Former US President Donald Trump has expressed his admiration for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, calling him a “friend of mine” and the “nicest human being.”
Speaking on the Flagrant podcast hosted by Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh, the Republican presidential candidate claimed that India’s political landscape had been “very unstable” before Modi took office in 2014, even though his predecessor, Manmohan Singh of the Congress Party, had been in power for a decade.
“On the outside, he looks like he’s your father. He is the nicest and a total killer,” Trump stated of Modi.
Trump also reminisced about Modi’s visit to the US in 2019, when he participated in the grand ‘Howdy, Modi’ rally in Houston, Texas, addressing the Indian diaspora. The event was attended by tens of thousands and was described as the largest gathering ever for a foreign leader in the US.
“It was me and him, and it was beautiful. There were around 80,000 people, and it felt crazy. We were walking around. Today, maybe I wouldn’t be able to do something like that,” Trump added, seemingly alluding to the recent assassination attempts against him.
Trump recounted conversations with Modi regarding India being “threatened” by a “certain country.” “I said, let me help; I am very good with those people,” the former president remarked, before appearing to impersonate Modi, by altering his tone and saying: “I will do it; I will do anything necessary. We have defeated them for hundreds of years.”
“He was talking about a certain country; you can probably guess which one,” Trump continued, apparently referring to Pakistan, India’s nuclear-armed neighbor with which it has had longstanding border disputes and has accused of sponsoring cross-border terrorism.
Ahead of Modi’s visit last month to the US for the ‘Summit of the Future’ conference at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, as well as the Quad summit of leaders from the US, Japan, India, and Australia hosted by President Joe Biden in Delaware, Trump suggested that he would meet with the Indian prime minister. “He (Modi) happens to be coming to meet me next week,” Trump stated during a town hall meeting in Flint, Michigan, referring to Modi as a “fantastic man.”