Love match: Modi-Trump’s tariffs tussle

0:28The Economist

0:40And anyone who watched its debut in 1975 might not have bet on its longevity. But this show's anarchic counterculturalism has proved extraordinarily popular and resilient. Our correspondent celebrates the 50th birthday of Saturday Night Live.

1:00First up, though.

1:06US President Donald Trump and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi have long enjoyed a bromance. I present to you, my friend, India's friend, the President of the United States of America, Mr. Dolan Trump. Namaste When the two met at the White House yesterday, Modi matched Trump's Make America Great Again with his own version, Make India Great Again or Megha. Magha plus Megha. Tab banjata hai. Add Magha and Megha together, said Modi, and you get mega prosperity. That all sounds promising. But the path of true love doesn't always run smooth. Just before the two men met, Trump appeared to follow through on a key campaign promise to stamp reciprocal tariffs on goods from every country that taxes American imports.

2:07We're just going to do it the easy way, and we're just going to say whatever you charge, we charge. India is among the countries that would be hit hardest by those American tariffs, and the two have other thorny issues to deal with, including immigration and defense. So can love see them through? Indian America are hugely important trading partners. Total trade between the countries has doubled in the last decade to almost$200 billion last year. And American firms employ 1.7 million people in India. Kira Khuyu is our India correspondent. Back in the States, America's economy benefits hugely from a 5 million strong Indian American diaspora, among whom 80 % have college degrees.

2:51That Indian-American diaspora has become more and more visible. What we see in general is the increasing political and cultural influence of this diaspora. So let's take a step back for a minute then, Kira. What was India expecting of Trump's second presidency? This isn't necessarily new for India last time around in Trump 1.0, Trump did keep calling India tariff king. And so in some ways, India is better prepared for a potential trade spat than most other US partners. Trump has announced that he will impose reciprocal tariffs on the rest of the world. And so tariffs will look the same from the US side as they will from whoever is imposing them on US products.

3:37India has said that it's very open to negotiations on tariffs.

3:47It doesn't look like Modi managed to get concessions on that. But what Modi has done in a very shrewd way is he enlisted Indian companies in his commercial charm offensive before the White House visit. And so we've already got Indian promises to buy more American oil, for example.

4:10And then we had a sort of news line grabbing example very soon after Trump's inauguration, which was the reduction of tariffs on Harley Davidson motorbikes. And this, for whatever reason, is something that Trump has long been complaining about. So India's been making these conciliatory gestures to avert a trade war. So before we get to those, Trump and Modi looked pretty friendly last night. How do they get on personally? It seems that they get on swingingly, that is the official narrative. This is one of the defining bromances of the second Trump presidency. Last time around, there were these mass rallies called Howdy Mordi in Austin, Texas, and then Namaste Trump in Ahmedabad and Gujarat, where the two shared a stage.

4:57And so there's been an understanding that although there might be bilateral irritants, that mutual understanding, a respect for the others, strongman characteristics will carry to the day. But you mentioned bilateral irritants, which is a nice diplomatic phrase there. There are some pretty thorny issues they're going to have to deal with, not least on immigration. Is that right? Yeah. Immigration is a vintage Trump consent. It hasn't really hit India so far. Now that's really changing. So we've got both illegal and legal migration that Trump is taking issue with. On illegal immigration, we've got some quite startling numbers.

5:36So Indians were actually the third biggest group of undocumented migrants in the US. Pew Research Center numbers from 2022 suggest that 725 ,000 Indians reside within the United States as undocumented migrants. So what you saw last week was 104 such individuals being sent back, marshalled in handcuffs on a US military aircraft that was bound for Amritsar Punjab. And Trump is a showman. His anti-immigration policies tend to take on this air of spectacle. But of course, this kind of treatment has left Modi's government exposed to domestic backlash about the treatment of Indian citizens. And then on legal migration, you've got this Indian-American model minority of 5 million.

6:27Indians make up over 70 % of the foreigners that were awarded a skilled worker visa called H-1B in the year 22 to 23. But these visas are intensely disliked within MAGA circles. And so we are now seeing a backlash. Interestingly, there was a poll a couple of years ago that revealed that 75 % of Indian Americans believe that they have already achieved or are about to achieve the American dream. And of course, these kinds of policies might be putting that dream at risk. Trump's executive order on ending birthright citizenship has created quite a grim trend, which is that Indian origin parents in the US are choosing preterm C-sections to meet the February 20th deadline, after which babies are no longer supposed to become citizens at birth.

7:15So the Indian American community is really scrambling to try and make sense of Trump 2.0 and what it means for them personally. And where do the two stand on defence? I think two things stand out. The first one is Trump sees defense as another way of reducing the US trade deficit with India. And so he has made several attempts at convincing Modi already to make larger weapons purchases from American defense companies. The second one is Trump is also not one for nuance, and so he's likely to have little patience for the finer details of something that Indians call multi-alignment, which is India's diplomatic doctrine of engaging with multiple partners, but formally allying with none.

8:02So what we saw in the press statement and what we already heard before is the United States will push India to develop stronger ties with its so-called quad partners. Our meeting today, the prime minister and I reaffirmed that strong cooperation among the United States, India, Australia and Japan. And strengthen slightly more traditionally strategic military partnership against China in the Indo-Pacific. So with all of these things between them, trade, tariffs, immigration, defence, where is this relationship headed? I mean, what was interesting about the joint press conference is that the two leaders were very keen to emphasize the complementarity of their projects.

8:48Modi played very well to Trump's vanity. He explained that MAGA, Make America Great Again, was a great project. And that India's project of becoming a developed nation by its 100th anniversary in 2047 translates into MEGA, Make India Great Again. and that when you put these two projects together, you get a mega partnership. And so there's a lot of goodwill on both sides. There was a poll that came out a couple of weeks ago, but was done back in November, that revealed that 84 % of Indians believe that Trump will be good for India specifically. And I do wonder what would happen if you polled Indians now after some of the trade spats, some of the treatment of Indian migrants.

9:31So there might be a bit of a cooling of expectations. There's been this trend where sceptical American analysts have asked what America actually gains from working with a sometimes prickly India. In this sort of speculative DC speak, they've wondered if America's India bet will pay off. And it seems to me that Indians might now increasingly be asking themselves the same question about Trump's America. Kira, thank you so much for talking to me. Thank you for having me.

10:31The podcast is completely brilliant.

11:01of Russia's Chechnya Republic has been the target of drone attacks as Ukraine strikes back against the invasion. Investigations pointed to only one conclusion, that the plane had been hit by Russian anti-aircraft fire. President Vladimir Putin apologized but didn't accept responsibility. It's not the first time, of course, that Russia has been implicated in the downing of a civilian airliner. And it's just the latest indication that conflict on the ground has growing implications for those traveling in the air. The crash of the Azerbaijan Airlines aircraft in Kazakhstan at the end of December is shocking and terrifying.

11:43Leo Marani is an Asia correspondent for The Economist. But it's only the latest in a string of these incidents over the past decade. It's the The third in the past decade is the fourth of the century. And the gap between these incidents is getting shorter. But that's not the only risk in the skies. The other thing that's happening is that the amount of airspace that is available to aircraft is getting smaller. And as we get into 2025, this is almost certainly going to become a bigger and bigger problem. And by bigger problem, you don't mean just the danger rises. You mean that the skies themselves getting more and more constrained.

12:20Precisely, Jason. So what's happening is there's conflict in more and more parts of the world, and there's geopolitical tensions, which is leading some countries to forbid other countries' aircraft to fly over them. Imagine that the wars in the Middle East that are going on at the moment shut down airspace, not just over Israel, but over Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon. And apart from shutting down airspace that make the open airspace more dangerous as well. something precisely like this has happened on multiple occasions in 2024 as Israel and Iran traded ballistic missiles. As recently as the end of December, Houthis in Yemen were firing rockets at Israel.

13:02There's never going to be warnings to this stuff. And so these things are overflying and passing through civil aviation airspace. This is a sort of combination of two different risks. One, the risk of planes being shot out of the sky by mistake. But also, as you issue airspace closure warnings, more and more planes are jammed into more and more congested air routes, which itself is not ideal, neither from the perspective of safety, nor from the perspective of sustainability, because sometimes that means taking longer routes, nor from the perspective of the business of airlines that have to spend more money to do this stuff and also annoy their passengers because it's taking longer.

13:40And clearly, the dynamic that you're talking about here is not not just limited to, well, the recent history in the Middle East? Not at all. So the stuff has been going on for a while. So let's take the Russia-Ukraine war, for instance. Ukrainian airspace has been closed since February 2022. Russian airspace is open, but Western airlines are forbidden from overflying it. What that means is for, let's say, a British aircraft flight to go from London to Beijing, it has to take a much longer route than the one it would earlier have taken, which is why, in fact, they've cancelled that route. But that's not the only thing.

14:16You look at North Africa. Sudan, its airspace is closed. Most airlines refuse to fly over Libya because it's too dangerous. Yemen, nobody wants to fly over there. So there's a whole bunch of places that even if they haven't closed their airspace, even if the carrier's home country hasn't forbidden it from flying over that airspace, airlines are understandably cautious and don't want to fly over certain places. But if you try and picture this now, we're talking about, at least for Western carriers, all of Russia, much of the Middle East, sometimes open, sometimes closed, parts of North Africa, plus dangers over the Red Sea.

14:51What that means is if you think about traffic going from Asia to anywhere west of Asia before the Atlantic Ocean, so we're talking about Africa, the Middle East, Europe, all of those flights are getting squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces. And so it's not just a matter of evading dangers. This is clearly disrupting the industry in a more general sense. Precisely. So European carriers, American carriers, they're at a disadvantage now compared to, say, Chinese ones or Indian ones. Air India, the flag carrier of the country in which I live, although not the bag carrier, I should add. They lost my bag from Bombay to Delhi.

15:26How do you do that? It's one flight. They fly from, let's say, New Delhi to San Francisco directly over Russia. It's a shorter route. It uses less fuel. they can charge lower prices. American airlines are complaining that this amounts to an unfair trade advantage. Why, just this week, there was a piece in the Financial Times that was looking at how much Chinese carriers have added capacity to European capitals, whereas European carriers have far reduced their capacity because of these constraints. So that's one thing. The other is, it affects cargo operations. A third is that some airlines that built their business model on this sort of thing.

16:03So take Finnair, the airline of Finland. They used to advertise, oh, take the shortcut over Russia, over the North Pole. There's no shortcut anymore. BA is no longer flying to China. Virgin's no longer flying to China. Lufthansa is cutting flights. It's not just about aviation. It's having major impacts on global connectivity. So you suggest that this is a problem, a set of problem that's going to get worse over time. Do you think it gets better as conflicts are resolved or is this just the way of the skies? Finnair's chief executive doesn't see this getting resolved for the next decade. And there's all sorts of new things popping up as well.

16:39So one of the risks at the moment is GPS spoofing or GPS jamming, which makes it very hard for a plane to know where it is. And in fact, this probably had something to do with the Azerbaijan Airlines crash as well. But it's incredibly dangerous if your plane doesn't know where it is, or if ground radar doesn't know where the plane is. So the thing is, there's new risks being introduced all the time. I can't predict the end of wars, but I can tell you that flying is going to become a more complicated and perhaps even more expensive thing in the short term. Leo, thanks very much for your time. My pleasure, Jason, as always.

17:28Now, a thought for you. A really good gift shouldn't be generic. So throw away the flowers, cancel the dinner reservation, and this Valentine's Day, buy something far superior for your beloved. An Economist print and digital gift subscription. It's even red. We've got a special deal giving you 30 % off and it ends today. Search Economist subscription for the details. Now that's what I call romance.

18:04In the spring of 1975, a 30-year-old Canadian named Lorne Michaels convinced the least popular of America's three television networks to let him develop a live 90-minute sketch comedy show. John Fasman is our senior culture correspondent. It would air at 11.30 p.m. on Saturdays, Saturday Night Live.

18:28Michaels compared the time slot to a vacant lot on the edge of town, by which he meant there would be few enough people watching then that he could experiment. His show had a sort of anarchic, countercultural sensibility. Its cast included people who had become huge stars like Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, and John Belushi. But they didn't always get along very well with each other. And anyone who saw that first episode would not have bet on its longevity. Live from New York, it's Saturday Night! There's a new film called Saturday Night that dramatizes those first night struggles. Look, my name is Lorne Michaels.

19:07I'm the producer of Saturday Night. The whole night? Yeah, the whole night.

19:13Despite that anarchic opening, we're about to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live. It has won and been nominated for more Emmys than any other show in history. And I think its longevity really testifies to how well the show balances innovation and conservatism. Anyone who watched the first show and then did a Rip Van Winkle and woke up in time for the 978th show would find it incredibly familiar. It still has 10 to 12 sketches per show. It still has a segment called Weekend Update, which is a new show parody. There's still a musical guest who performs twice. And the show still adheres to some old-fashioned production routines, like they still use hand-colored cue cards.

19:55One thing that has kept the show consistent is that Lorne Michaels, who created the show in 1975, still runs it at the age of 80. His gift really was for nurturing and finding comedic talent more than for performance itself. And that's what he's done to a remarkable degree over the past 50 years on Saturday Night Live.

20:19One of the ways that SNL is innovated is with short digital videos. These are cheap and easy to produce. And in fact, one of them, filmed by The Lonely Island, which is a comedy trio starring Andy Samberg, who is a cast member, had one of the first viral YouTube hits with their sketch, Lazy Sunday. Lazy Sunday, wake up in the late afternoon. Call Parnell just to see how he's doing. Hello, what up, Porn? No, Sandberg, what's cracking? You thinking what I'm thinking? Party up, man, it's happening. And in recent years, the cast has grown a lot more diverse. The initial cast had a bunch of outsized personalities who were constantly at war with each other.

20:58But the show has really come to prize versatility and collegiality. And what that does is it lets each member shine So you often have people who are hired as writers who end up being performers. Performers often write. The cast usually has a background in improv or stand-up, which means they're pretty adaptable. And people often find fame doing things they didn't initially think they'd be doing. Tina Fey, for instance, was hired as a writer, but she became a performer. She hosted Weekend Update. And then after leaving Saturday Night Live, she produced two hit TV shows. And she also produced a hit film and musical, Mean Girls.

21:33The person who preceded her as head writer, Adam McKay, went on to create the Anchorman movies, as well as Vice, a very funny movie about Dick Cheney. And politics has really been a mainstay of SNL's humor. Its ratings go up during election years. People tune in to see how they're portraying different presidential candidates. Hello, little girl. What's your name? Lisa Myers. Well, Lisa, if you're that good a sales lady, maybe I could use you up on Capitol Hill. One of the most memorable ones, this is from when I was a kid, is Phil Hartman, portraying Ronald Reagan as sort of a genial grandpa in public and just a ruthless mastermind behind closed doors.

22:13We are almost out of time, so I will instead ask each candidate to sum up in a single word the best argument for his candidacy. Governor Bush, strategery. In 2000, Will Ferrell debuted his now-famous performance as George W. Bush. In fact, Saturday Night Live got some credit for helping Bush into office because the portrayal of Bush is kind of dopey, but he's also really genial and seems fun. Al Gore, by contrast, who was played by Daryl Hammond, just comes off as insufferable to such an extent that Gore's staff showed him the performance and it helped him sort of become less robotic and warmer on stage.

22:55There's something about what SNL does, the position in Occupy, that's just magic. and its viewership is still strong, its ad revenue is still strong, even though the way people watch it now has changed. People will still make a point, some of them, of being in front of their TV late at night on Saturdays, but the sketches all have a second life on YouTube, and people will catch up with them on the next day. In a recent biography of Lorne Michaels, there is a great line by Amy Poehler, who is a former cast member, who described Saturday Night Live as that show your parents used to have sex to that you now watch from your computer in the middle of the day.

23:31Thank you.

24:15Thank you.

24:29Thank you.