Donald Trump calls Narendra Modi 'gentleman', 'great man', 'good friend' in televised US cabinet meeting

New York: Calling India’s prime minister Narendra Modi a “gentleman”, “great man” and “good friend”, US president Donald Trump waded into multiple mentions of India in a rambling ‘cabinet meeting’ which turned out to be less of a meeting and instead a signature Trump riff on the US president’s pet song “What’s he done for me?” [caption id=“attachment_4247235” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  File image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US president Donald Trump. AP[/caption] “He (Modi) tells me he built a library in Afghanistan. That’s great and I don’t know who uses it but it’s worth about 5 minutes of what we give them”, Trump said, scrunching his fingers together, at pains to explain to the captive audience of news cameras how he is negotiating better deals for America with countries big and small, rich and poor. In the same meeting, Trump changed his story on his outgoing Defence Secretary James Mattis, saying that he “fired” him, banged a drum about his own “popularity”, hunkered down on his border wall rhetoric, repeated how “alone” he was during Christmas in Washington DC with only “secret service guys with machine guns” for company, threw many of his own colleagues under the bus and yammered about everything under the sun that came into his head just that moment. He also called Syria the land of “sand and death”. In the same ‘stream of consciousness’ briefing, he mentioned Modi and India at least twice. “They used to charge us millions of dollars for overflights. I asked them not to, I said why do you do this? He said because nobody ever asked me not to. But now he doesn’t charge us anymore. He’s a good man”, Trump said referring to India and Modi. Taking nearly 35 minutes of on-camera questions, Trump used the news pool to show Americans how the sausage gets cooked and he’s going to be doing more of this all year. This was his 18th on-camera cabinet meeting and the first after his tantrum shut down the government on 22 December. This was Trump’s moment to make his case before Democrats take power in the House on Thursday; he squeezed the last drop out of it. During the ride, Trump also offered an abridged history of how Russia came to be: “There’s India and there’s Russia. Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made them Russia because they lost all their money fighting in Afghanistan. Why isn’t Russia there? Why isn’t India there? Why are we there from 6000 miles away?”