Skip to main content

A kiss is just a kiss




When I heard Trump was headed to Mexico to meet with President Enrique Pena Nieto I let out a loud guffaw.  It was just another one of his political stunts, but hours later there were the two of them holding a joint press conference after a meeting in the Presidential palace.

The invitation was apparently only for appearance sake but Trump took Nieto up on it and the Mexican president was left no choice but to confront the Donald.  It was kind of like when Stephen Colbert had his shot at Trump on the Late Show.  Nieto, like Colbert, found himself eating his own words.  They came out hollow with Trump just standing there, probably not even listening to the translator beside him, because what did it matter, he showed his supporters he could confront the enemy.

Sure, Trump played nice when finally given the opportunity to speak, dressing up his wall in garlands and not saying Mexico would be forced to pay for it.  But, the message was still the same and Mexicans felt shamed.   The mere presence of the man on Mexican soil was an affront to their pride and Nieto just stood there and took it as Trump said what he had to say before flying back to a rally in Arizona to lay out his ten-point plan, literally doubling down on what he has proposed before and vowing "zero tolerance" on illegal immigration. The humiliation was complete.

Hillary now has the opportunity to go down to Mexico to try to mend fences, but it is unlikely to get the same coverage this trip got.  Trump's little trip was plastered all over the news screens and blog walls.  Trump called Nieto's bluff.  It didn't matter the facts Nieto had at his disposal, citing Chamber of Commerce statistics to back up his claim that the trade between the US and Mexico was a positive influence, not a negative influence.  Trump just stood there smugly, ignoring every word that came out of Nieto's mouth, and when his time came rubbed the president's face in the dirt in front of his own people.

Enrique Pena Nieto seems like a bright, well-spoken, young man but it is doubtful he will survive another election.  The only thing positive about this as far as Democrats are concerned is that it took place two months before the election, so it is likely to be long forgotten by November 8.  Trump will have plenty of opportunities to trip over himself between now and then.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...