Mexico Running Scared After Trump Insists Border Wall Is Happening
25th February 2018
They’re afraid that he actually means it. That gives him huge (excuse me, yuge) leverage.
Mexico is delaying a meeting between Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and President Donald Trump for a second time because Trump refuses to take border wall talks off the table.
They don’t want a talk, they want a photo op. Trump has been down this road before and he’s not buying it.
Nieto canceled his first planned White House visit in January 2017 after Trump signed an executive order that authorized border wall construction along the southern U.S.-Mexico divide. After announcing he would not attend the White House meeting, Nieto promised the Mexican people the nation would not pay for any part of the wall — a reference to one of Trump’s key campaign promises regarding its construction.
This is what Scott Adams calls ‘thinking past the sale’. Scott points out that Trump is a master of combining two ideas, one that is based on the other happening first, and then getting the conversation about the second one, thereby fixing in people’s minds that the first one has effectively already happened. ‘We’ve already settled that, now we’re dickering over the price.’
The Mexican president’s assertion illustrates the line in the sand that both administration’s have drawn. Trump has insisted since he kicked off his campaign in 2015 that Mexico will pay, either directly or indirectly, for the wall. Nieto, like former Mexican President Vicente Fox, is unwilling to concede that point, insisting Mexico will not cough up one red cent.
All the U.S. has to do is to impose a significant tax on foreign remittances and earmark that money for the Wall, and it’s done — the Mexican President is completely cut out of the process. This is a significant portion of the Mexican economy, and one of the reason why Mexico assists illegal immigration to the U.S. as much as it can,