A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/opinion-what-makes-trump-a-better-candidate-for-india-and-world-13831800.html An AI-generated (courtesy notebookLM.google.com) podcast based on this essay is here: In all humility, I accept that my endorsement of Donald Trump for the office of POTUS doesn’t make a difference, but I think it’s important for me to articulate why I think Trump is the better choice for all concerned.  On the one hand, there are the purely objective factors: economic policies, foreign policy, immigration, and so on. On the other hand, there are the subjective factors: who I personally think is good for the US and for India, the only two countries, lets’ face it, that I care about.  The subjective factors are the ones that matter, I suspect, and my views are shaped by my own personal history. I grew up in an India that looked up to America; many houses had framed photos on their walls that showed a young John Kennedy walking with Nehru in the Rose Garden of the White House; as a food-deficit country we awaited the PL-480 shipments of foodgrains, so much so that cornflour in Malayalam is called ‘American maavu’ or flour.  I remember as a child when Marilyn Monroe died, and John Kennedy, and I listened to the Voice of America coming in on shortwave radio from, I think, Mauritius; I went to the nearby US Information Center to see an exhibit of moon rocks; my father’s PhD thesis was on John Steinbeck; I read SPAN magazine that showed a sanitized picture of life in the US that was aspirational. In college, I devoured information about America, reading Time and Newsweek magazines. I went to the US consulate in Chennai to use the library; and my beloved professor Anthony Reddy, seeing our collective obsession with the US, referred to it as “God’s own country” (this was before Amitabh Kant as tourism secretary propagated that moniker for Kerala, and in any case I believed that my two homes – Kerala and California – were indeed God’s own countries, at least before systematic rot set in). America permeated our consciousness. Those were the days before TV, and so American soap operas were not yet available in India, but American films were, and I still remember watching many of them. It was our Saturday ritual in the open-air theater. Do I remember many of them? No, but a few, like “Guns of Navarone”, “Death Wish”, still stand out. No, not exactly highbrow, but they left an impression. So did reading William Faulkner, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, Tennessee Williams, and even “The Exorcist”.  Nixon and Kissinger and their decision to send the 7th Fleet into the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India in 1971, and the shenanigans of Watergate, plus their  coverup of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, gave me the impression that Republicans were not to be trusted and that they were the bad guys, as compared to the Democrats: I remembered the two Kennedy assassinations. Taking the GRE and GMAT, and then going to grad school on scholarship was an achievement, especially because in those days relatively few from India were able to go to the US. Then working at Bell Labs, where I was active in the anti-apartheid movement there that asked AT&T to withdraw from any company doing business in South Africa. It was a just and proper position.  My friends in that effort were all, I suspect, Democrats, and when I was moving to California, they advised me to go Berkeley rather than Stanford, as I had been admitted to both. I didn’t, which was probably a good thing, as I found later that the People’s Republic of Berkeley, as it is derisively called in the Bay Area, was not that much to my taste anyway.  I was, however, left- and Democrat-leaning for years, and I used to even subscribe to the New York Times and Nation magazine. When I left for California, though, one of my friends at Bell Labs correctly predicted that I’