G20 or the Milken Institute conference. 

However, the annual gathering in not one typically frequented by a sitting US President - Davos has not had welcomed a US head of state since Bill Clinton attended in 2000.

Doug Rediker, a former chairman of the WEF's Geopolitical Risk Global Agenda Council and now at the Brookings Institution, says there is a “sense of contradiction if not outright hypocrisy between the 'America First' narrative and the populist-nationalist narrative that Donald Trump has been espousing, and the overt anti-globalization, anti-free trade and anti-Davos narrative being found to be inconsistent with that commitment to improve the state of the world.” 

This year's theme at Davos is “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World”. The White House says Donald Trump will be sticking to his "America First" agenda and is planning to meet with business leaders to advance domestic commercial interests.

In Switzerland, anti-globalization protesters have been telling Donald Trump to stay away. But WEF President, Borge Brende, is rolling out the red carpet.

"The decisions that the US are making in many, many areas do also have a lot of impact on the rest of the world,” says Brende, “So, it is very important to have a dialogue with the US and also hear the views from the president."