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US President Donald Trump got angry at his own officials in a meeting regarding tariffs imposed on India and China. According to a new book, Trump believed that India imposes higher taxes (tariffs) on American goods than government figures indicate.
In the book ‘Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump’ by New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, it is claimed that Trump had told Commerce Minister Howard Lutnick that he was not being given correct information about the tariffs of India and China.
According to the book, when Lutnick showed the official figures, Trump rejected them as well. He said that these figures are nonsense. India imposes at least 175% tariff on American goods.
The authors of the book Regime Change are Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
India’s average tariff is 16%
According to World Trade Organization (WTO) data, India’s average ‘Most Favored Nation’ tariff in 2025 was 15.8%. That means if India imports 100 types of goods, the average tariff imposed on all of them is about 16%.
Whereas in 2023, the trade-weighted average tariff will be around 12%. In this, more importance is given to those goods which are traded more. That means, in actual trade, the average tariff on India is around 12%.
This is the reason why India is called a high tariff country in the reports of WTO and US Trade Representative (USTR), but the figure of 175% has never been given for the entire Indian tariff infrastructure.
Howard Lutnick, who has been among the leading supporters of Trump’s tariff policy, also cited the example of India and China during his confirmation hearing in the Senate in January 2025. He argued that high tariffs do not always mean inflation, because despite high tariffs in India and China, inflation has been controlled.
According to the book, Lutnick later got caught in a situation where on one hand Trump was making politically tall claims about tariffs and on the other hand government data was not matching those claims.
Trump had said about Ukraine war – India will not agree
The mention of India in the book is not limited to trade disputes only. Another interesting claim has been made in this that a few days after the beginning of Trump’s second term, in a meeting held regarding the Ukraine war, US Vice President JD Vance had included India’s name among the countries that could send a possible peacekeeping force.
According to the report, in a meeting held in the Oval Office on January 30, 2025, Trump’s Russia-Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg presented a proposal to end the Ukraine war. During this time, a meeting was going on in America regarding sending peacekeepers to Ukraine.
When a proposal came up in the meeting to send soldiers from NATO countries like France, Britain and Netherlands, JD Vance expressed concern over it. Vance believed that sending NATO troops to Ukraine could anger Russia and America could also get directly involved in the war.
After this JD Vance suggested why not seek help from non-European countries. Vance put forward the names of Saudi Arabia and India for this work.
The book claims that President Donald Trump laughed upon hearing Vance’s suggestion. He said, ‘Indians will never do this. He will not spend money from his own pocket for something like this.
Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
Trump had said- Modi likes me very much
It was also claimed in the book that Trump had said about Prime Minister Narendra Modi that he likes him very much. And want to come to America to meet him. Trump also targeted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
He described Zelensky as a ‘bad negotiator’. He said Zelensky ruined his entire country by not negotiating properly, but he was very good at getting things done from the Biden government.
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