I had a little political discussion with Molly, a nurse in the US who knows the Bible like the lines on her palm. She is  happy to be called a prayer warrior. She often attends meetings of Indian evangelical women as a resource person. I asked her somewhat bluntly how she supported an uncouth fellow, who openly says that he would have dated his daughter, if she was not his biological offspring.

She was equally bold in telling me that she would be voting for Trump, as he was not contesting for the post of Pastor of a Pentecostal church but for the post of President of the US. In other words, she found him morally corrupt to be a pastor but politically savvy to be the President again.

I know many Christians of Indian origin in the US who were strong supporters of Trump, though they do not belong to the core group of Republicans who are white, evangelical and who believe that they represent the soul of America. 

In the 16th century when the Puritans from England went to the US and settled down in places like New York, Washington, Boston and Pennsylvania, they were not guided by the thought of making money and becoming rich. Rather, it was the yearning to praise the Almighty in the manner they wanted, not in the manner the Church of England wanted, that took them there.

They were the founders of the US. Wherever they settled down, they set up a church, a school and a newspaper, not necessarily in the same order. Then came the gold-diggers like the settlers in Malabar in northern Kerala, as poignantly narrated by S.K. Pottekkattu in his novel Vishakanyaka (The Poisonous Virgin), comparable in many ways to The Grapes of Wrath by the Nobel-winner John Steinbeck.

They set the moral compass. Today’s evangelicals are like Molly who are willing to support a person like Trump merely because they think he is a bulwark against the tides of time that will eventually reduce the white in the Bible Belt and elsewhere to a numerical minority in another two decades or so. As of now, about 70 per cent of all the children in the US are non-white.

A columnist in the New York Times quoted an evangelical who was clear in his conscience when he voted for the first time. His vote was for Jimmy Carter who represented the ideal Bible-thumbing candidate who proudly stood beside his wife and spoke about the upbringing he had from his mother who worked as a missionary in India. The columnist ended her column mentioning that the same evangelical voter voted this time for Joe Biden, not Trump.

To me, what is most shocking about the elections is that the Americans have not repudiated Trump and Trumpism at least in the manner pre-poll surveys had indicated. I expected the voters to tell the President that they did not want a racist and misogynist, who can’t even articulate a grammatically and idiomatically correct sentence in English, to stay in the White House even for a day.

Instead, we found Trump getting more support than he had during the 2016 elections from all sections of people, including the African-Americans and women. True, the increased support was not sufficient to edge past Joe Biden, who received greater support even in Republican strongholds like Pennsylvania and Georgia.

There is something fundamentally flawed in the American thinking that a person whose candidature for the Republican nominee in 2016 was considered a bit of a joke not only defeated Hillary Clinton, who got more popular votes than him, but even aspired to stay in the White House for another four years.

During Trump’s Presidency, the US saw itself being laughed at and mocked at in world capitals for the lies that Trump kept uttering every time he opened his mouth. He did not have a good word for anyone. He even hinted at the possibility that the killing of Osama bin Laden was just a show, crafted by his predecessor, and the Saudi Royal could be hiding somewhere in the world.

Trump is credited with business acumen. America had such great businessmen as Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Bill Gates, who made America what it is today. In contrast, Trump made his money by setting up gambling centres and investing in real estate. 

Today the industrialists I mentioned are known better for the Foundations that they set up than for anything else. Yes, a skyscraper called Trump Towers is coming up in Noida near Delhi as a symbol of how crony capitalism thrives in the US, as in India. There are even claims that, but for Coronavirus, Trump would have easily won the elections.

The working class is reportedly happy that during the last four years the US economy performed better than was the case during the eight years that Barack Obama led the nation. What is forgotten is that there are some America watchers like Sashi Tharoor, MP, who feels that China has already overtaken the US as the world’s largest economy. 

He even hints at the possibility that the IMF office would shift from Washington to Beijing as, under the IMF statute, its headquarters can only be in the world’s largest economy. If that were to happen, the dollar would lose its preeminence to the Chinese Yuan.

Of course, statistics will prove or disprove Tharoor’s theory but the point is that the US economy might have performed better under Trump but it was not adequate enough to keep it as the world’s greatest power. Trump presided over a divisive America, which could not capture the imagination of the people elsewhere in the world.

There was a time when the whole world lapped up the US’ bid to send a man to the moon. When Neil Armstrong landed on the lunar surface, the world saw it as mankind’s greatest achievement, not just America’s. Also, the world knew that the Second World War was coming to an end when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour for nothing thereafter prevented the US from joining the war.

Of course, one does not forget aberrations like the American intervention in Vietnam. However, for the world at large, America remained the redeemer, who could intervene with decisive power to tilt the balance in favour of world peace and stability. Under Trump, it remained a state which has no ambitions other than keeping itself insular. 

Crisis brings out the best or the worst in a leader. Nearly 2.4 lakh Americans were taken away by Coronavirus, pushing the US to the first slot as the worst performer. Nobody knows what point Trump was making when he threw his mask at the Republican audience after alighting from Air Force One. Was he making a statement that the best way to use the mask is to throw it at a crowd of people?

That is Trump’s level of leadership. Even when the whole world saw him losing to Biden in state after state, he persisted with his lies that he had won. The fact is that he was winning till the votes began to be counted. Come to think of it, he was the one evangelicals like Molly counted on. He is a congenital lier.

It is now clear that it was on Trump’s request that Prime Minister Narendra Modi organised a mega show for the US President in his home state Gujarat. He might have thought a bit erroneously that such a gathering would help him garner the votes of Indian Americans. Modi wanted to do him a favour for what Trump did for him in Houston. 

At the time of writing this column, with Biden getting the necessary electoral votes to be sworn in President in January 2021, there is uncertainty as Trump has been making wild claims that are otherwise laughable. His only hope is in the US Supreme Court. Come to think of it, it was an American President who defined democracy as “by the people, for the people and of the people”!

Trump, perhaps, counts on the fact that the judges nominated by the Republicans are in majority than those nominated by the Democrats. Alas, the judges, who are appointed for life, do not function on partisan lines.

They cannot be expected to support a person who does not want the votes cast against him to be counted. Trump is not Putin and the US is not Russia. There is no way in which he can negate the verdict of the people. That raises the question: How would the electoral outcome impact India-US relations? There is a perception, right or wrong, that a Republican in the White House is better for India.

Despite all the charms that Modi and Co. reserved for Trump, he called India one of the dirtiest places in the world. He would certainly have seen through the wall that Modi erected, almost overnight, in Ahmedabad when he visited India. That did not prevent some Indians from performing puja for Trump’s success. 

For good or bad, political leaders are elected by the people, not delivered by Gods as when Putrakameshti Yajna was held by King Dasharatha and the people of Israel, who were fed up with judges, asked God for a King to rule them. It is a truism that while America is the oldest democracy in the world, India is the largest. The latter has a more advanced and more sophisticated system of election than the US.

What is not commonly understood is that while America was gaining its independence in the late 18th century, India was losing hers. This meant that for the better part of nearly 200 years, the two countries had practically nothing to do with each other. Oddly enough, the country from which the US gained independence was the country to which India lost its independence.

As former Indian Ambassador to the US, K. Shankar Bajpai writes, “India to Americans was mainly the India of Kipling, of Gunga Din, and the jungle books, the rope trick and bizarre religious practices — or, at the same time, of mysticism and other worldliness practiced to the point of incomprehensibility”.

It may appear curious that India established diplomatic relations with the US even before it gained Independence in 1947. In fact, six years before Jawaharlal Nehru made his Tryst With Destiny speech, Sir Girija Shankar Bajpai presented his letter of introduction to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the first diplomatic representative of India. 

The Agent General of India, as Bajpai was designated, was listed under the British Embassy. Almost his first act was to sign on January 1, 1942, separately for India, the Declaration of the United Nations. The same year Bajpai presented his credentials to Roosevelt, the US hired the Cochin House in New Delhi, now Kerala House, to set up the office of the Personal Representative of the President, America’s first diplomatic mission in India.

At that time nobody in India knew much about America. Educated Indians absorbed British views of their “trans-Atlantic country cousins” as crude, brash and assertive. Today, more Indians travel to the US than to any other country and the US Embassy and its consulates see the longest queue of visa seekers in the country.

Even when India had the best relations with the erstwhile Soviet Union, much to the detriment of the US, ordinary Indians preferred to go to the US for studies, for treatment and for business. When Communist leader Pinarayi Vijayan sneezes, it is to the US that he goes for a medical check-up. Similarly, when Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad’s daughter gets admission to an MBA course in the US, he is so happy that he tweets a picture of her sitting beside him on his single-seat sofa.

Trump might not have done much for Modi but he kept silent when Kashmir was split into Union Territories and Amnesty International was sent packing. That was something he would be eternally grateful to Trump. There is no guarantee that Joe Biden, who is more Presidential than the President, would keep quiet, as when goons began attacking Muslims in Northeast Delhi even when Trump was on Indian soil.

Trump will soon be dismissed as a spent force, even by the evangelicals, not to speak of the rest of the Republicans. When television channels stop telecasting him in the middle of his speech because he is telling lies, how can they be expected to turn up when he speaks as just a former President? True, Donald Trump has found his place in American history as a footnote. Nothing more nothing less.

(ajphilip@gmail.com)