Share

Mexico Rift Deepens Over Trump Border Wall, Trade Threat, Canceled Meeting

Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto on Thursday cancelled a visit to the White House next week, hours after the USA president with Donald Trump tweeted that their meeting should be scrapped if Mexico would not pay for a border wall.

Advertisement

The Mexican peso took a battering with each new development. The White House said that during the call Trump and Pena Nieto recognized their differences on the wall but agreed to work them out.

Jared Kushner, a Trump adviser and the president’s son-in-law, was scheduled to meet with Canadian officials this week to begin talks on the trade deal.

If this policy was given the green light, USA consumers would be forced to pay extra on all these goods.

“I will not allow the taxpayers or the citizens of the United States to pay the costs of this defective transaction, NAFTA, one that should have been renegotiated many years ago.”, he said.

“We should not be scared of Trump or think things will necessarily go badly”, Slim said. Roughly 6 million jobs in the United States depend on trade with Mexico. “That won’t happen with me”.

Both governments issued almost identical statements following the leaders’ lengthy conversation, noting the two presidents’ “clear and very public differences” when it comes to a border wall Trump and lawmakers vowed this week to construct using USA taxpayer funds at the outset.

And a senior member of Trump’s team, chief strategist Steve Bannon, continued the administration’s attacks on the news media, calling it the “opposition party” in an interview.

Mexico’s strong negotiating position is in part thanks to Trump, said Slim, who remarked that he hadn’t seen the Mexican people so politically united in three decades. “It’s going to be good for Mexico”, he told ABC News US. Mexico is now America’s third largest trading partner, after Canada and China, as well as its second largest export market.

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday expressed his support for President Trump’s controversial plan to build a wall along the U.S. -Mexico border, saying the barrier he built along his country’s southern border “stopped all illegal immigration” and was a “great idea”.

Trump made building a wall one of his top promises during the presidential campaign.

On Friday, The Associated Press reported that Trump and Peña Nieto held a telephone call about the wall dispute.

“Mexico doesn’t pay for the wall”, Bernstein told AN.

Advertisement

But Mexico has repeatedly said they won’t be paying for anything.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto