Remember when Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto invited Donald Trump to Mexico City so they could have a short meeting and an awkwardly subdued press conference followed later by a peevish public back and forth about whether Mexico will pay for Trump’s dumb border wall? And remember how it didn’t seem clear to us here at Slate what Peña Nieto had gotten out of the whole deal despite it having apparently been his idea? Well, it appears that the Mexican populace had the same reaction that we did, and random members of Peña Nieto’s cabinet are paying the price. From the Wall Street Journal:
Mexican Finance Minister Luis Videgaray, seen as the right-hand man to President Enrique Peña Nieto, resigned on Wednesday. … In the days that followed the visit, obvious splits emerged in Mexico’s cabinet. The Foreign Ministry and the powerful Interior Ministry both made it clear they hadn’t supported the idea, and media reports soon placed the blame for the invitation on Mr. Videgaray.
Videgaray and Peña Nieto denied said reports, but now Videgaray has sacked himself nonetheless. Meanwhile:
A poll after the visit showed 85% of Mexicans thought it had been a bad idea to invite the real-estate mogul.
The best part of this is that Peña Nieto had a sub-Nixonian approval rating of 23 percent before he made a big show of appearing deferentially on stage with the American candidate who has made hostility toward Mexicans the central plank of his presidential campaign. How do you say “this man’s political career is the political equivalent of the Hindenburg landing” in colloquial Mexican Spanish?
