Despite Donald Trump’s comeback for the ages, he will have to struggle uphill continuously during his four-year term as US President (starting in January 2025) because the Democrats he beat so convincingly are already gearing up to place roadblocks at his every turn.
For Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who calls Trump a friend, the signal is for exercising prudence. Trump likes loyalty but his past record has shown that he is no country’s friend. For every smile to foreign leaders who scramble to curry favour, he exacts a price upfront.
His emphatic electoral victory does not mean that he will have the power to keep his administration stable and efficient enough for others including Delhi to rely on. He will have to face daily harassment by his political opponents, who are burning from the humiliation of defeat at the hands of a person they vilified and hated constantly for the past four years.
To their deep chagrin, American voters gave him a surprising new broad-based mandate, despite the one-billion-dollar campaign war chest at Democrat Kamala Harris’ disposal. Worse, that happened despite Trump being rejected by voters in 2020, indicted over an attempt to overturn the election and incite an insurrection, impeached twice for grave misdemeanours, convicted of 34 felonies, shot by a would-be assassin, branded a sexual offender and labelled as a fascist by his opponents.
The fault of many thought leaders in America and elsewhere, including India, is that they are still trying to fit him in the continuum of their usual analytic models of politics. They misled themselves by failing to shake off preconceptions to take a cold-eyed look at Trump and his almost fanatical loyalty to what his voters want.
Modi and his team are likely to be disappointed if they expect Trump to look kindly on them arguing that, like Biden, he needs India as a bulwark against China
Harris’ concession speech was a case in point. She conceded, but with a proviso: “While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuelled this campaign -- the fight: the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people. A fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation.”
Harris and Democrats are still clinging to a determination to paint Trump as a profound villain who will not fight for freedom, opportunity, fairness and the dignity of all people and does not revere the ideals at the heart of America. This is self-deception because more than half of American voters disagree. Instead of listening to those voters, Trump’s opponents still want to treat him like an unstable narcissist and are turning a wilfully blind eye to why voters chose him so emphatically over the long-held style of thinking of Biden, Harris and Democrats.
“And we will continue to wage this fight in the voting booth, in the courts and in the public square,” Harris declared. Biden and many Democratic leaders have echoed her words, while Trump gathers a new government and ruling class with the express aim of destroying their ways of thinking.
Further widening and deepening of this domestic political war will be dangerous for an already febrile world, where international co-operation and protection of human rights are being crushed by the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon as well as America and Europe’s increasing tensions with China. All those wars are being heavily subsidised financially by Washington, while American-made weapons are used to kill and maim innocent civilians, especially in Palestine.
Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine and Gaza. Even if he succeeds in coercing the warring sides to agree to a ceasefire, the root causes will not disappear without extraordinarily smart diplomacy and, above all, trust among impacted governments in Trump’s benign intentions towards them rather than only Ukrainians and Israelis.
Modi and his team are likely to be disappointed if they expect Trump to look kindly on them arguing that, like Biden, he needs India as a bulwark against China. More so, if Delhi does not have a clear intention to help Trump to contain China’s rise by encircling it with treaty allies Japan, South Korea and the Philippines in the Indo-Pacific and a friendly India in the Himalayas and Indian Ocean.
If Modi does not intend to turn China into an enemy by moving closer to Trump, he will have to keep some distance from Washington. Building a clever narrative about multi-alignment will not carry weight with Trump because he does not fit into any mould of political thought, whether liberal or conservative, about international relations and the utility of alliances or partnerships.