Next week President Enrique Peña Nieto will travel to New York to attend the World Leadership Forum dinner, where he will be the keynote speaker on Tuesday Sept. 20. The next day EPN will be at the UN General Assembly also as a speaker.
But there’s always a fly in the soup. On Wednesday the president received notice from Donald Trump, who said he’d like to meet with him again in order to reciprocate the President’s courteous behavior during Trump’s fly-by nigh-politically-disastrous visit to Mexico last Aug. 31.
The announcement was made over a radio interview by Marco Gutiérrez, a man who heads the Latinos for Trump movement in the United States, and who said that Trump will insist on meeting with EPN.
Faster than you’re reading this, President Peña’s press spokesman Eduardo Sánchez called the Radio Formula station to make it clear that other than his dinner organized by the Foreign Policy Forum at the St. Regis Hotel and the UN speech, the President was not planning any other commitments or even casual meetings.
Due to the rapidity of the response from the president’s press office it is clear the answer to the suggested invitation by Trump is a resounding NO, which only comes to prove what all Mexicans know: President Peña played with fire by inviting Trump to Mexico, and got burned.
Most polls showed that the president’s popularity plummeted to 87 percent disapproval over the past two weeks because of The Donald’s visit and even by mid-September EPN is still taking flak over the issue. Surely meeting again with Trump — this time as an invitee — would help President Peña to add the remaining 13 percent of disapproval to his now most unpopular mandate.
But even if Trump is not in New York to harass him, EPN can expect to be heckled by a group of young Mexican students organized within the “United We Dream” group. Part of this group considered his meeting with Trump “a shame.”
He will also be harassed by a different group of protesters called “Migrant Action,” who said that, by opening the doors to the Presidential residence of Los Pinos to Trump, where they held talks, EPN only managed to “legitimize the political agenda” of The Donald. They also claim that Mexico “can’t kneel” to the racism and xenophobia show of Trump.
Surely EPN will do well to keep a low profile while in the Big Apple as danger will be lurking from every corner.
But it is of the utmost importance that Peña Nieto stays as far as it is necessary from Trump, who by now for the people of Mexico represents not just the Empire’s Lord Voldemort but if he gets close to EPN, Mexico’s presidents will get something worse: the Devil’s Kiss! It already happened to former Treasury and Public Finance (SHCP) Secretary Luis Videgaray, who arranged Trump’s visit to Mexico and paid dearly for it. It cost him his political career. The same could happen to EPN if he trips twice over the same stone.
But let’s not move too fast for next week. Tonight, as the president comes out the main balcony of the National Palace to commemorate the 206th anniversary of the nation’s Independence, at 11 p.m., the more than 100,000 people attending the ceremony will surely show him what they felt when they were called rapists, drug traffickers and the scum of the earth, without a proper response from the president.
Worst still, adding insult to injury, it is now known that Trump entered the country illegally, as nobody asked him to show his passport.
Be as it may, President EPN’s woes are not over and will increase over the next week when he is in New York.
There is no question now as to the fact that he was kissed by the devil!