The Three Amigos Head Down to Mexico

This should be good ....



We have news tonight that tomorrow, in advance of his big immigration speech in Arizona, Donald Trump will travel to Mexico City to meet with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. This is such an outlandish idea it is not easy to make sense of it or predict its outcome. But a few key points are worth bearing in mind.

It's a general rule of politics not to enter into unpredictable situations or cede control of an event or happening to someone who wants to hurt you. President Nieto definitely does not want Donald Trump to become President. He probably assumes he won't become president, simply by reading the polls. President Nieto is himself quite unpopular at the moment. But no one is more unpopular than Donald Trump. Trump is reviled. Toadying to Trump would be extremely bad politics; standing up to him, good politics.

Put those factors together and Peña Nieto has massive and overlapping reasons to want to embarrass Trump. At a minimum since he's probably not eager to create a true international incident, he has zero interest in appearing in any way accommodating or helpful. The calculus might be different if Trump seemed likely to be the next US President. Mexico is a minor power with the world colossus on its doorstep. But a Trump presidency seems unlikely. Far likelier, Peña Nieto will need to build a relationship with Hillary Clinton. These factors combined make for an inherently dangerous political situation for Donald Trump, especially since the atmospherics of this meeting will be the backdrop for Trump's evening speech which is itself an incredibly important moment and one in which he has set for himself what is likely an impossible challenge.

And there's more!

Trump is apparently traveling to Mexico with Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Jeff Sessions as his minders. People with the political nimbleness and cultural awareness to manage and massage a good outcome? I should say not. They're also traveling on one or two days notice. It will show.

Remember that the central force of Trump's political brand is dominance politics. Trump commands, people obey. Trump strikes, victims suffer. It will be extremely difficult for him to manage anything like this in the Mexican capital. He comes with a weak hand, no leverage and the look of a loser. All Peña Nieto needs to say is no.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/can-trump-be-this-stupid-not-a-trick-question

It will be interesting if Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto calls Trump Mr. Hitler or Mr. Mussolinl.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/obama-pays-mexico-five-billion-dollars-to-keep-donald-trump

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—President Barack Obama defended his decision on Wednesday to issue a payment of five billion dollars to Mexico to compel that nation to retain custody of Donald J. Trump.

The payment, which will be delivered to the Mexican government in hard American currency by Wednesday afternoon, will insure that Trump will remain in Mexico for the rest of his natural life.

“I have been assured by the government of Mexico that Mr. Trump will be well taken care of and, if he proves to be a productive member of their society, will be provided a pathway to Mexican citizenship,” Obama said.

While the transfer of funds to Mexico sparked howls of protest from some Trump supporters, it was hailed by congressional Democrats, as well as by over a hundred Republicans currently running for reëlection, including Arizona Senator John McCain.

The President bristled at the suggestion that paying Mexico to keep Trump was “reverse ransom” and an extravagant use of taxpayer money. “There is only one accurate word for this payment: a bargain,” he said.

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More like this:

Floridatexan wrote:
More like this:

You owe them an apology. The Stooges I mean.

Telstar wrote:

Floridatexan wrote:
More like this:

You owe them an apology. The Stooges I mean.

I know...this would be perfect for a Photoshop, though...don't you think?

Donald Trumps hit a home run in Mexico. Hillary Clinton cowers in bed resting for the next press conference! Oh, wait, she doesn't have press conferences. When asked a question, she offers a tray of chocolates...probably caramel filled.

The meeting was a brilliant success. ANOTHER opportunity dodged by Hillary Clinton. After dodging the Louisana flooding crisis, with no reason given. Perhaps she thought a press question might be lurking in the flood waters.

How many million dollars has the Clinton Foundation contributed to help?

Crickets!

He looked like a complete fool.

"Clearly we are not sending our best to Mexico. We're sending liars. We're sending narcissists. We're sending sociopaths." ----- Rob Reiner

Seriously, how can people believe him when he panders to a Mexican audience; then turns around and gives a speech like the one in AZ?

http://www.salon.com/2016/09/01/desperation-and-demagoguery-trump-play-acts-as-president-in-mexico-then-goes-full-nativist-in-arizona/?source=newsletter

We’re getting into the later stages of the 2016 presidential race and Republican nominee Donald Trump is quite obviously losing. That’s why he agreed – at literally the last second and against the advice of U.S. diplomatic officials – to pop on down to Mexico and have a visit with President Enrique Peña Nieto ahead of his big immigration speech in Arizona on Wednesday.

Trump has been consistently behind Hillary Clinton in the polls as we ease into September, and so he was groping around for what hack journalists call a “game changer.” Meeting with Mexico’s president fit that bill nicely: Mexico has been one of his chief punching bags on the campaign trail, he gets to meet with an actual head of state like a real president would do, and the stunt was guaranteed to drive a ton of attention from dumb pundits who don’t know any better.

The problem for Trump and any other candidate who goes this route is that it never works because voters tend to recognize a stunt when they see one. When Trump announced the trip, immediate comparisons were made to John McCain’s 2008 decision to “suspend” his presidential campaign in response to the global economic crash – a stunt that quickly backfired on the Arizona Republican. “I remember [Obama 2008 campaign manager David] Plouffe and [Obama 2008 chief strategist David] Axelrod immediately saying the McCain move was desperate, even though it was treated by cable news as the most optically brilliant gambit since Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech,” Obama campaign veteran Jon Favreau told Salon. “In about 24 hours, everyone else finally caught up to the stupidity.”

In Trump’s case, the embarrassment couldn’t even wait a full day. The statement the Republican nominee delivered in Mexico City was a mushy jumble of bromides that undercut all of Trump’s campaign-trail bluster. His stateside promises to claw jobs back from Mexico and punish companies that move across the southern border were replaced by a pledge to “keep manufacturing wealth in our hemisphere.” He’s gone from “America First” to “Everything West Of The Prime Meridian First.”

And, of course, there was the business with “the wall.” Asked by reporters after his statement if he’d discussed with Peña Nieto his plan to force Mexico to pay for his massive border wall, Trump said it didn’t come up. “We did discuss the wall. We didn’t discuss payment of the wall. That’ll be for a later date.” A short time later, Peña Nieto tweeted that he told Trump right at the outset of their meeting that Mexico won’t pay for any wall, which the Trump campaign later confirmed was true.

All that shambling and dissembling on the international stage was, however, merely the table-setter for Trump’s big speech in Arizona on immigration. The weeks of “softening” hints from the campaign and Trump’s muted performance in Mexico raised the possibility that Trump would take a more measured approach to immigration in his remarks. That’s not what we got. Rather, Trump served up a speech that was unhinged and demagogic, even for him.

It kicked off with a lengthy recitation of violent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, the blame for which he passed on to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. He talked about the “record pace of immigration” and how the Obama administration’s “open borders” policy is destroying the American economy, even though the undocumented immigrant population in the country has been falling every year since 2008. As predicted, he ripped into the Obama administration for resettling Syrian refugees within the United States. “We have no idea who these people are, where they come from,” he said, wrongly. “I always say, Trojan horse, watch what’s going to happen folks, it’s not going to be pretty.”

Then he offered his 10-point “plan” for countering undocumented immigration. Despite promising a “detailed policy address,” most of the Trump’s plan was little more than vague generalities – build a wall, end sanctuary cities, etc. – that he insisted will come to fruition solely through his force of will. The only area he provided any sort of specificity was with regard to his extremely aggressive deportation policies. After promising to deport all criminal aliens and vastly expand the law enforcement agencies responsible for deportation, Trump made clear that every undocumented immigrant in the country – not just criminals – will have targets on their backs under his administration:

TRUMP: Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation. That is what it means to have laws and to have a country. Otherwise we don’t have a country.

Our enforcement priorities will include removing criminals, gang members, security threats, visa overstays, public charges. That is those relying on public welfare or straining the safety net along with millions of recent illegal arrivals and overstays who’ve come here under this current corrupt administration.

So what we’re left with is a campaign that spent Wednesday afternoon trying to shake up the race with a transparently desperate grasp for international legitimacy, and then spent Wednesday night stomping all over their own efforts by getting caught in silly lies and having the candidate go on an extended wallow in the nativist fever swamp.

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Bottom line, even many of his strongest critics said the meeting with Enrique Peña Nieto was a brilliant success.

It was a huge gamble. Yes, he had called President Nieto names, criticized Mexico and their citizens and he still had the courage to do the hard work. His demeanor and public statement after the meeting were Presidential, he bravely took questions from the hostile Mexican journalists and was brilliant. He left the stage as the dominant figure.

Progressives can moan and whine but where was Hillary? Where was Hillary in Louisana and how much did the Clinton Slush Fund contribute to the cause in Louisana?

Must have been the high altitude. Trump was so low energy. You could see the blood gushing from his tiny, well gushing from everywhere.

What a tough guy......no wonder Pace likes him. Bluster equals tough.

Dan Rather, 8/31:

Um. Wow. If anybody thought that Donald Trump would deliver a moderated speech on immigration, that ended pretty much in the first moments he walked onto the stage in Phoenix. He claimed it would be a detailed policy address, and yet from the start his tone was a seething, angry attack on what he described as a world of dangerous murderers and rapists who seem to be roaming “sanctuary cities.” Focusing on a few isolated and already well-documented tragedies, he painted the entire undocumented world with the casual brush of violence. This approach was punctuated by family members of those who have died paraded at the end. The crowd – nearly all white from the looks of the cutaway shots – ate it up with a hostility that seems in keeping with those who have flocked to Trump’s angry march through this campaign season. There was of course no mention of the de facto integration of millions immigrants already entwined in the fabric of our daily lives and economy.

I expected a law and order theme, but not this level of searing rhetoric. Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Trump feeds off his crowds and they were giving it right back. It was ultimate in the “Us vs. Them” mentality. Real Americans vs. others. I frankly saw echoes of the George Wallace speeches from the 1968 campaign.

The applause lines seemed like ready red meat for this crowd and I am sure for those who regularly watch Fox News. They were names and anecdotes that frankly will be unknown to most Americans. That’s because Donald Trump’s America does not comport with what many voters see in their own lives. It was an attack on “thugs” and those on “welfare”. I suppose there was a structure to this speech. He would say “and 3”, “and 4” as if it were a detailed list of proposals, but any sense of order was swamped by a tsunami of rhetoric and tone.

Going in there was a question, after a confusing and contradictory trip to Mexico earlier in the day, about the status of Trump’s wall. Trump said he would, without equivocation, “Build the Wall.” The crowd again went wild. And of course Mexico will pay for the wall – “100 percent. They don’t know it yet.” But by that point, even this news item seemed like an afterthought consumed by the overall tone.

Of course along the way he slammed Climate Change – just because, suggested that Hillary Clinton could be deported, and told African Americans they should vote for him because “what do they have to lose?”

But any details are beside the point. With a raspy roar, leaning over the podium, Trump delivered his message with glee - This is our country and we are being overwhelmed by hordes not fit to be in our country. He suggested that “These People” are well known to law enforcement and could be rounded up with ease. It was a line that seemed more in keeping with the culture of the old East Germany than the United States. “We have got to have a county folks” he summed it up. “Under a Trump Administration it’s called America first!”

You could try to fact check this speech, but that is a fool’s errand. Trump and Clinton are not running for the president of the same country. The one who wins will be the one whose vision of America most conforms with reality.

Make no mistake, this was a toxic mix of jingoism, nativism, and chauvinism. Many of you would like to think, not in America, not in our country could this type of rhetoric gain currency. But in other countries, and in other times in history, we have seen the impossible become possible to horrific effect. Trump is betting his political future on this idea – that there is a deep, tribal, and dark sea of the molten lava of hate and aggrievement. This volcano from below appeals to dangerous instincts- can it yield a path to the presidency and power?

How do you think this speech will play?

Even now, after all that's happened, most political reporters find themselves either unwilling or unable to identify Donald Trump's tirades as hate speech. But they fit the textbook definition, inasmuch as it's even a useful concept. The New York Times is on the receiving end of a storm of criticism at the moment for their botched story on Trump's whirlwind Wednesday from Mexico City to Phoenix. And they deserve it. But the offense is mainly one of laziness and sloppiness - offenses which the Times' privileged position makes it again and again vulnerable to. You write the story about the arc of the day, file it to edit and production. But while the piece is on autopilot in those later stages of the journalistic process the reality of the day changes radically and you end up publishing a story that is night and day of the reality everybody has just seen. But this embarrassment is a pedestrian stumble. The far greater offense is the one almost every news organization committed with the Times. This isn't 'tough' or 'hard edged' speechifying. This is hate speech.

We tend to think in over-literal or clumsy ways about 'hate speech'. Most often we assume that it's a matter of using particular words, referring to a black woman as the n-word or calling a Jew a kike. And these slurs are often the bread and butter of hate speech. But they don't constitute it in themselves. Two African-American comics can have a routine where they use the n-word right and left. That may be good or bad - it's really a debate for the African-American community. But it's not hate speech. Hate speech is rants meant to inflame, inspire fear or rage or violence against a particular class of people. The precise vocabulary is not the heart of the matter. There's no question that what Trump's Wednesday night speech was was hate speech, a tirade filled with yelling, a snarling voice, air chopped to bits with slashing hands and through it all a story of American victims helpless before a looming threat from dangerous, predatory outsiders.

I've discussed the matter a few times in these pages. But I'm stunned at how little reaction or discussion we see of how sick and dangerous it is to parade these victimized families around like props. McClatchy has a good piece of journalism out tonight looking up the actual stories behind these testimonies. Some are more complicated than they're presented. But the family members aren't any less dead.

One case of a daughter killed by an "illegal" turns out to be a 22 year old woman, Shayley Estes, who was shot to death last year by a Russian boyfriend, Igor Zubko, she'd once lived with. According to Estes' mother, Zubko he'd overstayed his visa at the time he killed Shayley. Spousal/partner violence against women seems like the more relevant issue here, not immigration. But my point here isn't to factcheck the victim stories. There are millions of undocumented immigrants in the US. It is a certainty that they are collectively responsible for many murders, auto fatalities, DUIs and much more. After all, they are believed to make up roughly 3% of the US population. These families have suffered horribly. And if some of their stories don't totally check, there are certainly others who might take their place on that stage with Trump if they chose to. The salient point is that as with Shayley Estes' murder, immigration policy and status is incidental to these horrors.

These families have suffered horribly but no more than the families of victims of American murderers and Americans who committed DUI fatalities. If we went out and found victims who'd suffered grievously at the hands of Jews or blacks and paraded them around the country before angry crowds the wrongness and danger of doing so would be obvious. Now, you might say, that's not fair. American Jews and African-Americans are citizens, with as much right to be here as anyone else. But that's just a dodge. There's no evidence that undocumented immigrants commit more crimes than documented or naturalized immigrants. Indeed, there is solid evidence that immigrants commit fewer crimes than the native born. Simple logic tells us that undocumented immigrants face greater consequences for being apprehended by police and thus likely are more careful to avoid it. They're likely more apt to avoid contact with authorities than the rest of us.

There is a legitimate public policy question about how aggressive we should be in deporting those who our laws say should not be in the country in the first place. But the fact that some of them commit crimes is not relevant to the discussion. This is simply a way of whipping up irrational fear and hatred. Though I wouldn't use the word 'demonize', one could fairly argue that groups like MADD spent decades demonizing drunk drivers. But of course this is demonizing a specific activity which has caused thousands of deaths. The action itself is the cause of death and suffering. There is no comparable argument to be made about immigration status. It is simply blood libel and incitement.

Indeed, my hypothetical about Jews and African-Americans is no hypothetical. Anyone who is familiar with the history of the Jim Crow South or 1930s Germany and the centuries of anti-Semitism that preceded it will tell you that the celebration and valorization of victims was always a central part of sustaining bigotry, fear and oppression. We know now that many victims of lynching or blood libel were in fact wholly innocent. But of course not all of them were. The specific idea of ritual killing behind the phrase 'blood libel' was an anti-Semitic fantasy. But being members of an oppressed group is no exemption from human nature. There were blacks who raped and killed whites and Jews who raped and killed Christians. The valorization of victims was and is a way of provoking vicarious horror, rage, hate and finally violence whether specific individuals were guilty or not.

I must return to the point: the suffering of these exploited victims is real. Indeed, I'm no stranger to that pain. When I was a child I lost a beloved relative in an auto accident. I know from my experience the intense desire to find a scapegoat or someone to blame. I don't begrudge any of these families not only their agony but even their a desire to blame whole groups. Grief warps the mind. But there's no excuse for those who have themselves suffered nothing but exploit this suffering to propagate hate. That fact that we've become inured to this, that we now find it normal to see these cattle calls of grief and incitement as part of a political campaign is shocking and sickening. There's no other word for this but incitement and blood libel.

Watch Trump's speeches, with the yelling, the reddened face, the demand for vengeance and you see there's little to distinguish them from what we see at Aryan Nations or other white hate rallies that we all immediately recognize as reprehensible, wrong and frankly terrifying. This isn't 'rough' language or 'hard edged' rhetoric. It's hate speech. Precisely what policy solution Trump is calling for is almost beside the point. Indeed, it wouldn't be hate speech any less if Trump specified no policy solution at all.

This isn't normal. It was normal in the Jim Crow South, as it was in Eastern Europe for centuries. It's not normal in America in the 21st century. And yet it's become normalized. It's a mammoth failure of our political press. But it's not just theirs, ours. It's a collective failure that we're all responsible for. By any reasonable standard, Donald Trump's speech on Wednesday night should have ended the campaign, as should numerous other rallies where Trump has done more or less the same thing for months. There's a reason why the worst of the worst, the organized and avowed racists, were thrilled and almost giddy watching the spectacle. But it has become normalized. We do not even see it for what it is. It's like we've all been cast under a spell. That normalization will be with us long after this particular demagogue, Donald Trump, has left the stage. Call this what it is: it is hate speech, in its deepest and most dangerous form.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-s-blood-libel-press-failure

You ignore the fact that criminal cartels use our lax border to commit human trafficking and exploitation. If you actually wanted to solve a problem it would be to secure the border then vet and process illegals and then further loosen immigration laws. The current chaos only plays as a political football.

2seaoat wrote:What a tough guy......no wonder Pace likes him.  Bluster equals tough.

Trump said the reason Jeb Bush is so soft on immigration is because Bush is married to a Mexican. Obviously the reason Trump is so chummy with Vlad Putin is because Trump's is married to a Russian immigrant whore.