Mexico’s ‘Desperate’ President Meets With Trump While Both Face Abysmally Low Approval Ratings
Late last night, it was confirmed that Republican party nominee Donald Trump would take a quick detour to Mexico just hours before his highly-anticipated immigration speech in Arizona. At first glance it may appear to be a curious move; after all, the nominee himself has demonized our neighbors to the South at every conceivable moment, beginning with his June 16, 2015 announcement speech.
The soundbites and quips from the last fourteen + months have become the stuff of modern political facepalm legend:
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Donald Trump, June 16, 2015
“Infectious disease is pouring across the border.” Donald Trump, July 6, 2015
“We’re gonna build a wall and Mexico’s gonna pay for it.” Donald Trump, pretty much every day
But if the move to meet with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, the handsome 50-year-old leader from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, seems strange, consider this: Peña Nieto himself is tanking in just about every imaginable approval metric in his home country right now.
Take, for instance, one of the more recent issues plaguing Peña Nieto’s presidency: less than two weeks after the country’s human rights commission determined that federal police “executed arbitrarily” dozens of suspected drug cartel members, Peña Nieto was forced to fire the chief of federal law enforcement. According to NBC News, “…police planted guns on some suspects and moved some bodies to bolster the official version that all the deaths occurred during a gunbattle.”
Then, there are allegations that Peña Nieto copied sections of his law thesis in 1991. The university — PanAmerican — was careful not to lobby charges of plagiarism against the sitting President, but tactfully noted that his work included “textual reproductions of fragments (of other works) without footnotes or mentions in the bibliography.”
Right, the same way Melania Trump didn’t plagiarize Michelle Obama‘s speech, she simply copied textual reproductions of fragments.
But overall, it is the approval rating for Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto that is most troublesome for the world leader. A poll taken earlier this month puts his numbers at around 23%, with 74% outright disapproving of the job he’s doing in office. The group responsible for the poll — Reforma — commented that is was the lowest approval rating for a president since it began its polling efforts in 1995. Jorge Ramos said yesterday that Peña Nieto is one of the most “unpopular” Mexican presidents in history, adding, “[h]e’s desperate.”
But it is Donald Trump, undoubtedly, who remains public enemy number one in Mexico. Here’s a look at Trump’s favorable rating among Mexicans in June, according to POLITICO’s Gabriel Debenedetti:
Those numbers are here: https://t.co/oz7sHYdvPG pic.twitter.com/tUrl07PO03
— Gabriel Debenedetti (@gdebenedetti) August 31, 2016
See that little sliver of blue “2” next to Trump’s picture? That’s it — 2%.
So what we’re seeing transpire today, in other words, is a meeting between two disastrously unpopular men both hoping to use the event as an opportunity to bolster his own numbers at home. Trump has significant ground to gain if he hopes to make a strong play for the Hispanic vote in this country, a demographic that, according to one Quinnipiac poll from earlier this summer — registers an approval rating of 18% for the GOP nominee. His speech tonight in Arizona will be carefully dissected; after all, his apparent flip-flops on undocumented immigration have left even his own campaign surrogates unable to pinpoint his exact proposals. And as for Peña Nieto, the embattled leader could stand to gain a few percentage points with a strong showing of defiance against the mouthy American who has sworn time and time again that it is the Mexican people who will pay for the newly-constructed border wall.
Maybe it will make for a nice photo op and a quick conversation that allows both men to claim diplomatic victory of sorts. Then again, Peña Nieto may have to answer for the time he casually compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
—
J.D. Durkin (@jiveDurkey) is an editorial producer and columnist at Mediaite.
[images via Wikipedia Commons]
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
