Head-on | Why President Trump is targeting India

Donald Trump is one of the most unpopular presidents in US history. According to recent opinion polls, Trump’s approval rating has sunk to 34 per cent. In a survey of 150 presidential historians, Trump was ranked at the bottom — below even the much-reviled Richard Nixon.

In his second term, Trump has systematically polarised American society. He has dismantled decades of painstaking efforts to make the US a more equal nation — racially, socially and economically.

Trump has assembled a cabinet without a single African American. In the past, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice served as secretaries of state one after the other between 2001 and 2009 under President George W Bush. They were symbols of the rise of black leaders to high office.

Trump’s racism is superseded only by the prospect of financial gain. If he sees a deal that will enrich himself or his family, skin colour no longer matters. Trump is happy to deal with Pakistan’s terror-sponsoring army chief, Asif Munir, because of Islamabad’s promise of lucrative crypto deals. He is equally comfortable dealing with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, despite knowing that bin Salman ordered the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

More from Opinion

Trump has meanwhile directed the removal of all material related to America’s centuries-long slave-owning past and the massacres of Native Americans by European colonists.

Trump’s white supremacism is tempered when real estate deals offer profit. His “Gaza Riviera” plan to build a resort city after clearing the rubble in Gaza was attacked so severely last year that he has not spoken of it since. Trump is thus both racist and mercantilist. If you are Mohammed bin Salman or Asif Munir but can offer Trump a profitable deal, Trump will be colour-blind.

Why India?

Trump is targeting India for two basic reasons. The first is geopolitical. The second is personal.

Consider the geopolitical reason. Caught off guard by the rise of China, the US has attacked Beijing with economic and technology sanctions. Most have failed. While China’s growth has slowed, it remains a formidable rival.

For Washington, nothing is worse than India becoming another China by 2050. Trump targets those he regards as weak and appeases those he regards as strong. He has made peace with Chinese President Xi Jinping in much the same way as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appeased Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1938 in the hope of avoiding war.

For Trump, India is the easier target — and, in some ways, the more important one. China has grown too big to control. Its rise can only be managed, not controlled.

India has not passed that inflection point. Its rise can still be controlled. Hence the 100 per cent tariff threat on Russian oil and gas on India, China, Hungary, Azerbaijan and Slovakia. Fifteen western European countries have been exempted in the proposed legislation.

China gets most of its Russian oil and gas through pipelines or shadow fleets. It will not be affected by the 100 per cent US penalty. The three small eastern European countries are in the list for largely cosmetic reasons. Western Europe has been fully exempted.

That leaves India — Washington’s principal target in the 100 per cent legislation being brought before the US Congress in August. The US knows India buys nearly 50 per cent of its daily imported requirement of 4.8 million barrels of crude oil from Russia. The bipartisan Congressional bill imposing 100 per cent trade tariffs for buying Russian oil is designed to punish both India and Russia in one stroke.

The second reason for Trump’s ire against India is personal. The US president frequently praises Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a “great man” and a “tough negotiator”, but that is for public consumption. It is the language of a real estate developer flattering a potential client. Trump is, at heart, still a real estate developer. He flatters and expects to be flattered in return.

The problem is Modi doesn’t flatter Trump in return. He has refused to go to the White House since February 2025, when Trump had just begun his second term. Trump has invited him multiple times. Modi has declined each time — probably the only major world leader to have turned down Trump.

So, despite his fulsome praise for Modi in public, Trump is aggrieved with the Indian prime minister. To make matters worse, Modi has instructed his trade negotiating team, led by Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal, not to agree to the India-US trade deal without Washington giving India a competitive tariff advantage over China, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

While the EU, UK, Japan and South Korea have gone out of their way to accommodate US trade demands, India has turned the tables. It is making demands of its own on the US and setting the terms of the deal. To Trump, this is a deliberate strategy. Modi, Trump believes, resents the multiple comments Trump made on the India-Pakistan conflict during Operation Sindoor in May 2025 following Islamabad’s terror attack on Indian tourists in Pahalgam. Trump takes ostentatious delight in praising Munir and trying to strike an equivalence between India and Pakistan.

Targeting India is not merely a part of Trump’s agenda. It is part of America’s bipartisan agenda. When India was still too small 15 years ago to pose even a future threat, Washington under President George W Bush and later President Barack Obama co-opted India as a counterweight to China. Hence the formal establishment of the four-nation Quad in 2007.

That logic no longer holds. China can’t be contained. But India, now bigger and growing fast, still can and must. Trump will leave the White House for the last time in January 2029. Modi, the mandarins in Washington know, will still be prime minister.

(The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)