After testy call with Trump, Mexico’s president shelves plan to visit White House
The Washington Post
Tentative plans for Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to make his first visit to the White House to meet with President Donald Trump were scuttled last week after a testy call between the two leaders ended in an impasse over Mr. Trump’s promised border wall, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.
Mr. Peña Nieto was eyeing an official trip to Washington this month or in early March, but called off the plan after Mr. 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 to discuss a confidential conversation.
Speaking by phone Feb. 20, Mr. Peña Nieto and Mr. Trump devoted a considerable portion of their roughly 50-minute conversation to the wall, and neither man would compromise his position.
One Mexican official said Mr. Trump “lost his temper.” But U.S. officials described him instead as being frustrated and exasperated, saying Mr. Trump believed it was unreasonable for Mr. Peña 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 Mr. Peña Nieto’s desire to avoid public embarrassment — and Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to provide that assurance — that proved to bethe deal-breaker.
A physically slight man, Mr. Peña Nieto has been loathe to put himself in an environmentin which the more imposing Mr. Trump could play the bully. Mr. Peña Nieto’s style is exceedingly formal and he is averse to verbal combat, making his carefully scripted public events the opposite of Mr. Trump’s often freewheelingappearances.
With Mexico heading into a July presidential election, any action by Mr. Peña Nieto that could be seen as kowtowing to Mr. Trump or buckling under American pressure risks damaging the prospects for his Institutional RevolutionaryParty.
The two presidents’ public posturing over the wall — Mr. Trump demands that Mexico pay for it; Mr. Peña Nieto insists that it will not — has harmed their personal relationship and jeopardized the alliance between their neighboring countries.
“The problem is that President Trump has painted himself, President Peña Nieto and the bilateral relationship into a corner,” said Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States. “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 U.S. asking itself, who lost Mexico?”
Still, negotiations between their respective administrations continue apace on the North American Free Trade Agreement and other issues. And both governments have striven to portray their ties as strong and the exchanges between their leaders as smooth.
“We enjoy a great relationship with Mexico and the two administrations have been working for a year to deepen our cooperation across a rangeof issues including security, immigration, trade and economics,” Michael Anton, the top spokesman for Mr. Trump’s National Security Council,said in a statement.
Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Videgaray called the U.S.-Mexico relationship “closer” under Mr. Trump than in previous administrations.
Traditionally, U.S. presidents have prioritized visits with their Mexican counterparts soon after taking office, considering the close ties between the neighboring countries.
But in January 2017, just days into Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Peña Nieto called off a planned trip to meet Mr. Trump in Washington amid an escalating war of words between the two leaders over Mr. Trump’s border wall proposal.
In a Jan. 28, 2017, phone call, a transcript of which was published last year by The Washington Post, Mr. Trump suggested to Mr. Peña Nieto that they both try to gloss over their respective wall positions by saying “we will work it out” whenever asked whether Mexico would pay for the wall.
“The fact is, we are both in a little bit of a political bind because I have to have Mexico pay for the wall,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Peña Nieto. “I have to. I have been talking about it for a two-year period. ... If you are going to say that Mexico is not going to pay for the wall, then I do not want to meet with you guys anymore because I cannot live with that.”