Memes, Farce And Violence Mark Trump's Breathless 36 Hours In India
AHMEDABAD, Gujarat — Shortly before Donald Trump left for his India visit, the U.S. president retweeted a meme of his face superimposed onto a scene from the megahit movie “Baahubali.”
“Look so forward to being with my great friends in India,” Trump said alongside the clip from a war scene, where the “hero,” played by actor Prabhas, hacks his enemies to death and drags one across the ground by his collar.
Meanwhile in India, a previously unheard of organization called the Donald Trump Nagrik Abhinandan Samiti, loosely translated as the Trump Citizens Felicitation Committee and widely believed to be a proxy for the Indian government, had arranged for a crowd of over 100,000 supporters to be bused into a freshly renovated cricket stadium in Gujarat, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state, to give the U.S. president the kind of mass adulation he craves.
As the crowded stadium impatiently awaited Modi and Trump’s arrival on Monday morning, the public address system belted out Bollywood songs with lyrics like, “Mere India ko bura kaha toh Dishoom/ Jana Gana pe na khada hua toh Dishoom” — loosely translated as, “If you say anything bad about India, Dishoom / If you don’t stand for the national anthem, Dishoom.”
The Dishoom, Bollywood’s preferred onomatopoeia for the sound of a violent punch thrown by action movie heroes since at least the 1980s, was supposed to reflect the supposed muscular nationalism of Modi and Trump.
This breathless day and a half, from Trump’s tweet to the Dishoom song, to the riot in Delhi, captures the unnerving blend of absurdity, farce, tragedy and outright human suffering that characterizes this period of global tumult where humanity’s fate is in the hands of the likes of Trump, Modi, Boris Johnson, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro.
But by mid-afternoon, as Trump stood beside Modi in the western state of Gujarat and congratulated him for leading a “democratic, peaceful,...
