A top comedian has lifted the lid on some of the surprising ways one of America’s largest immigrant communities relates to notoriously anti-immigration President Donald Trump.
“I can give you a hot take—I mean, the Indian community loves Trump,” stand-up comedian and New York Times bestselling author Zarna Garg told Joanna Coles on the latest episode of The Daily Beast Podcast. “We don’t have the problems with him that a lot of people in America have.”
Aside from occasional frictions over trade, the MAGA leader has maintained a consistently warm relationship with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi since first assuming office in 2017.
Despite turbulence over tariffs against the most populous South Asian nation, Trump told reporters ahead of a meeting with Modi earlier this year that the U.S. bond with India is “the strongest, I believe, it’s ever been.”
Supporters say the coziness of the Republican president’s relationship with his Indian counterpart owes largely to personal chemistry and an aligned nationalist-populist ideological agenda.
Critics, meanwhile, suggest Trump in fact admires Modi’s “strongman” image at home, along with the centralization of power that has accompanied democratic backsliding and mounting concerns over human rights under Modi’s now 11-year tenure.
Speaking with The Daily Beast Podcast on Sunday, Garg said the Indian American community’s largely positive view of Trump goes far beyond the affinity between the two nations’ populist leaders.
“First of all, our politicians are crooked back home, so that just seems to be a job requirement. So I mean, they’re like, of course he’s a criminal, they all are,” Garg, who is Indian American, said. “Nobody who’s not a criminal wants to do this job.”
Upon taking the White House for the second time in January, Trump became the first felon in U.S. history to occupy the office of president, following his conviction last year on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments to a pornstar in exchange for covering up their extramarital affair.
The months since have witnessed mounting alarm over allegations that MAGA officials have used their office for private gain. This includes accusations that Trump himself is profiting from his second presidency through his hotels and businesses, that Cabinet members have engaged in improper spending and misuse of government resources, and that Trump family members and close advisers are benefitting from access, foreign deals, and influence-peddling opportunities.
Since January, Trump has also launched the largest mass deportation drive in U.S. history, charging ahead with nationwide enforcement raids and restrictions on even legal migration built around sweeping executive actions and revivals of centuries-old laws otherwise shelved by previous administrations.
Garg says these mass removals, slammed by critics for undermining due process and humanitarian protections, have also played well among the Indian American community, itself second only to Mexico in terms of the largest national groups among foreign-born U.S. immigrants.
“Indian people, by and large, are legal immigrants in America, which means it was years of waiting, years of applying paperwork,” she told the show. “They did not understand what was happening during the Biden administration. We could not understand why they were not taking this seriously, because ask any Indian person—we have relatives who have been waiting 15 years in line because that’s the right thing to do, and then it felt like anybody who was breaking the law was getting rewarded.”
“I don’t think he should be doing things the way he’s doing them,” she clarified. “I have a problem with his execution. But a lot of the problems that he has highlighted are real problems, and just saying that the problem doesn’t exist is not going to make them go away.”
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