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So now we know how effective Donald Trump would be as our chief ambassador. Meet the ugly American.
His audition on the diplomacy stage as a presidential candidate turned into a disaster that left the president of Mexico fuming. Well, that’s just terrific. Despite Trump’s harangues about Mexican criminals sneaking into the United States, Mexico is a good friend of ours and an important trade partner.
Knowing what we do about Trump’s proclivity for spewing insults and lies, maybe we should have braced ourselves for the worst when he flew to Mexico City for a sit-down with Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto. Trump simply doesn’t play well with others (except perhaps for his friends in Russia). We don’t know what friendly barbs and insults Trump may have lobbed at Peña Nieto as ice breakers, or if he took the opposite approach of being the flatterer: “I love you. Enrique, I love you. I love Mexicans. Good people, Mexicans. Hard-working, good people.”
The details of their conversation weren’t released, but apparently there was no discussion about the border protection wall that Trump promises to build as soon as he moves into the White House — the wall for which Trump says Mexico will pay. Peña Nieto told reporters later that he declared to Trump at the get-go that Mexico would not pay for the wall, and Trump said that issue would be discussed “at a later date.” They emerged from their meeting, said a few niceties, and then Trump left for a boisterous red-meat rally in Phoenix.
It was there that Mexico was served up like a swinging piñata and Trump again pledged, this time in greater detail, that he would build the 2,000-mile-long wall, which would be “impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful.” He dramatically promised that sensors would catch those who would dare dig under the wall and again promised Mexico would pick up the tab “100 percent. They don’t know it yet, but they’re going to pay for it.”
Never mind that experts say such a wall would be virtually impossible to build because of its prohibitive cost, unfathomable issues in gathering the building materials, the logistical challenges of constructing the wall, the environmental consequences and international treaties that would block its erection. Besides, the number of illegal border crossings has plummeted and most undocumented migrants who have more recently settled in the United States entered through established ports of entry with proper visas that later expired. But we digress.
Trump’s hardline rhetoric Wednesday night fired up supporters, impossibly promising to round up and deport what he characterized as 2 million of the most criminal immigrants on Day 1 of his presidency (with the help of local police, who want nothing to do with this). Peña Nieto and members of Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Council got fired up, too, but in a different way.
After he heard of Trump’s remarks, coming just hours after they had sat down together, the Mexican president declared in a TV interview: “His policy stances could represent a huge threat to Mexico, and I am not prepared to keep my arms crossed and do nothing. That risk, that threat, must be confronted. I told him that is not the way to build a mutually beneficial relationship for both nations.”
Trump’s Hispanic campaign advisors, some of whom said they felt they had been gathered as trophies to suggest Trump was gaining support within the Hispanic community, unloaded on the candidate after the Phoenix rally. More than half of them quit, complaining that Trump has not softened his position in how to accommodate undocumented immigrants.
Jacob Monty, a Houston attorney, who had been an enthusiastic member of Trump’s Hispanic Advisory Council quit after hearing the Phoenix speech. Monty told Politico that Trump had previously said “he was going to approach this (immigration) issue with a realistic plan, a compassionate plan, with a plan that was not disruptive to the immigrants that were here that were not lawbreakers. He didn’t deliver any of that.”
Politico also obtained an email sent by another member of the advisory council, a Texas pastor, to the National Republican Committee, complaining, “The National Hispanic Advisory Council seems to be simply for optics, and I do not have the time or energy for a scam.”
So the Trump train-wreck of a campaign continues unabated, shedding light on how he would behave in the White House. After his first meeting with a head of state, he infuriates the man whom we count as a friend. He insinuates he will soften his position on immigration in order to seduce national Hispanic leaders to be his allies, only to betray them and leave them feeling used as stage pawns. He promises to build a fantasy wall to stop illegal immigration when open-field border crossings are becoming less popular due to heightened enforcement under President Barack Obama. He would round up millions of people living here without proper documents and deport them apparently without grasping the manpower, jail facilities and courtrooms such a dragnet and court proceedings would require.
We add these observations to ones already tallied: that his business empire is built largely on bankruptcies at the expense of investors and laborers; that 50 of the nation’s leading national security experts who have served presidents from both parties say Trump can’t be trusted; that he refuses to release his tax returns because he’s hiding something; that he insults women and minorities and dismisses global warming; that he’s already planting the notion that the elections in November will be rigged; that he advocates violence when he doesn’t get his way; and he admires terrorists and is nonchalant about his buddy Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressions in Europe and invites Russia to break into our computer servers.
And some people think he's fit to be our president?