On Monday, 20 January, as supporters of Donald Trump queued up to attend the official watch party of his inauguration as president just a couple of kilometres away from the Rotunda of the US Capitol where the ceremony was taking place, there was a man selling Trump merchandise who caught my attention.
The reason he stood out to me was because of the text on the red t-shirt he was holding up to the Trump faithfuls who passed by. Instead of the usual Make America Great Again (MAGA) slogan, the text on this t-shirt read, ‘Make Kamala Indian Again’.
“Ten bucks,” he called out to the passersby. He said those who had bought the t-shirt had told him, “It’s so funny, it’s hilarious.”
The irony of the moment was not lost on me. Here was a Black man holding up a slogan that clearly mocked outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman and first South Asian to become a major party presidential candidate, on the lines of her ethnicity and race in an echo of similar insults levelled against her by the man who was being sworn in as president that same day, which happened to be one marked to commemorate the great Black civil rights advocate Martin Luther King Jr.
I watched as some white MAGA supporters walked by and laughed at the slogan on the t-shirt. I was reminded of the recent divisions among the Trump base and even the Republican party on their attitudes towards Indian immigrants in the US, and the racist diatribes that sections of the MAGA community had indulged in as they weighed in on the debate over H1B work visas (a visa category dominated by Indians), spurred in part by comments made by Vivek Ramaswamy, an Indian American who had unsuccessfully run for the Republican presidential nomination and was at the time set to co-lead Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (he has since announced that he will not be doing so and is expected to run for governor in Ohio instead).
Among those throwing around anti-Indian racist insults in the H-1B debate was far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who had travelled with Trump on the campaign trail for the presidential election and regularly featured at his rallies. Loomer had tweeted, “Our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third world invaders from India…PS: why are people in India still shitting in the water they bathe and drink from?”
Now, note how the 2024 Indian American Attitudes Survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace showed a considerable uptick in the percentage of Indian Americans who said they would vote from Trump, from 22 percent in 2020 to 31 percent in 2024. There have been many reasons cited for this uptick, including that affluent American citizens of Indian origin see the GOP as the party of tax cuts and being more favourable to the wealthy.
So, even as more Indians turn towards Trump, a number of individuals of prominence in the MAGA-verse are ratcheting up their racism against Indians, emboldened by the overall rightward shift in discourse, and Trump’s willingness to engage with far-right figures such as Loomer despite their abominable records on such issues.
But herein lies the crux of a critical aspect of the new Trump presidency —that there are competing interest groups, with fundamental contradictions to one another, which came together to propel the 45th President of the United States to return as the 47th, but who are now faced with a question that looms all too large — whose president is he anyway?
Contradictions Galore
On the day of the inauguration, a few hundred metres away from the Capital One Arena where Trump would arrive to address the crowd of supporters, there was a public demonstration and rally held by the Proud Boys, a white nationalist and rabidly anti-immigrant outfit whose members were involved in storming the Capitol in the riots of 6 January 2021. Soon, Trump would issue pardons to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack, including members of the Proud Boys.
But even as the extremist outfit with a history of Islamophobia celebrated Trump’s win and his pardons, so did a large section of Arab and Muslim Americans who had voted for him, many of whom credited the incoming president as having contributed to achieving a ceasefire in Gaza even before he took office. Hundreds of Asian Americans, too, were part of the gatherings at the Trump victory rally in Washington, DC on Sunday, and the watch party and post-inauguration rally on Monday.
But when far-right, anti-immigrant and Islamophobic groups with a history of political violence, like the Proud Boys, get emboldened domestically to a degree not seen in recent times, it is immigrant communities of colour and minority groups which will be facing the heat.
One need look back only so far as the anti-Asian hate crimes, targeted primarily towards those suspected of being Chinese, that had become rampant during the COVID-19 pandemic, spurred on in part by the harmful rhetoric adopted by Trump and other Republican leaders while talking about the coronavirus.
A Pew survey in April 2021 showed that one in five Asian respondents directly cited Trump and his rhetoric about China as the source of the pandemic, his racist comments, or his labelling the coronavirus as the “kung flu” or “Chinese flu” as one of the reasons for the rise in violence.
When push comes to shove, will Trump choose to reprimand far-right groups that will likely continue to dial up hate campaigns against such vulnerable minorities? His actions so far do not give any such indication.
When it comes to Muslims, Trump has Elon Musk by his side, a man who has consistently spewed and amplified anti-Muslim content on X, a platform he owns. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for Department of Defense, allegedly chanted ‘Kill all Muslims’ at a veterans group event. The list of Trump appointees and aides with a track record of Islamophobic statements goes on, but you get the point.
And then, there is of course the chatter around a potential ‘Muslim Ban 2.0’, a new version of the travel ban from Trump’s first term that restricted visitors from a range of Muslim-majority countries, including several Arab nations. The groundwork for such a ban is reportedly already being laid by the new Trump administration.
Now, given that a large number of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans voted for him in the election, would Trump change how he treats these issues? Most Arab and Muslim Trump voters I spoke to before the election had no illusions about a reduction in Islamophobia on these fronts. They had other reasons for backing him over Harris, some of which are listed out in my earlier piece.
Now, admittedly, the case of Indians under Trump is more complicated, primarily because the contours of the relationship aren’t as clearly defined politically.
Tug of Work
When it comes to the Indians and Indian Americans, there are multiple competing interest groups here once again — firstly, large numbers of Indian citizens working in the US whose path to citizenship through the H-1B visa is typically very slow and can take decades; secondly, those demanding that American workers should get the jobs “being given away to Indian workers on visas”; and thirdly, Indian Americans who are already citizens and who could very well prefer that Trump focuses on other benefits for them instead, such as lowering taxes in higher income brackets.
Interestingly, there is some bipartisan support for the second group, those demanding that American workers be prioritised. From the other end of the political spectrum as the MAGA folks who have been opposing the H-1B, independent Senator Bernie Sanders has also criticised the H-1B visa programme as being “disastrous for American workers”.
In an op-ed for Fox News, yes you read that right, Sanders wrote, “The primary purpose of H-1B and other guest worker programmes is not to employ the "best and the brightest," but instead to replace American workers with lower-paid workers from abroad who often live as indentured servants. The cheaper it is to hire guest workers, the more money the multi-billionaire owners of large corporations make.”
This is a tougher equation for Trump, because tech giants such as Musk and a plethora of other large corporates are ardent backers of the H1B programme, through which thousands of Indians work in tech and other industries in the US. Disrupting such a system would irk business interests across the country, and the cons of that would need to be measured against any potential benefit that could be provided in terms of opportunities to American workers.
There are other factors to the equation too. For instance, there is a large population of undocumented Indian immigrants in the US, a group whose numbers have seen a sharp rise in recent years, in part due to the growing popularity of dunki routes and dunki influencers online.
According to a Bloomberg report, the US and Indian governments are in talks to repatriate some 18,000 undocumented Indian immigrants living in the US. This could very well be in exchange for a protection of existing numbers of visas granted to Indians through the H-1B route and others — for instance, Indians accounted for 72 percent of the roughly 386,000 H-1B visas granted in 2023, according to official data.
A quid-pro-quo that helps Trump look tough on undocumented immigration through “a deal” with a foreign government might steady the ship for Indian nationals in, or hoping to be in, the US through student or work visas, for now. But expect the ‘tug of work’, and the debate surrounding it, to continue.
Like Mark Zuckerberg and Musk and ByteDance, many of these competing groups have each vied for Trump to have their back. And there is a lesson from the story of the first-row tech billionaires at Trump’s inauguration. Zuckerberg may have hoped that Trump would let the TikTok ban come into effect, and for Meta to have been its biggest beneficiary. They even announced the launch of Edits, an app that would seek to fill ByteDance-owned CapCut’s void, in the event of the ban coming through.
Zuckerberg even publicly kowtowed to the incoming administration with a ban on fact-checking, widely seen as an overture to Trump. Yet, Trump brought TikTok back before even stepping foot into the Oval Office again. There may be other benefits associated with the move that we don’t even know about yet.
The situation is emblematic of the competing groups we have discussed so far. Trump won the presidency on the back of an arguably unnatural, and maybe even uneasy, coalition, and so, each of the groups, with their contradictions alive and kicking, will continue to wonder — whose president will he be anyway?
(Meghnad Bose is an award-winning multimedia journalist based in New York. He is a former Deputy Editor of The Quint. Views are personal.)