President Trump predicted a positive relationship with Mexico’s leftist president-elect after what he said was a cordial half-hour call that touched on hot-button issues including trade and border security.
“I think the relationship will be a very good one,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
“We talked about border security, we talked about trade, we talked about NAFTA. We talked about a separate deal, just Mexico and the United States,” he said.
“I think he’s going to try to help us with the border. We have unbelievably bad border laws, immigration laws — the weakest in the world, laughed at by everybody in the world,” Trump said. “And Mexico is very strong immigration laws, so they can help us until we straighten out our immigration laws.”
Trump said that President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador “had a very excellent election,” which he won with more than 53 percent in a multicandidate race.
“I told him a number of years ago when I saw him campaigning for a different race frankly, a different year, a different race, I said some day he’s going to be the president of Mexico, so he remembered that and it turned out to be correct,” Trump said.
Trump first congratulated his incoming counterpart in a late Sunday tweet. Lopez Obrador said in a Televisa news network interview that Trump’s Twitter message was “very respectful” and that he seeks “mutual respect”
“We are never going to disrespect the U.S. government, because we want them to respect us,” Lopez Obrador said. “At the appropriate moment, we are going to get in touch [with the Trump administration], to reach an understanding.”
Trump had a difficult relationship with Mexico’s outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto over his opposition to illegal immigration and insistence that Mexico pay for a border wall.
Although Pena Nieto welcomed candidate Trump during the 2016 campaign, the Mexican leader didn’t visit Trump in Washington. In a leaked January 2017 call, Trump told Pena Nieto, “If you are going to say that Mexico is not going to pay for the wall, then I do not want to meet with you guys anymore because I cannot live with that.”
