How to Deal With Trump!

India has a lot to gain by playing its cards well with a dealmaker who is now the US President. No one says it will be easy.

- Raj Chengappa

Trump thought really big and look where he is now: in the Oval Office at the White House, occupying the most powerful chair in the world and presiding over the future of not just the USA but of the world, including India.

To understand what drives Trump and how to negotiate with him, Shalabh ‘Shalli’ Kumar, a Chicago-based Indian-American businessman and founder of the Republican Hindu Coalition, advises all policy-makers to buy a copy of Trump’s book, The Art of the Deal, and to take all the promises he made during his campaign seriously (see interview: ‘If India is with America even 90 per cent of the time, that will benefit both’). Since he took over as president on January 20, Trump has unleashed a blizzard of decisions that have rattled not just the US but also the world and have already earned him the sobriquet of Disruptor-in-Chief.

On day one, he cancelled Obamacare, the health insurance policy pushed through by his predecessor. Soon after, he trashed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a major policy that Barack Obama had touted as a game-changer but which Trump described as “a bad deal”. He then signed an executive order banning travellers and refugees from seven Muslim majority countries “to keep bad dudes out”. When a district court judge stayed the order, the president snarled at him and began to pursue an even more stringent immigration regime. Alarm bells rang in India when there was talk of introducing major restrictions on H1B visas that currently facilitate an annual migration of close to 50,000 Indian workers, mostly IT techies.