08/31/2016
I’ve got to run some errands, so comment away on Trump’s trip to Mexico and upcoming immigration speech.
Sounds like Trump dominated in Mexico. Carlos Slim’s NYT is livid:
Mexicans Accuse President of ‘Historic Error’ in Welcoming Donald TrumpBy AZAM AHMED and ELISABETH MALKIN AUG. 31, 2016
MEXICO CITY — If President Enrique Peña Nieto invited Donald J. Trump to visit Mexico for a dialogue in the interest of democracy, the message has fallen on deaf ears.
Instead, the predominant feeling here in the Mexican capital is one of betrayal.
“It’s a historic error,” said Enrique Krauze, a well-known historian. “You confront tyrants, you don’t appease them.”
On Mexico’s most popular morning television show on Wednesday, a livid Mr. Krauze likened the president’s meeting with Mr. Trump to the decision by Neville Chamberlain, then the British prime minister, to sit down with Hitler in Munich in 1938.
“It isn’t brave to meet in private with somebody who has insulted and denigrated” Mexicans, Mr. Krauze said. “It isn’t dignified to simply have a dialogue.”
Yes, many Mexicans say, it was Mr. Trump who offended the people of Mexico with his disparaging comments about migrants and his promises to build a border wall paid for by Mexico.
But for many Mexicans, the surprising invitation from Mr. Peña Nieto — who has likened Mr. Trump’s language to that of Hitler and Mussolini in the past — is even worse.
Newspapers, television stations, social media and all manner of national communication were awash in vitriol at the idea of a meeting between the two men. …
Still, analysts on both sides of the border said they were mystified about why Mr. Peña Nieto received Mr. Trump.
There is “unanimity that this is a giant farce,” said Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez, a professor and columnist for Reforma, a Mexico City newspaper.
Mr. Peña Nieto “compared Mr. Trump to Mussolini and Hitler,” he added, “and now we invite Mussolini, we are going to negotiate with Hitler when he hasn’t even won the election.”
After the two men met, in what Mr. Trump described as an “excellent” occasion, they appeared at a very civil news conference. Mr. Peña Nieto promised to work with whichever candidate was elected and spoke about the importance of the relationship with the United States.
“I shared with him the fact that there have been misunderstandings or affirmations that hurt and affected Mexicans in their perception of his candidacy,” Mr. Peña Nieto said he told Mr. Trump. “The Mexican people felt aggravated for comments that were formulated, but I am certain that he has a genuine interest in building a relationship that would lead us to provide better conditions for our people”
While Mr. Trump hardly offered Mexicans the sort of apology that many had hoped for, he was a far more chastened candidate than Mexicans have come to expect. He repeatedly lauded their hard work, and spoke of his “tremendous feeling” for Mexicans.
“They are amazing people,” he noted.
In the end, he called Mr. Peña Nieto a friend.
“I don’t see how that helped Peña Nieto,” said Shannon K. O’Neil, a Mexico expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “If the reason Peña was inviting Trump was to stand up to him and show his strength in front of somebody who has attacked Mexicans, then he failed.
Other critics were less kind.
“To put it mildly, I think it was the biggest humiliation a Mexican president has suffered on his own territory in the last 50 years,” said Esteban Illades, editor of Nexos, a magazine in Mexico. “He not only managed to make Donald Trump look presidential, which is an incredibly hard thing to do, he managed to forgive Donald Trump even though he didn’t actually offer an apology in the first place.”
Keep in mind that Pena Nieto is, lately, the arch-enemy of the financial savior of the New York Times, Carlos Slim. The current president of Mexico finally pushed through anti-monopoly legislation that has knocked, last I checked, about $20 billion off Slim’s net worth.
Now Trump’s immigration speech is coming up. [Comment at Unz.com]
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