By Mayank Chhaya-
As embellishments, exaggerations and downright falsehoods go, former President Donald Trump’s claim about his meeting with India’ Prime Minister Narendra Modi would not even crack the top 1000.
However, in so much as it reveals him as a habitual fibber it offers a window into how there no longer seems to be a distinction in his life between what is real and what is fantasy-cum-delusion.
During a townhall at Flint, Michigan on September 17, barely three days before the Indian prime minister’s arrival in the country, Trump said, “He happens to be coming to meet me next week, and Modi, he’s fantastic.”
If one did not know better, one might have thought that the Indian prime minister was traveling 10,000 miles with the sole purpose of meeting Trump and then return home right after that.
That the meeting with Trump was never on Modi’s itinerary was a minor detail for the former president.
In a particular moment, in front of a captive audience, the idea that Modi was coming to meet him caught his fancy and he said it with complete certitude.
New Delhi, apparently taken aback by the unfounded claim, had to point out that the prime minister had no plans to meet either Trump or his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Even Modi, who often tends to be impolitic about such matters, would have recognized the bad optics of him meeting Trump without also meeting Harris. In any case, the prime minister would have known better than to come to America barely two months before the presidential election and meet one over the other.
It is conceivable that the prime minister has a personal preference in the race, which could well be Trump, but he would not have shown it publicly, especially against Harris given her Indian heritage from her mother’s side.
But beyond what Modi may or may not have done, Trump’s announcement was instructive of the man’s personality type. He creates a fantasy and dwells in it irrespective of its divergence from the real world.
It is impossible to tell why Trump felt the need to make the claim other than to perhaps spin a circumlocutory yarn to say how tough he would be as president on the issue of tariffs. He did, in his own way, point out that leaders such as Modi and China’s President Xi Jinping are tough negotiators. In fact, he even called India “an abuser” when it comes to tariff parity even while describing Modi as “fantastic” in the same sentence.
Since ludicrous exaggerations and downright lies are baked into his persona since 2016, a claim like the one about Modi coming to meet him largely failed to prompt consternation in the media.
The Harris campaign could not have been faulted for initially feeling mystified as to how it was that India’s prime minister had chosen to seek a meeting with Trump but not the vice president. The reality, of course, was nowhere close to what Trump had just conjured up in the moment.
Photo courtesy: Jay Mandal/On Assignment
