No visit from Peña Nieto after all. Sad!

Tentative plans for Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to make his first visit to the White House to meet with President Trump were scuttled this week after a testy call between the two leaders ended in an impasse over Trump’s promised border wall, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.

Peña Nieto was eyeing an official trip to Washington this month or in March, but both countries agreed to call off the plan after Trump would not agree to publicly affirm Mexico’s position that it would not fund construction of a border wall that the Mexican people widely consider offensive, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a confidential conversation.

Well you can see why Trump would be annoyed. He told everyone Mexico would pay for the wall! It’s terribly unkind and impudent of Peña Nieto to contradict him like that.

One Mexican official said Trump “lost his temper.” But U.S. officials described him instead as being frustrated and exasperated, saying Trump believed it was unreasonable for Peña Nieto to expect him to back off his crowd-pleasing campaign promise of forcing Mexico to pay for the wall.

Oh, frustrated and exasperated – yes that’s completely different from losing his temper.

And there’s Trump’s nagging Other Minds problem again – thinking it’s unreasonable for Other Person to refuse to do a thing that I, The Only Person In The World, promised OP would do. I promise that Queen Elizabeth II will give me Windsor Castle as a present; how unreasonable of her to expect me to back off such a promise!

A physically slight man, Peña Nieto has been loath to put himself in an environment in which the more imposing Trump could play the bully.

Could and inevitably would, because that’s who and what he is. Bullying is perhaps his most noticeable characteristic.

[I]n January 2017, just days into Trump’s presidency, Peña Nieto called off a planned trip to meet Trump in Washington amid an escalating war of words between the two leaders over Trump’s border wall proposal.

In a Jan. 28, 2017, phone call, a transcript of which was published last year by The Washington Post, Trump suggested to Peña Nieto that they both try to gloss over their respective wall positions by saying “we will work it out” whenever asked whether Mexico would pay for the wall.

“The fact is, we are both in a little bit of a political bind because I have to have Mexico pay for the wall,” Trump told Peña Nieto. “I have to. I have been talking about it for a two-year period. . . . If you are going to say that Mexico is not going to pay for the wall, then I do not want to meet with you guys anymore because I cannot live with that.”

Again – it’s so absurd of him to think that what he has been saying is somehow binding on Peña Nieto, and that his perceived necessity is also a necessity for Peña Nieto. I know I said all this a year ago but that’s how life is under Trump – we have to keep objecting to the same grotesque bullshit over and over.

“Build the wall!” was a signature slogan of Trump’s campaign and has continued to be one through his presidency, even though Congress has not yet fully funded its construction. At his rallies, Trump would cry out, “Who’s going to pay for the wall?” His crowds would shout their answer back: “Mexico!”

Speaking Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, Trump told his fans, “Don’t worry, you’re getting the wall,” adding that whenever he hears someone suggest that he does not really want to build a wall, “the wall gets 10 feet higher.”

Trump’s statements are considered offensive and outright racist by many Mexicans, who accuse the U.S. president of using their country as a punching bag to motivate his most fervent supporters.

Of course they’re racist, and deliberately offensive. All the “wall” talk frames them as like disease-bearing rats or similar. Of course they’re racist.