COLUMN: Trump’s egomania reaches fever pitch.
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: What does businessman and GOP frontrunner Donald Trump mean when he reiterates at rallies: “They are taking our jobs. China is taking our jobs. Japan is taking our jobs. India is taking our jobs. It is not going to happen anymore, folks!”
As far as India is concerned, is it political theater? Just shrug, observe and analyze from far a hugely unpopular or popular – whichever way you look at it – grandstanding, fake reality TV messiah talk and mesmerize his hordes of ignorant supporters at rallies.
Does India need to be concerned at the future of bilateral and economic ties with the US if the bluster of the egomaniac Trump prevails with voters? Not only over his rabid supporters in the primaries – comprised of also some he terms as “I love my poorly educated supporters’; aka mostly white, school or college dropouts or high school graduates employed in low paying jobs who have little clue what he means by India taking jobs except perhaps a vague idea that he means to kick out all Indians from America – but ultimately a majority of voters in the general elections, to become president of the US?
Or does India just wait it out as Trump continues with his bombast, uncanny ability of relentlessly making enemies of citizens, communities and countries? And then repair, normalize relations once Trump becomes a political pariah, probably the biggest failure in American political history?
Trump’s stand against India, however nonsensical it may be, has the potential to derail trade ties, if he were to get to the White House.
For some years now, enthusiastic politicians, trade advocates and business chambers in both countries have talked of pushing Indo-US trade ties in the realm of $500 billion annually. In fact, trade between the two countries decreased last year, the first time in nearly a quarter century. India with its over 300 million middle class society is the largest consumer market in the world, and with the country’s growth being pegged upwards of 7.5% despite talk of a global recession around the corner, is a steady market for US companies to take advantage of, make profits, which help in turn, stabilize the US economy.
India and the US traded in goods and services worth $66.271 billion in 2015, which is $581 million lower than the trade volume in 2014. The last year it happened was in 1991, when the trade volume shrank by nearly half a billion dollar from the previous year.
The US trade deficit with India also slightly declined in 2015 to $23.21 billion, compared to $23.63 billion in 2014, a reduction of $6.18 million. According to trade data released this year by the United States Census Bureau, total US exports to India in 2015 was $21.529 billion and total imports from India stood at $44.741 billion.
Imports from India are valued by the US, including textiles, precious stones and metals, pharmaceuticals; while major American exports to India include aircraft, spacecraft parts, machinery, optical instruments and equipment, plastic products. India is the 11th largest trading partner of the US. Trade with India comprised 1.7% of the country’s total foreign trade that raised five folds in the last decade.
So, what is the Donald’s grouse against India? President Barrack Obama had recently said that US would look at export controls to ensure that Indian companies have the same access to American technologies. Is Trump not going to do that? Is he against imports from India, wants all those products to be manufactured in the US, increase jobs for his ‘poorly educated supporters’, but in the process increase too, the costs for consumers?
Tim Worstall, writing in Forbes, seemed appalled at Trump’s rhetoric against India, and other countries with which US has strong trade relations. He noted in a column today, on Saturday:
“Trade is thus our going out and seeking those things that those foreigners (and those foreigners can be those from outside our own household, or village, or city, state, economy, country, the basic intuition is all the same) can do better than we can. That’s the point and purpose of the entire enterprise: to gain access to those imports. Exports are just our own hard work that we’ve got to ship off elsewhere to gain those imports.
Thus to complain that other people are working hard to provide us with what we want and desire is simply economically illiterate. Imports are the good thing, the aim and point of trade itself.
Trump is complaining that Indians and others are doing exactly what we want Indians and others to be doing. It’s ludicrous but then that’s politics.”
Ironically, even as he rails against India, Trump has earmarked India as one of the countries in Asia he plans to expand his own businesses, has even talked openly of investment. Trump has in place licensing agreements with partners in India for high-end residential apartment buildings in Mumbai and Pune, which house Bollywood celebrities, among others. It includes a 75-story building in mid-town Mumbai by the Lodha Group owned by billionaire Mangal Prabhat Lodha, and two, adjacent 23-story Trump Towers in Pune, in Kalyani Nagar, built in partnership with Panchshil Realty, founded and run by the brothers Atul and Sagar Chordia. Apartments in the Pune project are around $2.5 million.
A Forbes article in 2014 noted Trump has also six luxury condos in South Korea and a Trump Tower in Makati, in the Philippines. It also noted Trump talking of investing in India in the future.
So, is Trump going to now not invest in India, not build condos, hotels and golf courses in the future? Does he plan to expand his business only in the US?
Several other GOP presidential contenders like Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas attacked Trump in the last GOP debate on how he used illegal immigrants from Poland to build his Trump Tower in New York City more than 38 years ago, had to eventually make a legal settlement of more than a million dollars for treating those illegal immigrants unfairly.
It’s very likely that if Trump indeed were to rake action against India, Indian companies and entities, against Indian citizens, there would be a quick wave of anti-Trump movement in India. The Indian government, as well as the state government of Maharashtra, would scrutinize his past and existing business deals to check whether there were any illegalities, greasing of the wheels. Plenty of questions have been raised of dubious Trump deals and his four bankruptcies, in the past.
John Cassidy of The New Yorker noted in a piece on Friday that David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter, published a story at The National Memo headlined “21 Questions For Donald Trump” last year in July, that sought scrutiny of several business deals by Trump, including his bribery investigation in New Jersey during the 1970s, allegations that a Mafia-related company helped to build Trump Tower, contents of Trump’s tax returns, and his failure to contribute a single dollar to his eponymous charitable foundation since 2006, among others.
Concern too, for India, would be allegations of Trump doing business through his ties with politicians, and if he manipulates favors. Johnston points out that in the 1970s, New York City Mayor Abe Beame gave Trump a $400 million tax abatement to facilitate his first big real-estate deal, the conversion of a hotel next to Grand Central Terminal. During the 1980s, when the city refused to give Trump $700 million in tax breaks for his controversial Riverside South development, he had a bitter dispute with Mayor Ed Koch. Cassidy writes in the New Yorker:
“What deals were done to grease the wheels of his various developments in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, at least one of which, Johnston writes, involved a banker for a mob boss?”
If one were to go past all of the threats of bilateral trade deals going sour, and anti-Trump sentiments in India, which would be an anomaly given the huge popularity past presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama enjoyed and enjoy in India, what would concern India the most, and perhaps the biggest threat from Trump, would be the way he utilizes executive powers in office to put laws into effect. Those laws would harm Indian Muslims, and Indian immigrants living in the US on work visas, like H-1B, and L visa.
Although Trump has not reiterated in the last few debates his proposed plan to ban all non-American Muslims to the US, in his 10 debates so far in eight months of campaigning, it is one of the themes that has resonated most with his supporters, apart from his plan to build a wall on the border that Mexico would pay for.
The latest NBC News/SurveyMonkey national online poll released Friday said that voters supporting Trump are more than twice as likely to hold an unfavorable view of American Muslims: 2/3rds (67%) of those identifying themselves as Trump supporters said they do not hold favorable views of Muslim Americans. Nearly 9 in 10 respondents (87%) said they support Trump’s call to institute a temporary ban on Muslims who are not American citizens from entering the US.
The survey may not say it, but the implications would be of worry to those who fear racial backlash against minorities whom Trump has bashed in his run to the White House. And as the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks showed, when it comes to discrimination in the US, all brown folks are at risk and at the mercy of deranged crazies, especially Sikhs.
But Trump doesn’t seem to care. At a rally in South Carolina on Friday night, Trump told the crowd a unconfirmed story of General John Pershing allegedly halting Muslim attacks in the Philippines in the early 1900s by shooting them with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood, reported the Boston Globe. The Council on American-Islamic Relations denounced that, said in a statement that Trump’s “inflammatory rhetoric has crossed the line from spreading hatred to inciting violence.”
That wall on the border, by the way, seems to get 10 feet higher every time Trump gets questioned and challenged on it. Hopefully, it won’t get high enough to intrude on air space of low flying planes and the hapless Mexicans might have to even install lights on it like lighthouses do, increasing the budget by a few million dollars. Former Mexican president Vicente Fox might dislike that, draw some further expletives from him.
If Trump were to foolishly go ahead with his plan to ban Muslims to the US, it would draw diplomatic ire of the world. Come to think of it, Trump doesn’t have many more countries or people left in the world, outside of the US, to disrespect and humiliate. The Dalai Lama has not come in his line of fire, as yet. In no order, apart from India and Indians (comprising of more than a billion brown folks), he has already offended by his remarks: China, Vietnam, Japan, Germany, UK, Mexico, the Pope, women, the disabled, Muslims, Blacks, Hispanics, Sikhs, Democrats, Republicans…pardon, me, if I missed any communities and countries.
William Galston of Brookings Institution, who worked in the White House under President Clinton, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times, talking of Trump’s ability to use executive powers to achieve his goals.
“He will have a very easy time doing whatever he can do through executive authority alone. That includes the conduct of foreign relations, up to a point. He would have a hard time doing anything that requires the cooperation of Congress.”
Executive powers Trump could use may also put a curb on companies like Disney World who outsource work to India, through ‘knowledge transfer’. Trump could also put a curb on the H-1B visa and L visa programs, to limit the number of work visas for foreigners, in attempt to open up jobs for residents. Add big tech companies who tap top notch talent from overseas to the list of those going to get miffed by Trump in the future.
That perhaps, is what India needs to be wary of: Trump’s action against Indians, to curb Muslims and ban workers on H-1B visa, may hurt not only remittances to India but also diplomatic relations. It may hurt more than his trade actions against India, which could be taken to the WTO for arbitration.
All these conjectures, however, would mean nothing, if Trump never gets to be the GOP nominee, or, even if he does become the nominee, loses in the general elections by the likely Democrat nominee, Hillary Clinton. In the meantime, Trump’s menace hovers.
(Sujeet Rajan is Editor-in-Chief, The American Bazaar. Follow him @SujeetRajan1)
8 Comments
The problem is that a lot of Indians don’t like white people. They would rather hire other Indians. There’s not a lot of diversity in these IT shops, everyone practically is Indian. I have 30 years experience in the IT industry and have found it difficult to get a job where the technical people are mostly Indian. I’ve had interviews which bordered on harassment. I have Indian friends and they even complain there are too many Indians entering the US. I know hearing it from my Indian friends that India is a very racist country. No one can get along if that Indian person is from a different part of India. Tell me I’m wrong.
The truth hurts the Anmerican workers. India is big leech of American jobs, with outsourcing and then HB-1 visas you people have raped the American workers like you do your women everyday back home. Stay home and go home fix your country and get some class. Real patriotic aren’t you.
“It’s very likely that if Trump indeed were to rake action against India, Indian companies and entities, against Indian citizens, there would be a quick wave of anti-Trump movement in India”
India can always go back to their commie buddies kiss Putin’ rear end and learn Russian to work like dogs in Indian factories. Can’t they? Won’t they ?
India is a secular country just like the UK and USA.
They all face the same challenges of:
1) Islamic radicalism and terrorism
2) Illegal immigration ( Mexico , Syria and Bangladesh)
3) Chinese trade domination and job drain
4) Quota system ( reservation/affirmative action) that is destroying the middle class for something that was done 100+ years under other administrations.
If Trump were to destroy ISIS and contain Islamic jihadism and attract them like bees to a flame (USA) a-la – Post 9-11 … then the Republic of India ( and lots of other countries) can decrease the GDP they allocate to defense (from the 20%+ to less than 10%), which alone will mean savings of 10s of Billions of $$$
The $300 million to $700 million that the H1-Bs lose will be compensated 10-20 fold… and the IT industry will grow in India rather than the brain-drain to the US.
Problem is under Obama, Blair and the Congress regime, the masses of USA, UK and India have all been PULLED SO FAR TO THE LEFT , that it needs somebody like Trump as a Modi and Cameron etc to pull these masses BACK TO THE CENTER.
Time to stop being fooled by the Islamic and Aethistic Western Media, and think with your own brains… and vote for Trump, Modi and Cameron!
Somesh: What you say is very true. where Indians can and should make difference is not listen to such rhetoric and fight the establishment. Either demanding of no separation by people or banning the products from such states will work. It is not an easy fight, but when educated people see what is going on, they have the obligation to show the less-educated and poor what is going on, no matter how hard it might be. It is for the future of our next generation. If we join the same complainers, what will be the difference between us and the ‘fair skinned, blue eyed, superiority complex filled dim wits on cocaine, applauding in trumps rally, but unable to do anything constructive’ kind of people? Also, I think, right to bear arms is long due for Indian People-to save themselves from such establishment politicians and animals who attack women! Home grown arms!
I will love to see Trump become the president. The reason being, India and similar other countries will get a chance to stop the brain drain from their respective countries. This will allow the people to work for their own, develop their own nations and be proud of their own countries. In the mean-time. I will love to see the so called better race of melanoma prone skin color and weird colored eyed people grapple with the fact the poison and garbage and cultural rape they have been spilling in other countries, while calling them ‘developing’ countries will stop. I love this idea. I pray that this happens. It is about time! World needs re-organization.
Don’t blame him, he must have learnt this idea of rousing emotions in the name of jobs from Indians themselves.
In the Indian state of Maharashtra, The shiv sena leaders(Bal Thackeray and uddhav thakre and raj thakre and Aditya thakre) also come to power using the same rhetoric by targeting non Maharashtrians.
Similarly the State of Tamilnady in India is most famous for High degree of Xenophobia and mortal hatred towards non tamils.
if anyone analyses the demography of any company(including the big IT firm cognizant) in Chennai 99% management positions will be held by tamil and non tamils are regularly mobbed and fired and not allowed grow into higher positions.
The Maharashtra government is very famous for sabotaging the initiative of other states using its clout in the bureaucracy in central government.
Interestingly the central government of Indian always favours these states and these two states are most well developed states in India
recently the same rhetoric was misused by leader to split the stat of Andhra pradesh and carve out the prosperous and well developed telangana area leaving the rest of Andhra Pradesh high and dry.
The most interedting question this kind of leader must be asked, if you don’t want people from xyz countries to work in American companies why don’t stop selling American product and services in those countries.
Similar question are being posed to the hostile states of Maharashtra, tamilnadu etc in india, if you don’t want people from other states of indian to work in your cities then stop selling your products in other states.
Don’t blame him, he must have learnt this idea of rousing emotions in the name of jobs from Indians themselves.
In the Indin state of Maharashtra, The shiv sena leaders(Bal Thackeray and uddhav thakre and raj thakre and Aditya thakre) also come to power using the same rhetoric by targeting non Maharashtrians.
Similarly the State of Tamil nadi in Indin is most famous for High degree of Xenophobia and mortal hatred towards non tamils.
if visit analyse the demography of any company in Chennai 99% management positions will be held by tamil and non tamils are regularly mobbed and fired and not allowed grow into higher positions.
The Maharashtra government is very famous for sabotaging the initiative of other states using its cloud in the bureaucracy in central government.
Interestingly the central government of Indian always these states and these two states ae most well developed states in India.