New Delhi: For the second time in a week, US president Donald Trump has sought to paint prime minister Narendra Modi as a supplicant who is keen to please him.Speaking at the House Republican members policy retreat a day ago, the US president said India had pressed his office for faster delivery of 68 Apache helicopters. Incidentally, a report by Times of India claims that India ordered only 28 Apache helicopters in total, and as of December last year, all of them had been delivered.Trump spoke on Modi’s visit to him to broach the subject of the Apaches, “India ordered 68 Apaches and Prime Minister Modi came to see me. ‘Sir, may I see you please’.”“Yes,” Trump added in a slightly more officious voice.“I have a very good relationship with him,” Trump continued.Incidentally, in 2019, CNN did an analysis of how Trump’s use of the word ‘sir’ indicated heavily that the account he was essaying was fictional.Trump then spoke of their current equation.“He’s not that happy with me because, you know, they’re paying a lot of tariffs now because they’re not doing the oil, but they are. They’ve now reduced it very substantially, as you know, from Russia,” Trump said.The Trump administration has imposed a 25% “penalty” on Indian exports to the US, citing India’s trade in Russian crude during the course of the Ukraine-Russia war. This is over the 25% tariffs that were already imposed on India since August last year. There has been no bilateral trade agreement between the two countries yet.Trump added that the US was “getting rich because of tariffs, by the way.”“I hope everyone understands that. They hate to report [on this]. We’re going to have over $650 billion poured into our country or coming in shortly,” he added.Talking to reporters about tariffs aboard Air Force One on January 4, Trump had said that Modi knew that it was “important to make” Trump happy.“They [India] wanted to make me happy, basically. Modi is a very good man; he is a good guy. He knew I was not happy, and it was important to make me happy,” Trump has said.The Hindu meanwhile has reported, citing government data, that India’s Russian oil imports rose to a six-month high in terms of volume and value in November 2025. But Reliance Industries said a day ago that it is not expecting any Russian crude oil deliveries in January, something that Reuters reports could sharply cut India’s Russian oil imports during the month to the lowest in years.