Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Mexican president’s meeting with Trump is called off over the border wall. The same thing happened last year.

In 2017, they cancelled on Twitter.


By Emily Stewart  Feb 25, 2018, 3:01pm EST

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is 0 for 2 for actually making it to a meeting with at the White House. He called off plans to travel to Washington, DC after a testy call over Trump’s border wall. If that story feels familiar, it’s because it is: Around this time last year, the same thing happened.

The Washington Post reported on Saturday evening that Peña Nieto was considering an official trip to the White House in February or March but that Mexico and the US called off the plan after Trump refused to agree to publicly affirm Mexico’s position that it wouldn’t pay for a wall at the US-Mexico border. The two presidents reportedly spoke by phone for nearly an hour last week, and neither would budge on the matter. For Mexico, the wall is considered offensive, and accepting it would be a blow to national pride. For Trump, it is a campaign trail crowd pleaser that is a big deal for his die-hard supporters.

“The problem is that President Trump has painted himself, President Peña Nieto and the bilateral relationship into a corner,” Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the US, told the Post. “Even from the get-go, the idea of Mexico paying for the wall was never going to fly. His relationship with Mexico isn’t strategically driven. It’s not even business; it’s personal, driven by motivations and triggers, and that’s a huge problem. It could end up with the US asking itself, ‘Who lost Mexico?’”

Read more
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/25/17050996/mexican-president-meeting-trump-wall-pena-nieto

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