Trump heads to India eyeing trade deal as re-election trophy

As Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi fetes Donald Trump this week at the Taj Mahal and at a posh state dinner, the US president will be thinking about securing what would be another re-election campaign trophy: A trade deal.

US and Indian officials have been talking for months about a trade agreement that would bring the two economic giants closer, but those negotiations have stalled to the point that the American leader has tried downplaying the chances for an agreement by the time he departs New Delhi.

"But we're going to India, and we may make a tremendous deal there, or maybe we'll slow it down," Mr Trump said last week. "We'll do it after the election. I think that could happen, too."

Mr Trump has several verbal and nonverbal tells, body language and phrases he reflexively resorts to frequently. When he is agitated, he sometimes folds his arms against his chest. And when he is uncertain how an unresolved matter - especially on foreign affairs - he says some version of this: "So we'll see what happens."

Mr Trump would, if the two sides can strike a deal, achieve another 2016 campaign promise. With three political rallies in as many days in three states he is trying to secure as an Electoral College backup plan - Arizona, Colorado and Nevada, which culminated with a wild, insult-laden Las Vegas rally that spanned nearly two hours - showed, the president is planning to tout the state of the US economy and trade pacts he already has secured as a major selling point to voters.

Convincing Mr Modi to agree to terms on even a small pact would give Mr Trump - a showman who is not afraid to over-exaggerate facts to his own benefit - would give him another trophy to show off at rallies in key swing states.

"While the extreme left has been wasting America's time with vile hoaxes, we've been killing terrorists, creating jobs, raising wages, enacting fair trade deals, securing our border lifting up citizens of every race, color, religion and creed," he said at the Las Vegas rally.

"America is no longer for sale. Last month, we ended the NAFTA catastrophe and I signed the brand new US-Mexico-Canada agreement, USMCA," he said on Friday, touting one of his trade pacts. "And you remember that USMCA is a gigantic victory for farmers, ranchers and manufacturers all across the great state of Nevada."

"I also took the strongest ever action to confront China's massive theft of American jobs. Our strategy worked," he added. "Last month, we signed a groundbreaking trade agreement, probably the biggest agreement of any kind ever signed with China."

The latter statement was a prime example of how Mr Trump exaggerates his achievements: the deal with China, even himself and his top aides have admitted, is merely the first part of an envisioned two-part agreement. And Mr Trump's top trade negotiators have admitted they left most of the difficult-to-resolve issues for the second part, towards which a new round of talks have not yet begun.

No matter for Mr Trump, who is busily selling it to swing-state voters as an economic game-changer. Securing even an incremental deal with India would give him another line with which he could hammer his eventual Democratic general election foe and paint himself as a global dealmaker trying to right the wrongs done to voters by his predecessors.

"Ronald Reagan was great. I thought he was a great guy, great president," Mr Trump told the Vegas crowd. "Didn't like his policy on trade. That's okay."

When it comes to aiding his re-election campaign, just about any agreement to bring back on Air Force One would be, in the president's own word, "okay."

Richard Rossow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank, said the Trump team is going to India with "some type of modest trade agreement" in mind.

"We're not talking about a broad-brush free-trade agreement that includes, you know, hundreds of sectors and bringing customs down to zero duty," Mr Rossow said. "Basically, the mini-trade agreement that we're talking about right now is that both sides would agree to remove some of the recent trade impediments we put in place."

Both sides have made moves since Mr Trump took office that has made it more difficult for US and Indian companies to get their goods and services into the other country's market. Knocking down some of those barriers and putting them in a document would allow Mr Trump to say it's just the latest way he is living up to one of his campaign's mantras: "Promises made and promises kept."

To be sure, there are "a lot, a bunch" of unresolved issues that stand between the two sides and a deal, a senior administration official said on a call with reporters on Friday. The White House sees "an increase in barriers, not a decrease," the official said, meaning blockages to US services and goods being allowed into India.

"Whether or not an announcement on a trade pact," the senior official said, "is really wholly dependent on what the Indians are prepared to do."

As always, Mr Trump is banking his personal relationship with Mr Modi will help bring about a deal the way he claims his self-described friendships with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe helped foster trade pacts with those countries.

"You haven't heard the president when he's up there with Prime Minister Modi saying things that would, you know, put people off. You know, President Trump has done that a number of times with India in other forums, but not the big public stages," Mr Rossow said. "So, I think the way that they're setting this meeting up, I think they're reducing as much as they can the chance that there's going to be some kind of diplomatic incident."

Mr Trump appeared to send Mr Modi a message about who has leverage when they meet behind closed doors on Tuesday.

"And I'm going to India next week and we're talking about - you know, they have 1.5 billion people, and Prime Minister Modi is number 2 on Facebook. Number 2 Think of that," the American leader said at a separate event in Las Vegas on Thursday.

"You know who number one is? Trump," he said with a smirk. "Do you believe that? Trump. Number one."