Will India be stumped by Trump?

The unpredictable and unthinkable has finally happened. Donald Trump, the billionaire businessman and former TV star, has become the first person in modern US history with no political experience whatsoever, to effectively clinch a major party’s nomination. He will likely take on Hillary Clinton of the Democratic Party in the November general election.

The campaign to become US president is the longest job interview anywhere in the world. American elections are essentially held twice over during a cycle that can last nearly two years. In the first, candidates from each party run in the so-called primaries where they contest 50 different elections across the 50 states, staggered over a period of nearly six months.

The winner of these contests from each party becomes the party's nominee and earns the right to represent it during the general election. In this second contest, all eligible citizens vote to elevate one of the two nominees to the coveted presidency. The loser generally retires from politics forever.

This primary season has seen so many firsts that it is hard to keep count. The Republican Party started off with 17 candidates, a record. Trump largely used his own money to fund his campaign, frustrating business interest groups who have traditionally bankrolled prior Republican campaigns.

His views are in sharp contrast with those held by his party but this has not stopped him from winning big. This is the first election when party insiders tried everything to dethrone their front runner but failed miserably in the end. Trump is truly the first Twitter-era candidate, exploiting the social media platform to get nearly $1 billion of free media attention. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is the first woman candidate to be likely nominated from a major party. When she was Secretary of State, she maintained a private email server at home to conduct government business, a bizarre arrangement that ordinary mortals will not even dream of.

The FBI is now investigating if some of those emails were improperly handled, compromising the country’s secrets. This is the first time that a major party candidate’s actions are under government investigation this close to a general election.

And finally, this is the first time that an unpopular candidate, Clinton, will take on another candidate, Trump, whose claim to fame is that he is arguably more unpopular than her.

It is way too early at this stage to trust general election polls, but Clinton has at least a 10 point lead over Trump. If she wins, not much will change for India. In foreign policy, she has been even more of a hawk than Obama, so she will likely continue America’s close military cooperation with Pakistan and in West Asia.

Back home, she is expected to take care of the Indian diaspora well, appointing several Indian Americans to key positions in her cabinet or to the courts. For all intents and purposes, she will be running a third-term Obama presidency.

If Trump wins and carries out most of his campaign promises, India will come in for a rude shock because the scale of his proposals, both in magnitude and direction, is truly remarkable. He has hinted that many of America’s trade deals — including NAFTA and the recently concluded TPP — would be renegotiated.

He vows to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US from both China and Japan by slapping tariffs, if necessary, on imports. He has promised to go after countries that manipulate currencies to alter the balance of trade — so, India’s finance ministry mandarins better take note.

He wants to spend more on taking care of US veterans, rebuilding America’s military and investing in America’s public infrastructure such as roads, bridges and airports. India Inc. is not likely to win any contracts during this massive spending binge.

In foreign affairs, he has promised to scuttle the Iran nuclear deal and enter into a strategic agreement with Russia to help manage the Middle East. He has said that rich countries like Germany, Japan and South Korea should reimburse the US military for protecting them, a marked shift in post-World War II US policy that can have a domino effect in South East Asia.

His proposals on immigration will have serious direct consequences for India. Senator Jeff Sessions, a leading immigration critic and prominent advisor, is expected to have a key role in a Trump administration.

Ann Coulter, author of an extreme right-wing book Adios! America where she laments the loss of the culture of America’s whites, claims to have influenced Trump on his immigration stance.

And there’s some evidence to support this because Trump rose to national prominence when he said in rally after rally that most Mexican immigrants are rapists, drug dealers and killers, points repeatedly made in Coulter’s book.

On the subject of legal immigration, Trump proposes to raise the prevailing wage paid to those on H-1B visas and bring back a requirement for companies to hire American workers first. In a recent campaign swing through Delaware, a state that he handily won, he mocked Indian call centre employees by mimicking in a fake Indian accent.

As the most protective major party candidate in decades, Trump’s philosophy is to look inwards and take care of his country first. It is a position that is seriously at odds with the way the world has been moving for at least 25 years, a movement that has lifted many economies, including India’s, along the way.

How India grapples with this new American-centric vision can be crucial to how it can face up to its own myriad challenges in the coming years.

The writer is the managing director of Rao Advisors LLC, Texas

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