The Washington Post reports that while deciding to send more troops to Afghanistan, the US President affected Indian PM’s accent and recounted his praise.
New Delhi: US President Donald Trump is under fire again for faking an accent. This time, though, he is reported to have feigned an Indian accent to imitate Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
According to a report in The Washington Post, the Trump administration is now planning to send up to 1,000 more American troops to Afghanistan this spring. Trump is said to have been inspired by Modi’s praise, while also imitating him.
“Senior administration officials said that the President has been known to affect an Indian accent and imitate Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who in an Oval Office meeting last year told him, ‘Never has a country given so much away for so little in return’ as the United States in Afghanistan,” the report said.
Modi, who last paid an official visit to Trump in June 2017, is known to have been all praise for the Trump administration’s role in Afghanistan. The Post report adds: “To Trump, Modi’s statement was proof that the rest of the world viewed the United States as being duped and taken advantage of in Afghanistan.”
But Trump’s imitation of an Indian accent is nothing new. In April 2016, on the campaign trail inthe state of Delaware, the former businessman and TV personality used a fake accent to mock a call centre representative in India. He went on to lament the fact that when Americans call their credit card companies, they discover their customer support is based overseas.
Using a fake accent to demonstrate his template for a conversation, Trump had added: “Guess what, you’re talking to a person from India. How the hell does that work?”
It’s not just Indian accents he fakes. In October 2017, Trump’s address commemorating Hispanic Heritage Month drew flak for his exaggerated Spanish accent. Referring to Puerto Rico’s humanitarian crisis in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, the President went on to fake an accent while saying, “We love Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico!” exaggeratedly, before reverting to his regular accent.
The incident had drawn sharp responses on social media.