In call, Mexican president stands pat on border wall

Tentative plans for Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto to make his first visit to the White House to meet with President Donald Trump were scuttled this past week after a testy call between the two leaders ended in an impasse over Trump’s promised border wall, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.

Pena Nieto was eyeing an official trip to Washington this month or in early March, but he called off the plan after Trump would not agree to publicly affirm Mexico’s position that it would not fund construction of a border wall that the Mexican people widely consider offensive, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Speaking by phone on Feb. 20, Pena Nieto and Trump devoted a considerable portion of their roughly 50-minute conversation to the wall, and neither man would change his position.

One Mexican official said Trump “lost his temper.” But U.S. officials described him instead as being frustrated and exasperated, saying Trump believed it was unreasonable for Pena Nieto to expect him to back off his crowd-pleasing campaign promise of forcing Mexico to pay for the wall.

Both accounts confirm it was Pena Nieto’s desire to avoid public embarrassment — and Trump’s unwillingness to provide that assurance — that proved to be the deal-breaker.

With Mexico heading into a July presidential election, any action by Pena Nieto that could be seen as kowtowing to Trump or buckling under American pressure risks damaging the prospects for his Institutional Revolutionary Party.

The two presidents’ public posturing over the wall — Trump demands that Mexico pay for it; Pena Nieto insists that it will not