New Delhi: A new book written by two journalists of The Washington Post has revealed that US President Donald Trump had once left Prime Minister Narendra Modi “shocked” and risked diplomatic relations with New Delhi when he suggested that India and China didn’t share a border.
Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig’s book A Very Stable Genius — based on the moniker Trump once gave himself — states that the two leaders were in a meeting when Trump had remarked: “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border.”
“Modi’s eyes bulged out in surprise” at Trump’s comment and the PM’s “expression gradually shifted, from shock and concern to resignation”, The Washington Post quoted the book in a report.
The rift between India and China has widened on several fronts in the last several years, and one of the reasons behind this is the decades-long border dispute over a 3,488-km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC) separating the two nations.
According to the book, as quoted in the Post report, one of President Trump’s aides later told the two journalists that Modi had “left that meeting and said, ‘This is not a serious man. I cannot count on this man as a partner,’ ”.
The aide also told the book’s authors that “Indians took a step back in their diplomatic relations with the United States”.
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‘Dangerously uninformed’
Rucker and Leonnig also explain that aim of the 417-page book is to “reveal Trump at his most unvarnished and expose how decision-making in his administration has been driven by one man’s self-centered and unthinking logic — but a logic nonetheless”.
The book goes on to describe another episode where Trump’s lack of historical knowledge on Pearl Harbour comes to the surface.
“Trump had heard the phrase ‘Pearl Harbor’ and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else,” the authors claim.
They also quote a White House official who had said, “He [Trump] was at times dangerously uninformed.”
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