The sweeping Democratic victory across the US Congress marks the definitive collapse of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement and leaves President Donald Trump a politically crippled “lame duck” whose tariff regime against India is effectively over, world-renowned economist Jeffrey D Sachs told NDTV today.
“India should put forward an open trade proposition right now; say, ‘Look, the decks are cleared. Here is how we can move forward. No more fighting.
For India, which has weathered months of turbulent bilateral ties, tariff threats and Middle East energy shocks during Trump’s second term, the electoral rout hands India a decisive leverage at the negotiating table, Sachs said. Let’s just get on with our business’,” Sachs said, urging New Delhi to propose low, flat tariffs to return to normalcy while capitalising on how politically weakened Trump is.
“Don’t trust this administration; don’t trust the United States, for that matter. I tell them, ‘You have no inside track, believe me, and there’s no special relationship here, especially with Trump’. He doesn’t have any special relations except with his bank account. Sachs called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin to act through the BRICS grouping – which includes Iran – to halt the conflict in the Middle East that has strangled global commerce and threatened India’s energy security.
Even inside Trump’s inner circle, figures harbouring 2029 presidential ambitions including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will now restrain Trump from ordering fresh military strikes while a Democratic-controlled Congress cuts off budget appropriations for his policies, Sachs said.
Don’t become an ally of the United States,” Sachs said. “People said, ‘Oh, but we have an inside track, we’ll get a good trade policy.
Sachs argued that Trump’s unilateral application of trade duties was already thrown out by the US Supreme Court and lacked constitutional backing. “Trump doesn’t have the authority; the American people absolutely have repudiated these tariffs. They paid for them. “MAGA was largely a white base; it tried to talk the Hispanic vote into Trumpism, but the Hispanic vote departed from Trump.
Because congress did not vote for this,” he said, it is taxation without representation.
In this sense, we’ve just elected the most multi-ethnic Congress in our history and governorships as well,” Sachs said.
