Trump claims 'fantastic' Modi is coming to US to meet him

WASHINGTON: In an off-the-cuff remark that underscored the haphazard manner in which he handles foreign relations, former President Donald Trump on Tuesday claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is coming to the US to meet him next week.

“He happens to be coming to meet me next week, and Modi, he’s fantastic,” the MAGA supremo said during a town hall in Flint, Michigan, in course of a rambling discursion on free trade in which he characterized India as a "very big abuser" of tariffs.

Modi is scheduled to visit the US for the Quad summit to be hosted by President Biden in Wilmington, Delaware (Biden's home town) on September 21 and also take part in UN summit and community related events in New York City, but his schedule disclosed by the MEA to journalists for credential purposes does not list any meeting with Trump. The Indian Embassy did not offer any comment on the claim and there was no comment either from the State Department at the time of writing.

While it is not unusual for foreign leaders to privately meet Trump (Hungary's Victor Orban and Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu have met him in recent weeks), or any other US opposition leadership for that matter, the MAGA supremo's disclosure of Modi "coming to meet me" seemed aimed at underlining the imminence of his re-election, positioning himself as a major interlocutor in foreign relations and a guardian of American interests. Trump's MAGA loyalists, referring to his statement, gloated over social media that "the world is starting to recognize Trump as America's next President."

The former President randomly invokes a small set of foreign leaders whose names he remembers (President Xi of China, Russia's Putin, Hungary's Victor Orban and North Korea's Kim Jong Un being the most frequent), describing then with adjectives such as "fierce" and "fantastic" to talk up his self-perceived heroic defense of American interests against strong world leaders.

His repeated exposition on punitive and reciprocal trade tariffs, with claims of raking in billions and billions of dollars from foreign countries, has been laughed at by most economists who say it is the American consumers who eventually end up paying higher prices for goods. But Trump keeps repeating the tariff mantra to his credulous MAGA flock. During his first term as President, he obsessed over New Delhi's tariffs on Harley-Davison motorcycles, a relatively small item of trade between the two countries.