SANTA MONICA, California — Former Mexican President Vicente Fox rejected a comparison between himself and Donald Trump this week, even though both are businessmen who presented themselves as political outsiders running against the entrenched political establishment of their respective countries.
“No! Big difference,” Fox exclaimed when asked about the parallels in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Wednesday.
“I ran against a dictatorship. It’s absolutely different. I ran and I fought to bring democracy into Mexico to bring freedom into Mexico, so that’s different than what’s going on,” in America, Fox argued.
Fox stunned the world in 2000 by defeating the incumbent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had been in power for much of the previous century and was widely viewed as both permanent and corrupt. He was a businessman who worked his way up in the Coca-Cola company, from route supervisor to overseeing all of Coca-Cola’s operations in Mexico and Latin America.
Despite Fox’s rejection of the comparison, others, too, have seen parallels between Trump and Fox. Rafael Romor, Senior Latin American Affairs Editor of CNN Worldwide, told Brooke Baldwin on Thursday that the two closely mirrored one another, despite their recent public spat over the border wall Trump wishes to build if elected.
Fox, however, recently had another parallel in mind: “Today, he’s going to take that nation (U.S.) back to the old days of conflict, war and everything. I mean, he reminds me of Hitler. That’s the way he started speaking,” Fox told CNN in February.
Fox apologized for that and other harsh remarks to Trump in his interview with Breitbart News on Wednesday, and on Thursday evening Trump Donald Trump on Vicente Fox: ‘I Accept His Apology’ in remarks to a rally.
“I thought it was very nice that he apologized,” Trump told the crowd of some 12,000 supporters in Charleston, West Virginia, adding, “We’re going to have a great relationship with Mexico, but we need a border.”