Donald Trump says he is willing to meet with Mexico’s president, despite prior hostile invective from the leader of the country that has sent an abundance of illegal immigrants into the United States.
“I’d meet with him,” Trump told Sean Hannity in a Fox News town hall event on August 23. “Absolutely, I’d meet with him.”
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto confirmed mid-August that he wanted to meet Trump. “Yes, I would meet with him. … I have never met him. I can’t agree with some of the things he has said, but I will be absolutely respectful and will seek to work with whomever becomes the next President of the United States, ” Peña Nieto said.
That polite response is a sharp turnaround for Peña Nieto.
In a March interview with a Mexican newspaper, Peña Nieta accused Trump of mimicking the rise to power of Hitler and Mussolini:
There have been episodes in human history, unfortunately, where these expressions of this strident rhetoric have only led to very ominous situations in the history of humanity. … That’s how Mussolini got in. That’s how Hitler got in. They took advantage of a situation, a problem perhaps, which humanity was going through at the time, after an economic crisis.
In June, at a summit in Canada, Peña Nieto backtracked, saying that he had not intended to say that Trump is like those dictators, only that his populist style and policies would have the same result.
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News in May, former Mexican President Vicente Fox apologized to Trump for his earlier criticism of Trump and his plan to build an effective border wall to stop Mexican migrants from entering the United States.
Fox had declared he would not pay for Trump’s “f***ing wall” and called Trump “ignorant … crazy … egocentric … nasty … [and a] false prophet.”