Trump and Modi emerged from a bilateral meeting, their first of Trump’s second administration, to announce that the United States and India will be doubling their bilateral trade to $500 billion by 2030, with the U.S., in the words of the president, becoming India’s “leading supplier of oil and gas.”

The two leaders also announced that the U.S. will be increasing its military sales to India “by many billions of dollars,” including Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II supersonic stealth strike fighters.

But Trump on Thursday indicated he was unhappy with Modi’s initial trade concessions, which included reducing India’s tariffs on some Harley-Davidson motorcycles from 50% to 40%, amid a trade deficit of $50 billion in India’s advantage.

“As we deepen our defense partnership, we will also strengthen our economic ties and bring greater fairness and reciprocity to our trading relationship,” Trump told reporters during a joint press conference in the East Room. “Prime Minister Modi and I agree that we’ll be in negotiations to address the long-running disparities that should have been taken care of over the last four years, but they didn’t do that in the U.S.-India trading relationship, with the goal of signing an agreement.

“We want, really, we want a certain level playing field,” he said.

Trump’s Thursday announcement that the U.S. will put matching tariffs on any country that imposes duties on American imports follows a flurry of trade activity in his first weeks on the job.

Trump already imposed new 10% levies on China and 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Trump singled India out by name in his latest salvo, saying the country puts far too many duties on U.S. goods.

“Whatever India charges, we charge them,” Trump said at a joint news conference. “So frankly, it no longer matters to us that much what they charge.”

Prior to the meeting, senior administration officials previewed that Trump and Modi would discuss defense, trade, energy, infrastructure, and regional partnerships, including the Quad alliance between the U.S., India, Japan, and Australia before India hosts the next Quad leaders summit in New Delhi this fall.

At the same time, the meeting was an opportunity for the pair to resume their warm relationship, best demonstrated by the Howdy Modi event Trump helped host in Houston in 2022.

“President Donald Trump and Make America Great Again are inseparable,” Modi told Trump before the start of their meeting in the Oval Office. “Whenever we talk about President Trump, one has to talk about Make America Great Again.”

Then during the press conference, Modi added, “Our vision for a developed India is to ‘Make India Great Again’ — or ‘MIGA.’”

Modi knows what he was “getting into” with Trump, according to Center for Strategic and International Studies India and Emerging Asia Economics Chairman Richard Rossow.

“[India knows] that President Trump has certain hot-button issues like improving U.S. exports and such, and resolving trade disputes for American companies,” Rossow told the Washington Examiner. “The United States is a critical market for Indian exports, and so I think India wants to first and foremost avoid becoming a target of President Trump’s tariff fighting.”

Much to Trump’s annoyance, India has traditionally protected its market to prevent, for example, the dumping of cheap Chinese products into its economy.

“It’s very hard to sell into India because they have trade barriers, very strong tariffs,” Trump said during the press conference. “We are, right now, a reciprocal nation. We are going to — if it’s India or if it’s somebody else, with low tariffs, we’re going to have the same.”

For Rossow, India “needs to keep the lines of trade open” in order “to avoid a trade war,” but for U.S. companies similarly hoping for export and investment opportunities, “India is only going to rise in prominence” as it is poised to become the world’s third-largest economy.

Though the pressure may be on Modi, Trump quipped that the prime minister was “a much better negotiator than me. It’s not even a contest.”

Days before Modi arrived in Washington, the prime minister announced tariff reductions through his government’s fiscal budget. But during a background briefing call with reporters, a senior Trump administration official described Modi’s tariffs announcements as having been “well received” but “early,” “modest” steps as the two countries work toward a “fair” bilateral trade agreement by the end of this year.

Besides trade, the other “friction” or “pain” point in the U.S.-India relationship, per Asia Group managing principal Basant Sanghera, is legal and illegal immigration, particularly after Trump repatriating 100 illegal Indian immigrants from the U.S. last week in shackles created “domestic challenges” for Modi.

“The arc of U.S.-India ties for the past two decades has been maximizing converges and minimizing divergences,” Sanghera told the Washington Examiner. “At present, it’s about reducing the differences on trade and immigration.”

During the press conference, Modi told reporters India is “ready to take back verified citizens living illegally in the U.S., but the fight is against the human trafficking ecosystem.”

Earlier during the background briefing call, a senior administration official also previewed Trump’s desire for India to prioritize the use of U.S. technology rather than that of Russia, though the U.S. may need to reduce its own export controls to improve technology transfers.

A second official added that the two countries were “moving towards signing a new defense framework,” in addition to “a number of new procurements, which will add to the relationship and also bring down the trade deficit.”

“India continues to buy large amounts of Russian-made defense equipment,” Rossow said. “India co-mingling advanced technologies from the United States and Russia might be inherently dangerous because the sensitivity that you can pick up on on radar signatures and things like that, that’s intelligence we don’t want anybody in the world to have.”

Regarding technology, Trump and Modi also addressed critical technologies and minerals in the context of supply chain resilience and diversification, as well as the 2022 U.S.–India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, including artificial intelligence. The men separately spoke about a civil nuclear agreement and the extradition of 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack plotter Tahawwur Rana.

Sanghera, of the Asia Group, underscored the importance of realizing the commercial potential of the U.S.-India civil nuclear agreement, considering collaboration on “small modular nuclear reactors” is critical as China seeks to dominate with the same technology.

To that end, Trump’s meeting with Modi comes before an expected call between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

For Sanghera, the U.S.-China relationship will not be at the forefront of Modi’s visit but will “be on their minds going forward.”

“That’s not a pain point but perhaps an anxiety point that the Indians are going to be watching closely,” he said.

Trump’s meeting with Modi was Trump’s fourth with a foreign leader at the White House in the past two weeks, with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer set to sit down with the president by the end of the month. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al Sis had been scheduled to travel to Washington next week but canceled his trip on Thursday because of Trump’s demands for Arab countries to resettle Palestinian refugees.