Republican leader Virgil Bierschwale, running for the Texas Senate election, reacted to Donald Trump‘s 25 per cent tariff on India, and said this is what he predicted. “Folks, you have sent your workers around the word so that they would send remittances home to India which make a few rich as many who live in extreme poverty wonder,” he wrote.“You have discriminated against Americans in America in their own country.”“Basically you were asked in as a guest, and you destroyed your hosts home and family, and now you are wondering why you are getting evicted. Look in the mirror India,” he wrote. Trump also announced an unspecified penalty for India for buying Russian crude oil and military equipment, putting a question mark onthe India-US relationship in the future. “I don’t care what India does with Russia. They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care,” Trump wrote. “We have done very little business with India, their tariffs are too high, among the highest in the world.”Secretary of State Marco Rubio called India an ally and a strategic partner but mentioned that India’s purchase of Russian oil is helping Moscow to sustain its war efforts in Ukraine. “Look, global trade – India is an ally. It’s a strategic partner. Like anything in foreign policy, you’re not going to align 100 per cent of the time on everything,” Rubio said in an interview with Fox Radio.Rubio acknowledged India has “huge energy needs and that includes the ability to buy oil and coal and gas and things that it needs to power its economy like every country does, and it buys it from Russia, because Russian oil is sanctioned and cheap and – meaning they have to – in many cases, they’re selling it under the global price because of the sanctions.”He added that “unfortunately, that is helping to sustain the Russian war effort. So it is most certainly a point of irritation in our relationship with India – not the only point of irritation. We also have many other points of cooperation with them. “But I think what you’re seeing the President express is the very clear frustration that with so many other oil vendors available, India continues to buy so much from Russia, which in essence is helping to fund the war effort” and allowing this war to continue in Ukraine.
