Donald Trump crossed the border into Mexico, but declined to break it to the country’s president he would be paying for Trump’s Great Wall.
The man who launched his presidential bid a year ago vowing to create a deportation force that would stop Mexico from sending its “rapists,” criminals, and drug dealers into the United States, today described Mexicans as being “beyond reproach,” respectful, hard working people with strong values of family, faith and community.
Returning the compliment, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto did not compare Trump’s foreign policy to that of Hitler and Mussolini during their post-talk newser, as he has in the past. On the other hand,
On the other hand, before inviting Trump and Hillary Clinton to meet with him, Pena Nieto, had vowed not to get involve in the U.S. presidential election, and today he got involved in a bigg-ish way, giving Trump a made-for-TV tableau in which he got to appear very presidential, as former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski had forecast would happen, on CNN this morning.
Trump did, in his prepared remarks before taking questions, note he’d shared with the president his belief the North American Free Trade Agreement has been “of far greater benefit to Mexico than the United States and must be improved upon.” And Pena Nieto did admit to recognizing the right every country has to protect its own borders” though he suggested the bets way to accomplish that is by treating the country on the other side as an ally in that effort.
Still, TV news networks, who’d spent the day breathlessly covering the hastily arranged visit, were left mulling, when it was over, whether this new In-Like-A-Lion-Out-Like-A-Lamb Trump would sway a single Hispanic vote that he hadn’t already won before today’s meeting.
As Trump was jetting to Pena Nieto’s digs, Reporters Who Cover Trump had wiled away the time wondering how both men would use the photo op to advantage. Their Reporters Who Cover Trump were unhappily cooling their heels in Phoenix, Trump having left them there which, CNN’s media pundit Brian Stelter said set a dangerous precedent for candidates and POTUS’s going forward, as if somehow Trump’s movements there would now not be properly covered, which may have irked his network’s reporters in Mexico City.
