Kushner to visit Mexico following latest Trump tirades https://t.co/PwvINgEQVy
— Reuters Politics (@ReutersPolitics) March 7, 2018
Senior adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, will visit Mexico on Wednesday and meet President Enrique Pena Nieto, amid strained relations over trade and Trump’s demands that Mexico pay for a border wall.
The Mexican foreign ministry announced Kushner’s trip in a statement late on Tuesday. A senior U.S. administration official confirmed the visit, adding that meetings will focus on security, immigration and trade, among other issues…
On Monday, as the latest round of the negotiations over a revamped North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were wrapping up, Trump repeated that the trade deal was bad for the United States and that Mexico was not doing enough to stop drugs flowing into the country.
Some analysts in Mexico view the visit as a chance to repair a key U.S. relationship and for Kushner to prove his usefulness to the White House.
“I see it as one of the few things of consequence that he can do that don’t require security clearance,” said Agustin Barrios Gomez, a former federal congressman and head of the working group on the future of U.S.-Mexico relations at the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations…
Accompanied on his visit by other U.S. diplomats and security officials, the foreign ministry statement said Kushner will also meet Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray.
Among Pena Nieto’s closest advisers, Videgaray helped orchestrate then-candidate Trump’s visit to Mexico in 2016, a trip that was widely panned in Mexico as the Mexican president failed to confront the New York businessman and reality TV star over his anti-Mexican rhetoric on the campaign trail.
Videgaray lost his job as finance minister over the trip’s fallout, but was later appointed foreign minister after Trump’s surprise win in the U.S. presidential election. Videgaray has maintained close ties with Kushner ever since, including several visits to the White House, most recently an unsuccessful effort to try to broker a Trump-Pena Nieto meeting.
Despite Trump’s sharp criticism of Mexico and its migrants, Videgaray said last month during a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that ties between the two countries were closer than during the previous U.S. administration…
We’re about a hundred years past the days when a ruling party could send one of its troublemakers off on a “trade mission” for long enough to hope voters would forget the latest fvck-up, but then, the Trump Occupation *does* seem to think this is still 1890…
Or maybe both governments are hoping the two idiots will somehow get lost, or fall off a cliff, or suffer a fatal helicopter collision?
Kushner trip to Mexico Wednesday suggests he'll continue to hold broad foreign policy portfolio despite downgrading of his security clearance last week. https://t.co/u1zYgVmTw6
— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) March 7, 2018
? Martin
Just shows how dumb these guys are. Mexico has an extradition treaty with the US.
Villago Delenda Est
These guys are worse than Nixon’s “Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight”. These doofi can’t load their weapons because they’re trying to shove a copy of “Guns and Ammo” into the magazine well.
Czanne
Oh, my. Talk about impossible needles to thread. This ends badly no matter how it ends, and the beginning and middle won’t be much fun, either.
Please pass the popcorn. This shit just got gooood.
Aleta
Redshift
As someone here said last week, the reason Kushner can keep his job without a clearance is because his “job” has always been to stand around pretending to be in charge while competent people did the actual work. (And grifting off his “office,” of course.)
Aleta
From Huff Post
The old statement:
patrick II
Kushner is good at asking for money from foreigners. Perhaps he’ll get enough on this trip to Mexico to build a wall.
Amir Khalid
@Aleta:
The Trump administration’s true mission, as this act and others like it show, is to break the US federal government. Dismantling regulatory barriers against discrimination as part of that mission is shameful. An African-American man doing it is particularly shameful.
Raven Onthill
Since this is an open thread, I’m going to write about something completely different.
I just finished Normal Ohler’s Blitzed!, about the use of psychoactive drugs in Nazi Germany, and my approximate response is holy s..t! I had no idea that the Blitz ran on meth, but it did.
And Hitler was a lot more like Trump than I realized, brrr.
Anyhow, my review is here.
Raven Onthill
“’tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.”
Chet Murthy
@Raven Onthill: Read your review. Nicely done. You asked about whether stuff like that persists. Here’s an NYT link. I remember reading about this elsewhere, and that it was a widespread thing, but can’t remember where I read it — it wasn’t the article below.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/opinion/sunday/why-are-we-drugging-our-soldiers.html
Kathleen
Here’s a link to the tweet from Soledad O’Brien which calls out Chris Cillizza:
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/971215283464605696
Eljai
@Kathleen: I read Cillizza’s responses to Soledad OBrien and it’s just depressing that he can be so lacking in intelligence, discernment and basic self-awareness and yet still hold down a plum position with a major media outlet. Oh well, good on Soledad for trying.
Jeannedalbret
We’re not sending Mexico our best people.
Kathleen
@Eljai: Soledad doesn’t play around!
BroD
@Jeannedalbret:
BAM!
Skepticat
@Jeannedalbret: For the win
bobbo
Does Jared think someone connected to the Mexican government is going to lend him a billion dollars?
Barney
Neither Reuters nor the WSJ thought it worth mentioning that Mexico is one of the four countries reported to have looked into manipulating Kushner because of his disastrous debts?
Is that because they assume all their readers remember that, or because they think Kushner’s foreign contacts are now so meaningless that it doesn’t matter what pressure might be put on him, he’ll never be able to influence anything back in Washington ever again? And this whole trip is just a sham to make it look like Kushner still does something?