Donald Trump began his first day in office as United States President by signing 200 executive orders, perhaps setting a world record, triggering a slew of lawsuits by opponents and critics who maintain that he overstepped his brief. That may not be the only bit of firefighting he would have to deal with.
Even before the MAGA ship set out on its journey, a controversy that didn’t trigger much traction in America revealed signs of a rocky sail ahead.
At the heart of it is the battleline drawn between his supporters over immigration, with fragments of deeper fractures along ancestry thrown in. The ideological sparring between the technocrats and the far-right Donald Trump backers is intertwined with a political narrative that seamlessly flows between America and India.
While stricter immigration policy was the cornerstone of Trump’s election campaign, he recently batted for encouraging educated and skilled foreign workers as the clamor for expanding the cap on H1-B visas, popular for hiring tech-skilled foreigners, began in Silicon Valley.
While Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, both tech entrepreneurs tipped to be the co-leaders of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) endorse this view, his far-right white supremacist supporters like Laura Loomer and Brenden Dilley want major reforms, limiting the scope of H1-B visas.
The differences snowballed into a major war after Ramaswamy’s controversial X post which suggests that top tech companies prefer hiring foreign-born and first-generation engineers because American culture has long venerated mediocrity over excellence. “If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve……. “Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent,” he wrote.
Ramaswamy’s focus on mediocrity and normalcy, even if not overtly racist, is disparaging about the American culture and smacks of both insensitivity and cultural elitism. It has triggered a much more hateful tsunami of white supremacist slurs on X.
The reality is far more tangled than a simple slugfest between pro-visa technocrats and the far-right opponents. Musk’s X provided unbridled space for the outpouring of unchecked racist slurs, revealing how his technocrat dreams are at odds with his white supremacist ideologies – existing like the two faces of Janus.
Adding another layer of mess to the MAGA movement is the Hindu Rightwing backlash to white supremacy on display with erroneous claims that the hate rhetoric against ‘Indians’ is ‘Hinduphobic”.
Most of the upper-caste Hindu elites who play a dominating role in the tech enterprise in America support Narendra Modi’s Right-wing government in India, and recently, there has been a decisive shift in their loyalties from Democrats to Republicans.
Some of the avowed fans of Modi among these elite Indians are also likely to be part of the Trump team – Ramaswamy, Sreeram Krishnan, Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard. Having been supporters of Hindu supremacy in India and abroad, they are now navigating the minefield of white supremacist fury.
Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is deeply aligned with the Hindu nationalism ideology called Hindutva, India has witnessed the persecution of not only its largest minority, Muslims, but also Christian groups. Modi’s Hindutva has a huge fan following among the elitist Hindu diaspora in the United States who import and pump that brand of desi racism into the United States.
Supporters of this movement advocate for India as a Hindu nation, marginalizing Muslims, Christians, and Dalits through violence, erasure of their history, and decimation of their places of worship, with an explicit aim to transform India’s secular democracy.
Ramaswamy and Gabbard have unabashedly promoted this vision in America - while glossing over how the American Hindu far right has made American Muslims the target of its hate rhetoric, harassment, and discrimination, pushed against caste-bill in California and flaunted the bulldozer that is seen as a symbol of oppressing Muslims in India.
With the Christian white supremacists promoting a similar vision in which the American Hindus are the ‘othered’ minority, it’s like getting a bitter, perhaps more potent, taste of their own medicine. If the former finds some empathy for the persecuted Christian minority of India, it may further rev up the ante against Trump’s Hindu Right supporters.
How political narratives within both India and America shape US-India relations and vice versa is not known, but it is reasonable to expect an impact of this clash of different supremacists.
That’s a lot of turbulence for Trump to begin his presidency with. And it’s virulent to the core. How are these set of intertwined conflicts likely to impact his governance, and how will American society respond to the echoes of competitive hate?
Throw in the social media that is now discarding all filters and promoting hatred to further complicate the matters. It isn’t just Musk’s X, Meta recently decided to disband its professional fact-checking procedures – removing an essential mechanism that previously helped mitigate the spread of misinformation and harmful content.
Trump has just begun his innings, but we’ve already taken a sneak peek into what lies ahead for America in the next four years. The MAGA vision that is stimulated by the potent venom of isolationism is now also infused with a cocktail of business interests, white supremacy, cultural elitism, and racism imported from abroad - creating a tangled web.
Will Trump be able to navigate these nagging rapids or would his MAGA dream turn into MASH (Make America Soaked in Hate)?
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