Why the Trump-Peña Nieto meeting is perfect theater

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco (3 minute read) 

All reports say that today’s visit between Donald Trump and Mexico’s president Enrique Peña Nieto, in Mexico, is to be a private affair. That’s a very sound idea, because the only person that may be less popular in Mexico than Peña Nieto is Donald Trump. They wouldn’t want to meet in public.

The Mexican president is despised by many of his countrymen for many reasons, his approval rating is less than 30 percent, but the latest blemish on the president’s reputation is an accusation that he plagiarized parts of a post-graduate thesis (the popular sentiment is that he’s not a smart man). Trump’s unpopularity in Mexico needs little explanation.

I visited Mexico City recently and everyone from cab drivers to government officials, journalists and university administrators wanted to know, with an ill hidden tinge of contempt, what was happening with the U.S. election. What they really meant was what’s going on with Trump?

The question was easier to answer weeks ago when I visited the Mexican capitol for a two-day conference on the U.S. election. Mexico’s National Autonomous University and INE, the federal elections administration, joined forces with several U.S. universities for an unprecedented symposium on the effect of the U.S. election on Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican-Americans. It was unprecedented because it was the first of its kind, ever.

Mexicans have never been as interested in U.S. elections as they are now. We can thank Donald Trump for that. Mexicans want to know how our presidential politics work, how campaigns proceed, how someone like Trump could get his party’s nomination. Imagine trying to explain primaries or the Electoral College to an audience whose elections are administered, nationwide, by a federal agency. Think of how you would explain local control and how in the U.S. we elect everyone from school board members to judges to mayors and lawmakers and how because of this our electoral ballots can be, at times, pages long. Then add to this a layer of Trump.

It didn’t occur to me that Peña Nieto would invite Trump and Hillary Clinton to a meeting in Los Pinos, Mexico’s presidential residence – much less that Trump would accept, given his continuous, year-long Mexico bashing. But it makes good sense to me now.

The meeting is a perfect fit for both an unpopular president and a master political showman. Trump has a proven political formula – not proven because it works but proven because he’s consistent with it. The formula isn’t so much showmanship as it is one-upmanship for the sake of winning the news day.  If Clinton calls him out for his ties with the alt-right, Trump calls her a bigot, that kind of thing. If the media was anticipating what he might say in his cornerstone immigration speech, he travels to Mexico to water-down the coverage. He’s like a sit-com where you know when the punchlines are going to hit.

Peña Nieto, on the other hand, gets to look tough – he met cara-a-cara with his nation’s biggest cultural nemesis, he took the badmouthing gringo to the woodshed to let him know what’s what. It’s a private meeting so Mexicans will only know what their president tells them.

I have a suspicion that they sat on a veranda, smoked cigars, had a tequila and gave each other a heads-up about what they’d each be saying to the press. Does that sound cynical? You should hear what cabbies and professors in Mexico City think.