Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is bizarrely taking the credit for a shake up in the cabinet of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Finance Minister Luis Videgaray stepped down from his post Wednesday, reportedly the fall guy for last week’s disastrous encounter between Trump and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Interviewed later that evening by NBC’s Matt Lauer, Trump implied that it was his aim all along to unsettle Mexico’s leaders.
“If you look at what happened, look at the aftermath today, where the people that arranged the trip in Mexico have been forced out of government. That’s how well we did.”
According to several sources, the invitation to Trump and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton came from the finance ministry.
Clinton this week declined her invitation, calling Trump’s meeting with Mexico’s president “unfortunate,” saying the Republican candidate had created a “diplomatic incident.”
Videgaray has been one of Peña Nieto’s closet allies and was regarded as a possible presidential candidate in 2018. He was instrumental in orchestrating the package of institutional reforms in the energy, education and labor sectors that highlighted the first of Peña Nieto’s administration. Videgaray’s replacement is Jose Antonio Meade, who has served as social development minister and foreign minister.
Leaks in the aftermath of the Peña Nieto-Trump meeting suggest that senior cabinet members, including Foreign Secretary Claudia Ruiz Massieu, were kept out of the loop about the visit.
Some analysts have suggested that Peña Nieto – who cannot stand for reelection – was keen to hand out an olive branch in the hope of softening Trump’s anti-Mexico stance, while sowing the seeds for a friendly personal relationship should the Republican win November’s general election.
Far from dying down, the criticism of the Mexican president intensified this week and with the removal of Videgaray, Peña Nieto finally appears to have accepted that the meeting was a catastrophic error.
This doesn’t mean the fallout from the ill-fated encounter will now end. As Trump inevitably closes in on Clinton in the polls prior to the debates, Mexicans will begin to get edgy, fearful of an “Armageddon” scenario should he actually win the presidency. Were that to occur and if the Mexican people believe that Peña Nieto in some way contributed to putting Trump in the White House, his position as president might even become untenable, some analysts are saying.