Mexico President Enrique Peña Nieto should be sending his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump a thank you note for Thursday’s tweet in which The Donald told Peña Nieto that if Mexico wasn’t willing to pay for the wall, they might as well not carry out their programmed reunion next Tuesday.
The fact that Peña Nieto took Trump’s “threat” at face value had politicians from every shade in Mexico rallying behind him finally, at long last, recognizing that no matter what, Peña Nieto is the only president Mexico’s got, and he must not be abandoned to a potentially disastrous fate.
“Thank you, Donald,” Peña Nieto ought to be saying.
The speed with which President Trump is moving his “Twitter diplomacy” talking about his executive orders and how he’s going to make “America Great Again” is nasty, but even worse, disorderly. He is doing all this without having a diplomatic or economic corps in place. His nominees for Secretary of State and Trade Representative have not been ratified by the U.S. Senate.
The fact that Roberta Jacobson is still the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico means very little, because for the time being, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City is literally powerless to do creative mediation between the White House and Los Pinos.
Without a diplomatic corps doing what they do best, probably the situation of rupture would not have gone from push to shove.
The big issue for Peña Nieto is that he is paying heed to his external critics and political opponents within Mexican territory, and they came to his side on the double.
Definitely on Wednesday the president said he’d consult with National Governors Conference (Conago) president and Morelos (Cuernavaca) state Gov. Graco Ramírez as to whether to go to Washington or not next Tuesday.
Graco — as he’s best known — made a public announcement in the name of all 32 state governors of Mexico using picturesque language:
“Screw Trump! Let there be no agreement on anything. It’s not possible to watch that as soon as President Peña Nieto announced he was going to Washington the man announces again that he’s going to build a wall and we’re going to pay for it. Dignity comes before anything else. It’s unacceptable that they are betting on softening you down.”
Like Trump, Graco does not apologize. By the way, he also calls Trump “schizophrenic and bipolar.”
Read my lips. The U.S. Embassy will not be filing a protest note over these offenses to the President of the United States of America, but then, that’s what Trump gets for trying to go over the cuckoo’s nest with Twitter diplomacy. It’s reckless political behavior.
At the same all this was going on in Mexico, in Washington Mexico Foreign Relations Secretary Luis Videgaray was apparently meeting with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner trying to mend fences and come up with a new date for the presidential gathering.
In any case, the Conago spokesman’s remarks were heard loud and clear by President Peña Nieto. But Graco’s was not the only voice telling Peña Nieto to stand back as a humongous amount of relevant citizens went on the web begging the President to stay away from the White House for the meantime and aloof from The Donald’s verbal onslaughts.
Among those in solidarity with Peña Nieto was his most corrosive critic and political foe, not to mention leading candidate for president in the 2018 elections, Andrés Manuel López Obardor (AMLO) who said in a tweet that he stood behind Peña Nieto because “these are times of unity.”
“President Trump: your wall is an aggression and leaves the Statue of Liberty as a legend. We will go to international courts,” said the frontrunner for the next presidential election.
So there you have it, and that will stay as Mexico’s official and popular stance against Trump in his first major diplomatic showdown with the much badmouthed and maligned neighbor to the south of the United States.
The time has come for a lot of bilateral diplomacy, but that doesn’t seem to be the way of The Donald.