TOI correspondent from Washington: MAGA fundamentalists are having an almighty meltdown after US President Donald Trump hosted a Diwali celebration in the White House on Tuesday, their hysteria underlining the growing hostility towards immigrants and foreigners in nativist circles in America. Scores of MAGA supporters, many of them Christian nationalists, berated the Trump on social media after he lit a Diwali diya (lamp) in the Oval office in the presence of prominent Indian-Americans in his administration and from Corporate America.
“The White House has been defiled by celebrating Diwali with a pagan ritual” and “Trump has been compromised by demon worship” were among the dozens of posts on X from MAGA fundamentalists, some of whom called for a nation in which Christianity is the only religion recognized by the government. It is not the first time Trump has hosted a Diwali event at the White House; he did so during his first term, continuing an administration tradition that first began in the Bush White House in 2003 and continued into the Obama and Biden administrations, when it got bigger and attracted ever-larger throngs of Indian-Americans. Although Tuesday’s event was much smaller, involving only about two dozen invitees, Trump praise for the community and its success rankled his MAGA base, which has some of the lowest education and health metrics in the country and is in the throes of an isolationist fervor.According to several surveys, median household income of Indian-Americans is double that of white US-born Americans and the national median ($126,000 v $ 69,000). Nearly 80 percent of Indians and Indian-Americans have college degrees compared to 36 percent for native-born Americans, “What a wonderful culture and what a wonderful group of people,” Trump said as he walked into the Oval Office for the lamp lighting ceremony, waving to the CEOs of IBM (Arvind Krishna), Micron Technology (Sanjay Mehrotra), Adobe Systems (Shantanu Narayen), and Palo Alto Networks (Nikesh Arora), who were among the Indian-American executives who attended the event. FBI Director Kash Patel, National Intelligence czar Tulsi Gabbard, Justice Department’s Civil Rights head Harmeet Dhillon, and White House policy Advisor on AI Sriram Krishnan were among those present from the administration. “This is a serious group of people…seriously the biggest business people in the world….whatever they are teaching you, they are teaching you well,” Trump said, talking up the performance of the Indian-American CEOs, including the current stock market performance of their companies and quizzing them about their US investment plans. In the spirit of the current White House, all of them fawned over the President, praising him for his leadership and vision and pledging support for his MAGA outlook. But that did not avert a flood of rage-posting from the nativist flock which sees Indians and Indian-Americans as “job stealers” or “unassimilable foreigners,” often invoking stereotypes about skin color, hygiene, caste, and religion. “The horrible optics of this are only surpassed by the horrible smell in there,” read one post.Among the critics was Nick Fuentes, a raging racist platformed on Elon Musk’s X, who has become increasingly hostile to Trump and his global engagement. “This administration is a joke,” Fuentes told his nearly million followers, posting a video of Trump lighting the Diwali diya, accompanied by a rant about Trump “dancing around with a bunch of Indians lighting lamps and eating curry.”
