President Donald Trump slipped into an impersonation of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s accent on the latest leg of his week-long tour of Asia, as he praised the strongman leader for being “tough as hell.”
Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Gyeongju, South Korea, on Wednesday, following on from his appearances in Malaysia and Japan, the president reflected on India exchanging fire with neighboring Pakistan earlier this year in a four-day conflict that threatened to spiral into full blown war between the two nuclear powers.
“I’ll tell you what, Prime Minister Modi is the nicest looking guy,” Trump said of his Indian counterpart: He’s… oh, you’d like to have your father like that.”
But, the president continued: “He’s a killer! He’s tough as hell!” He then launched into an insensitive imitation of Modi, declaring in a booming voice: “No, we will fight!”
Switching back to his own, he continued: “I said, ‘Whoa, is that the same man that I know?’”
Trump went on to take credit, in his customary rambling fashion, for stopping the hostilities by threatening both sides with 250 percent tariff hikes: “After a little while, and they’re good people, and after literally two days they called up, and they said we understand, and they stopped fighting – isn’t that amazing?
“Do you think [Joe] Biden would have done that?” he asked his audience. “I don’t think so. Most people wouldn’t have thought of it. They wouldn’t have thought of it.
“I said I was going to put 250 percent tariffs on each country, which means that you’ll never do business… That’s a nice way of saying we don’t want to do business with you… and they understood that and within 48 hours we had no war.”
India has rejected Trump’s claims that he personally ended the May conflict between the two nations, with sources telling Bloomberg that Modi had skipped Trump’s weekend summit in Malaysia to avoid running into him and inadvertently providing him with an opportunity to repeat his disputed version of events in the Indian PM’s presence.
Reaction to Trump’s latest comments on social media was overwhelmingly adverse, with Indian journalist Shubhangi Sharma saying: “There’s no making sense of things with Mr Trump.”
“We are the laughingstock of the world,” a left-leaning American user reacted. “This is worse than a 4 am lounge act in Vegas.”
Others called his speech “insanity on international display” and “verbal diarrhea” or suggested the president might be “on the loopy drugs today and not the adrenaline ones.”
More seriously, there was widespread dismay about Trump’s dubious claims to have played peacemaker and over his ongoing insistence on invoking Biden, long after he had left the political stage.
