Harish Khare 
By one count, as many as 81,047 editorials and columns, totalling 30,111,952 words, were written about Donald Trump between his election on November 5, 2024 as America’s 47th president and his inauguration on January 20, 2025.
There was a global convergence of views that Trump’s return to the White House would simply mean pandemonium, to use Senator Daniel Moynihan’s evocative phrase to characterise the global (dis)order after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of the Soviet Union.
Since taking oath, the 47th president has kept the world guessing.
What about us in India? Our wise men and professional strategic experts have pitched in with reassuring words of advice, highlighting our unique advantage of having the blessing of a Vishwaguru to help us navigate these uncertain times. Perhaps a kind of whistling in the dark, in a rough version of raag darbari. So be it.
It would be instructive to keep in mind that Trump represents a coalition of interests and forces and the elements of this coalition will continue to vie for an internal upper hand.
His inaugural speech itself, it appears, was a patch-up among two dominant tendencies in his tent. One speech-writer pandered to his visceral flaws of petty-ness and vindictiveness; and, another speech-writer sought to exalt him as part of the grand and glorious American national journey and made the new president declare himself to be a peacemaker and a unifier.
Admittedly, Trump has announced from the house-top he gives a fig about conventional decencies and protocols; nor does he care about the sanctity of constitutional ideas and institutions, nor is he enamoured of the familiar interpretations and behaviour patterns of the American presidency.
Yet like any other president, he would find himself buffeted by conflicting advisers with egos and ideas of their own. The oligarchs will fall out among themselves, as thieves always do; the January 6 radicals will be constantly pushing the envelope.
Add to this the permanent volatility of his own personality, the White House over the next four years should be a site of confusion, compromises and uncertainties in America and across the continents.
Of one thing, however, it is reasonable to be certain: the Trump establishment will be ruthlessly insensitive to our sensitivities. To be sure, the Trump White House will be cheerfully indifferent to our growing democratic deficit and the officially instigated suborning of our institutional vitality. On the other hand, the Americans will no longer want to feed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s self-puffery.
As a nation we have become accustomed to cheating ourselves; fuzzing figures, manufacturing facts, creating history; the best and the brightest of our economists and technocrats are content to lend their talent and name to paint the miserable present in bright colours. The crony ecosystem in the media, too, has acquired an economic stake in sustaining the ruling clique’s false narrative. That of course, is our business and our funeral.
But the outside world can only cast a cold eye on our pretensions and postures. The Chinese have already disrupted our chest-thumping in the Galwan valley; and, it took a creative common sense on the part of the national security adviser and the unwillingness of the armed forces leadership to fight the People’s Liberation Army to restrain our national leadership from stumbling into wider conflict and a greater humiliation than that of 1962.
It took extraordinarily deft diplomatic efforts by our professional foreign service officials to help us as a nation to keep up the pretence that the Chinese did not give us one across the face.
The same cold and unsentimental approach can be expected to define the Trump White House’s dealings with Modi’s India.
It is quite possible that our entrenched oligarchs can collude with Trump’s oligarchs to bypass the political leadership and short-change our public interests. It is equally conceivable that our defence establishment may enter into transactional entanglements with Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon without the politicians being in the loop. The Christian right-wing can crank up the American officialdom against India should Mohan Bhagwat go overboard with his animus against the missionaries.
The prime minister’s image-makers can no longer hope to garner legitimacy and global acceptance for him from photo-ops with the American president. There would be good days and there would be bad days in dealings with Trump’s Washington.
We have cast upon ourselves a duty to peevishly go after anyone who gives us “offense” or slights Modi. This is a trap we have laid for ourselves. But the new rulers in America see such tantrums as a hallmark of weakness and immaturity rather than as a demonstration of the prowess of an “emergent India”.
The India of Narendra Modi is ill-equipped to cope with a whimsical and temperamental American president. Our political class – dominated by Mohan Bhagwats, Amit Shahs, Yogi Adityanaths, Manohar Lal Khattars – is vastly underprepared and uninterested in realising that the American leopard has changed his spots. The opposition crowd, headed by wayward Rahul Gandhi, is of little help in coming up with a considered and measured national response to an America-instigated global turbulence.
Our universities and think-tanks have been devalued as parking lots for mediocre Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh camp-followers. And, the Indian diaspora itself will be in a tizzy and the new manipulators of patriotic fervour in the Trump camp will not take kindly to any kind of outward expression of support for the Modi regime.
As a nation, we will have to tap our collective imagination and clarity of national purpose to ward off demands and demarches from Washington.
All we can devoutly wish is that our national leadership remembers the old Chankya admonition: no ruler should seek personal glory at the expense of abiding national interests. This injunction will need to be remembered every single day for the next four years. So long.
Harish Khare was editor of The Tribune.