Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is due at the White House on Thursday, offering President Donald Trump a friendly visitor sandwiched between two high-stakes meetings with key Arab allies about his contentious Gaza takeover plan.
America’s Arab allies are walking a tightrope with Trump as he begins his second term with an admittedly more aggressive foreign policy than during the opening weeks of his first administration. That includes his plan to “take” and “own” the strip along the Mediterranean Sea and then to “run” its cleanup and redevelopment — as well as the proposed relocation of some 1.7 million Gazans.
Trump 1.0 stumbled out of the starting gate eight years ago. When he wasn’t bickering with congressional Democratic leaders, he was clashing with his own Cabinet officials and senior White House aides — firings and departures became normal. But Trump 2.0 has fired out of the gate, with the 47th president busily signing executive orders and making bold threats almost on a daily basis, shaking up Washington and threatening to do the same to the world order.
Trump himself on Sunday acknowledged how his second term has started differently from his first.
“I was fighting everybody because they were very aggressive toward me,” the president told reporters Sunday on Air Force One en route to the Super Bowl in New Orleans, according to a pool report.
“I had a bunch of lunatics like [Nancy] Pelosi and some of these people,” he said of the former speaker and other congressional Democrats. “They fought me.”
While some Democratic lawmakers have been more outspoken in recent weeks, their gripes, warnings and news conferences outside the buildings of federal agencies threatened by Trump and the Elon Musk-run Department of Government Efficiency have done virtually nothing to slow down Trump — that’s been up to the courts.
To that end, the commander in chief has not mentioned Congress when speaking publicly about the Middle East or his sweeping plans to slap tariffs on all sorts of imported items from most other countries. And with Republican control of the House or Senate, early indications suggest Trump — for two years, at least — will have wide latitude to run America’s foreign policy as he sees fit.
Enter Modi.
His planned Thursday appearance at the White House will follow King Abdullah II of Jordan, who was in the Oval Office on Tuesday. The head of the Hashemite kingdom did not explicitly reject Trump’s proposal when asked by the U.S. president himself about Jordan taking in displaced Palestinians.
“I think the point is, how do we make this work in a way that is good for everybody?” Abdullah said as Trump listened intently, a fire crackling behind them. “And, obviously, we have to look at the best interests of the United States, of the people in the region, especially to my people of Jordan.”
It was on the latter aspect, though, that Abdullah took to social media later Tuesday to send a clear message to Trump.
“I stressed that my foremost commitment is to Jordan, to its stability and to the well-being of Jordanians,” he wrote just days after protests in several Jordanian cities objecting to Trump’s talk of removing Palestinians from Gaza permanently.
Things won’t get any less tense next week, when Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi is slated to come calling. It was Abdullah who set the stakes for that session, telling reporters after being asked if he wanted to see the U.S. take over Gaza: “Let’s wait until the Egyptians can come and present [a plan] to the president and not get ahead of ourselves.”
But first, Trump is expected to have a friendlier audience Thursday. He has referred to Modi as a personal “friend” and described their working relationship in a positive way. The Indian leader, though, has faced criticism from some Democrats over his government’s Hindu nationalist policies, with a handful of House progressives boycotting his speech to Congress in 2023.
Trump and Modi spoke by telephone on Jan. 27, with the White House saying in a statement that the two leaders had “discussed expanding and deepening cooperation” on “a range of regional issues, including security in the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and Europe.”
Trade and combating China are likely to be atop the agenda for their first in-person meeting since Trump returned to power. In a preview of that huddle, Trump on their Jan. 27 call “emphasized the importance of India increasing its procurement of American-made security equipment and moving toward a fair bilateral trading relationship,” according to the White House.
Trump’s aggressive implementation of tariffs on imports will have an impact on India’s economy, with Morningstar DBRS analysts noting in a Feb. 3 white paper that the Modi government’s recently released fiscal 2026 budget blueprint was set “against a backdrop of slowing domestic growth and global concerns around the potential for escalating protectionism.”
Trump’s import taxes, and retaliatory ones from some of the world’s other leading economies, are driving those protectionism worries. Modi is expected to present a number of investment proposals to Trump, including plans to buy more American-made goods, which should also please Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill.
The Indian leader has ample incentives to assuage the “America first” Trump. The Morningstar analysts noted that the International Monetary Fund “expects India to remain among the fastest growing major economies from 2025 to 2029,” a trend Modi wants to keep going.
‘Modi’s puppet’
As Trump prepares to hear Modi out, the Indian leader has also been on senators’ minds as they evaluated whether former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s dealings with world leaders, including Modi, should have disqualified her from becoming director of national intelligence. (She was confirmed on a 52-48 vote Wednesday morning, with Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell the lone GOP senator to vote against her nomination.)
Some Democratic lawmakers have questioned Gabbard’s interactions with leaders such as Modi since she left Congress, suggesting the former Democratic congresswoman’s ability to objectively assess intelligence could be compromised. She attempted to knock down any incoming questions from Democrats at the start of her Jan. 30 Senate Intelligence confirmation hearing.
“I want to warn the American people who are watching at home, you may hear lies and smears in this hearing that will challenge my loyalty to and my love for our country,” she said in her opening statement.
“Those who oppose my nomination imply that I am loyal to something or someone other than God, my own conscience and the Constitution of the United States, accusing me of being Trump’s puppet, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s puppet, [former Syrian President Bashar] Assad’s puppet, a [religious] guru’s puppet, Modi’s puppet, not recognizing the absurdity of simultaneously being the puppet of five different puppet masters,” she said.
“The same tactic was used against President Trump — and failed,” Gabbard said. Still, Democratic senators on the Intelligence panel have said they plan to watch her assessments of Modi and other leaders closely.
To take any meaningful action, however, on Gabbard and Modi — or just about any Trump 2.0 foreign policy move — Democrats would need to take control of the Senate after the 2026 midterm elections. That prospect, however, would be a difficult one for the minority party, which faces an unfavorable Senate map this cycle.
“If Democrats were to win all five of the races initially rated as competitive, they’d still be two seats short of a majority,” CQ Roll Call elections analyst Nathan L. Gonzales of Inside Elections wrote last month. “Senate Republicans begin the cycle with the advantage to hold the majority in two years.”
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