MJ Akbar

is the author of, among several titles, Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan. His latest book is Gandhi: A Life in Three Campaigns 

The critics must stand down or shut up. President Donald Trump, accused of making policy during press conferences, has finally offered a rational reason for bringing peace to every corner of this fractious world: he wants to go to Heaven. This is good news for everyone, except possibly God.

On any rational assessment God would never win the Nobel Peace Prize. God cannot escape responsibility for the first Armageddon, which isn’t over. The history of war begins in Paradise with the conflict between God and Satan over young Adam and Eve. That established the bookends: every partisan believes that good is on its side and the enemy is pure evil. The First Couple can also take the credit, if that is the right word, for the peculiar morality of war. They betrayed God and switched sides.

It is axiomatic that when Trump reaches heaven he will challenge God over the divine record and set about reinventing Paradise.

Heaven, we have been informed on good authority, is like America. This means, ipso facto, that there is democracy out there. Democracy means elections. You can­not have one entity, however omnipotent, sitting on the celestial throne for eternity. It’s not fair. It’s not American. God has had no challenge since Satan lost Paradise, but that age of comfort is over. The electorate in heaven will be a bit large of course, but thanks to California (heaven with drugs) there is enough technology now to manage the process. Trump will insist, naturally, that angels do not vote, since they are God’s slaves, however cherubic they might look. Only free people get the vote.

Trump’s campaign themes are in place, sitting on the shelf, written on his collection of red caps, which encapsulate his philoso­phy. The first should be persuasive enough for voters: TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.

So far only God has made such a claim. God has competition now. The flaw in God’s manifesto is obvious. God was not right about Adam and Eve, nor about Satan. Adam was a darling son but abandoned a home as fine as Paradise for better pastures, setting a template for future generations. Satan was born to serve. His record? Disobedience. Civil strife. How is God going to answer that in the televised debates?

In contrast, Trump has always been right. He was right about how the Democrats ruined America. He is right about tariffs and anyone who disagrees is an ignoramus cuss pot. Does God understand global trade? Has God ever run a business? Built a Trump Tower? Been president of a country which in the months of July and August 2025 added $21 billion a day to its national debt? Twenty-one billion, not million. Every single day. With the total national debt racing towards $40 trillion. Trillion. That’s counting in real cash, dollars, not in some silly sky-blue roubles or yuan. You need to answer these questions, God, if you want to be elected.

Trump has the answers because he is the best. Best in everything, about any­thing: “I’m a perfect physical specimen.” “I know words. I have the words.” “I know more about grass than any human being.” Ad infinitum.

He knows which names are correct. Pentagon merely describes an architect’s whimsy. Department of War is so much more accurate. Next on the agenda: America’s defence industry will be called the offence industry. Again, so much more accurate.

Has God, who merely created the world, with dubious side effects, ever managed the world? Look at what Trump has achieved within the first hundred days of his second term. This is how he summed up the fallout of his tariffs: “These countries are calling us up, kissing my ass.” Which country has called up God, except maybe the Vatican? And God hasn’t bothered to take the Vatican’s call for quite a while.

Any global opinion poll will expose God’s limitations. More than half the world doesn’t believe God exists. Every single person on this earth now believes that Trump exists. Who has more credibility? God or Trump? The election for the throne in the sky is going to be easier than America 2024.

The clincher is the promise on a second red cap: MAKE HEAVEN GREAT AGAIN. Let’s see God negotiate that one.

God might argue that the unique strength of heaven is equality. All the divisive sins of earth—religion, class, gender, ethnicity, colour—gone. Utopia is happily-ever-after. If that is true then God must be a socialist, even if socialists do not believe in God.

Time for the trump card. Who has done more to make America socialist than Donald Trump? It would not be farfetched to call him a secret socialist. What are tariffs except protectionism, the go-to policy of all socialist states in the Soviet Union? The second mantra of socialism is nationalisation. Trump has an­nounced that the American government will buy 10 per cent of Intel shares to prevent the tech behemoth from implosion. Reports suggest that Trump wants his government to become a shareholder in the defence industry. Government ownership of shares is creeping nationalisation, the panacea of socialism. India suffered an incurable form of this disease till the 1970s, which sabotaged the growth of the Indian economy. It took more than seven decades to restore Air India to the private sector. Comrade Deng Xiaoping opened China’s eyes in the 1980s, and abandoned bamboo-curtain socialism to create a capitalist economy with a few egalitarian characteristics. Trump is Deng’s mirror image. He is adding socialist charac­teristics to robust capitalism. This could win some serious brownie points with heaven’s voters.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin (Photo: Reuters)

This brings us to an existen­tialist question: Will God give up power after defeat? Is God a dictator? For his part, Trump has clarified in his usual simple and easy-to-understand sentences that he is not a dictator: “I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person.” He does use a signature on his diktats that is as high as a column and stretches across the page. He likes his hair or wig. Narcissism perhaps, but not authoritarian. He did ruminate after that dictator statement: “A lot of people are saying: ‘Maybe we like a dictator’.” Let us call that a stream of consciousness remark. That stream is never dry of course; he repeated that observation about many people liking dictators within 72 hours.

God will have one good question for Trump. Why did the all-purpose peacemaker show absolutely no urgency about peace in Palestine? If he paid any serious attention to God’s Holy Land it was brief, until almost every Western ally of America had promised to recognise Palestine as an independent nation. The Abrahamic faiths believe that the gates to heaven lie through Jerusalem, which is one reason why the fortress city has bled for millennia. Men who read the Sermon on the Mount in church and speak of peace in mosque and temple, ravage the region of Abraham, Jesus and Muhammad till it sinks in knee-deep blood with the massacre of innocents in search of land. There is no word more bitter in human history than land. As the horror of Palestine soaks up more blood of innocent children, satire loses meaning.

ONE CAN SEE why Trump gets the hives at the men­tion of India. When country after country scurried to Washington to beg for lower tariffs by paying a flattery tax, fawned and promised a Trump Tower, Prime Minister Narendra Modi did the unthinkable. He challenged Trump’s tariffs as 21st-century imperialism. Instead of pleading, accord­ing to a German newspaper, Modi declined to take four calls from Trump. India must be turning into a nightmare for a man who seeks genuflection as the starting point of negotiations.

Indians responded with collective pride as Modi reminded them that the road to India’s independence and the end of Euro­pean colonialism began with the call for Swadeshi. Buy Indian, Be Indian. In the 1920s Gandhi made a charkha the symbol of independence. On August 26 this year Modi flagged off Maruti Suzuki’s first electric vehicle, the e-Vitara, made in India for the world. Maruti Suzuki announced a further `70,000 crore investment. India has moved to the frontlines of economic achieve­ment through a century of struggle and achievement.

In the contextual discourse Trump’s Russia excuse shrivelled under the glare of facts. China had bought more oil than India while Germany and some European countries had never stopped, so what was the basis of discrimina­tion against India? As this logic collapsed, India’s credibility rose. Modi reasserted India’s strategic autonomy. National Security Advi­sor Ajit Doval went to Moscow for talks with President Vladimir Putin before Putin left for Alaska.

India and China revived a relationship that had cooled. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi came to Delhi for discussions with Doval, prior to Modi’s visit to Beijing in the last week of August. China taunted Washington with studied indifference as Trump twirled the volume of attack up and down, saying at one point that if China did not supply rare earth magnets, it would be lashed with 200 per cent tariffs. He added: “If I played those cards, that would destroy China.” China announced a resump­tion of the sale of rare earths to India.

Modi will make his first visit to China in seven years for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit on August 31 and September 1. The spotlight will be on Modi, Putin and Xi Jinping. A thought might have occurred to Washington: Could the three finesse the Trump initiative on Ukraine? Presi­dent Volodymyr Zelensky owes nothing to Trump. He has been humiliated in the White House, and hears daily the gloat with which the administration proclaims that not a single American dollar is being spent on Ukraine. Instead, America is profiteer­ing from its arms sales to Ukraine, adding an extra 10 per cent on the price. Europe is paying up without a complaint because it is helpless now. When Europe has recovered from the disas­trous decade of Angela Merkel in Berlin, David Cameron in London, and forgotten pretenders in Paris who degraded its defence to pay for handouts to the electorate, Europe will treat America as an ally, not an overlord. But that is still five to seven years away.

Zelensky has sent Modi a message that he is depending on India. Words are chosen with care by the careful. Could India play a part in a freeze-where-you-are option, based on the formula devised for the Himalayan ceasefire line between 1988 and 1993? It was devised on the principle that the solution lies in non-resolution. A ceasefire line is not a border, leaving both sides content with their claims. But it can be the basis of a stand­still agreement which ends hostilities, and permits resumption of bilateral relations in travel, trade and engagement.

The Trump turbulence has had a dynamic impact on blocs that had become dormant. Trump was expecting a meltdown. Instead, BRICS and SCO have been resurrected. Trump set out to Make America Great Again. By the end of his term America could have become as weak in international affairs as it was on the eve of World War I. In the 2020s and 2030s America will still have the strongest military in history but armies become bystanders without the multiplier advan­tage of careful political leadership. Trump has punctured the faith of European allies and ravaged the trust of friends. Deci­sions disrupt, language hurts. India, China, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa, adding the strength of one another to their individual capacities, will not bow. Europe is making baby gurgles to buy time. Trump has ensured that the American umbrella will struggle for space with BRICS, SCO, and surely soon ASEAN, which prefers to wait, watch and then act in self-interest.

Donald Trump wanted a new world order. He has got it.