New Delhi: When Donald Trump returned to power in 2025 as President of the United States, Indian Americans emerged as one of his most visible constituencies. From the FBI to the White House, Indian-origin figures were suddenly everywhere inside and around the administration.
But a year later, that same cohort is caught in a bitter irony. South Asian conservatives have become both symbols of the Trump coalition and targets of its ugliest edge. After going all in on Trump’s campaign, many now find themselves caught between proximity to power and a rising tide of racist hostility from within the president’s own base.
For a section of the diaspora, especially those aligned with conservative politics, the rise to power initially looked like validation. They were no longer outsiders navigating America, but shaping it. However, visibility is not the same as acceptance. And in Trump’s America, it has come with conditions.
That reality surfaced starkly at a campus event in Montana last year. Vivek Ramaswamy, entrepreneur, politician, and one of the most recognisable Indian-origin faces of the Republican right, was pressed not on policy but on identity. He was asked why he appeared to be “masquerading as a Christian” and how a Hindu immigrant could claim to represent a country rooted, according to the questioner, in Christian values. It was not the first time Ramaswamy had encountered such rhetoric from his fellow Republicans.
The exchange echoed a broader shift. Even as South Asians occupy a disproportionate share of jobs in sectors like technology and healthcare, and hold high-profile roles in government, they are facing a surge of online abuse, much of it emerging from MAGA-aligned spaces.
“After the victory of Trump, a lot of people started looking for the next enemy,” pro-Republican strategist Anang Mittal told WIRED. According to him, Indian Americans, especially conservative ones, have become easy targets — they are visible, successful, and politically useful until they are not.
Busting the ‘model minority’ myth
Indian-origin figures today hold prominent posts across the Trump administration, including White House deputy press secretary Kush Desai, FBI director Kash Patel, DOJ civil rights official Harmeet Dhillon, AI adviser Sriram Krishnan, NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, and Second Lady Usha Vance. These appointments are significant for a minority group that, despite being the highest-earning ethnic population and often described as a “model minority”—a label used to praise Asian immigrants while pitting them against other racial groups—remains a small slice of the electorate.
Their visibility makes them one of the few non-white presences in a largely white administration, even as some of the politics and rhetoric around them continue to engage in openly racist ideas.
But the model minority myth is proving to be a fragile shield. Its positive connotation has, in recent years, curdled into suspicion. Among sections of the far right, particularly the hyper-online Groyper movement led by white nationalist Nick Fuentes, the idea of a “heritage American” has gained ground, one that implicitly excludes anyone who is not white and Christian. In this framing, Indian Americans are not a success story but a threat: Outsiders who assimilate only to compete.
Even as they face this hostility, some Indian-origin conservatives continue to locate its origins elsewhere. In an op-ed for the New York Times in December 2025, Ramaswamy acknowledged the slurs directed at him online but argued that the Groyper movement is, in part, a reaction to “anti-white discrimination.”
Others echo similar lines. Mittal, for instance, points to academia and sections of the Democratic Party as contributors to anti-Indian stereotypes, even as he warns that the right’s growing reliance on racial and religious “purity tests” is becoming difficult to ignore.
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From online resentment to offline hate
The resentment is not confined to online spaces. It increasingly intersects with mainstream policy debates, particularly around immigration.
The H-1B visa programme, through which roughly 80,000 Indian workers entered the US, largely in the tech sector, has become a flashpoint. Critics frame it as a pipeline that displaces American workers, a claim that has gained traction.
“America does not need more visas for people from India. Perhaps no form of legal immigration has so displaced American workers as those from India,” complained Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on X, days before he was shot.
He added: “We’re full. Let’s finally put our own people first.”
Attempts to defend skilled immigration have often backfired. Ramaswamy’s widely circulated post arguing that American culture rewards mediocrity over excellence was intended to justify hiring foreign talent. Instead, it triggered a wave of racial abuse.
Trump’s 2024 campaign positioned itself as “pro-immigration” but “anti-illegal immigration,” a distinction that many Indians interpreted as an assurance that legal, high-skilled migration would be protected, says Raqib Hameed Naik, executive director at the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, a Washington, DC-based think tank that has published multiple reports on rising anti-Indian hate on X.
A CNN report noted that the Centre recorded nearly 2,700 posts promoting racism and xenophobia against Indians and Indian Americans in a single month alone.
The broader picture is further sharpened by the Carnegie Endowment’s 2026 Indian American Attitudes Survey, according to which Indian Americans offer a largely negative assessment of Trump’s second term, including his handling of the domestic economy, international economic policy and immigration, and most continue to identify with the Democratic party by wide margins. The report also points to heightened exposure to discrimination as a defining feature of Indian American life.
From the outside, Indian American’s alignment with a political movement that accommodates white nationalist rhetoric and imagery may seem paradoxical. But scholars argue there is precedent.
“We are a deeply colonised people,” says Siddhartha Deb, author of Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India.
In his view, the Indians in the Trump administration are part of a “comprador class” aligning themselves with power, a term first used in 18th and 19th-century China to describe local elites who enriched themselves by acting as intermediaries for Western interests.
“A significant number of Indians wish to identify with the winners, in terms of material wealth, power, and violence,” Deb theorises.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)