Answering Trump in kind, the Mexican head of state tweeted midday Thursday in Spanish, "We have informed the White House that I will not attend the working meeting planned for next Tuesday with @POTUS[.]"
The previous night Peña Nieto had reiterated his government’s opposition both to the wall and to his country paying for it. "I regret and reject the decision of the United States to continue building a wall that, far from uniting, divides us," he tweeted according to an apparently reliable English translation.
In an unprecedented round of refreshingly transparent social media diplomacy, Trump, the master negotiator, published two tweets baiting his Mexican counterpart:
The U.S. has a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with Mexico. It has been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers of jobs and companies lost. If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.Peña Nieto, who is deeply unpopular in his homeland, accepted Trump’s invitation to withdraw from the Jan. 31 summit. He had come under intense pressure in his country to cancel the meeting.
And on Wednesday as Mexico’s foreign minister was reportedly in the White House trying to patch up relations between the two countries, Trump signed an executive order moving forward with construction of the wall.
A labor leader might say Trump was bargaining in bad faith but the Americans who elected him would more likely say the president is simply moving ahead with honoring his campaign pledge to build the wall as part of a crackdown on illegal immigration.
The executive order was sufficient to set at least the construction planning process in motion because a 2006 law supported at the time by Democrat Sens. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton was never repealed.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) voted for the legislation in 2006 but now finds that vote decidedly inconvenient in the current political climate.
A fortnight after the recent election he said he would oppose Trump’s plan to move forward with wall construction.
“We’re not going to help him build his wall,” Schumer told NBC’s Chuck Todd.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265605/mexican-standoff-matthew-vadum
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