MEXICO CITY -- President Enrique Pena Nieto welcomed presidential candidate Donald Trump into his mansion on Wednesday, but reaction to the gathering seems to indicate Pena Nieto wasn't too focused on how it would play at home.
Televisa news anchor Carlos Loret de Mola marveled that Trump would dare go to Mexico and reiterate his intention to build the wall. "The humiliation is now complete," he tweeted.
Particularly irksome to Mexicans was that Pena Nieto appeared to do little to push back against Trump's unpopular proposals and earlier negative statements about Mexican aliens in the U.S.
Pena Nieto "did not even take a really strong stand and talk to Mr. Trump directly to his face and tell him exactly why his stances are not acceptable to Mexicans," said Tony Payan, director of the Mexico Center at Rice University's Baker Institute. "He sounded tepid and too soft. He essentially rolled over and allowed Mr. Trump to get away with his own goals without getting anything in return."
Pena Nieto did say that Mexicans felt "aggrieved" and had disagreements with Trump, but many people felt that it was not enough.
Javier Urbano Reyes, a professor in the department of International Studies at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City, said he thought Trump gained a little with the meeting, but Mexico's president lost a lot.
"Without a doubt, my perception is that it is going to make it even worse, even stronger the drop in approval," he said, referring to Pena Nieto's near 20 percent approval rating, according to recent polls, a rate that ranks him the lowest of any Mexican president in two decades.
"He permitted Trump to appear presidential for nothing," said Alejandro Hope, a Mexico City-based political and security consultant. "Serving as a carpet for Donald Trump won't likely help him."
Pena Nieto's opponents took the visit as an opportunity to criticize him.
"Whose idea was it to invite Donald Trump to Mexico at the worst moment of his campaign, after he has insulted Mexicans?" Ricardo Anaya, the leader of the National Action Party, the second-largest bloc in Congress and the party of Pena Nieto's predecessor Felipe Calderon, asked in a Twitter post after Trump and Pena Nieto's meeting.
Foreign Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu, who sat in the front row for Wednesday's news conference, said in a Twitter post that in the meeting with Trump, Pena Nieto "expressed the injury and outrage of Mexicans over insults and offenses."
Former Mexican President Vicente Fox said Trump was trying to boost his sagging campaign. "He fooled him [Pena Nieto]."
Pena Nieto and Trump even appeared to disagree about what was said in the meeting.
Standing next to Pena Nieto, Trump said the topic of who would pay for the wall would be discussed later. Pena Nieto, at the time, said nothing about the wall.
Hours later, Pena Nieto said in a tweet that he had told Trump clearly in their private meeting that Mexico would not pay. It seemed to contradict Trump's statement that payment wasn't discussed, but the president's office said only that Pena Nieto made his statement and the topic was dropped.
Later Wednesday night, in a speech on immigration in Phoenix, Trump made building the wall the featured element of his immigration plan. He referred to Pena Nieto as a "wonderful, wonderful president," but reaffirmed the pledge he had not repeated in Mexico: "They don't know it yet, but they're going to pay for the wall."
In the growing uproar in Mexico over the meeting, Pena Nieto told Televisa's Denise Maerker that he had invited Trump because his policies are a threat to Mexico -- precisely the reason why most Mexicans think he shouldn't have met with him.
Payan hypothesized that Pena Nieto had little good news to give in his state-of-the-nation address Thursday and was looking for a distraction with the "ill-advised" meeting.
"Maybe Pena saw the opportunity to distract the attention of the Mexican people," he said.
Nieto sent invitations last week to both the Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns for the candidates to meet with him, his office said in an email. Clinton has yet to respond.
On Wednesday, standing next to Pena Nieto, Trump said ending illegal immigration, not just from Mexico to the U.S. but also from Central America into Mexico, would increase prosperity for both countries if they worked together. Pena Nieto said he was open to modernizing the North American Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. and Canada.
If the visit serves to moderate Trump's rhetoric, then that might provide an explanation for Pena Nieto's decision to see him in the first place, said Andrew Selee, executive vice president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
"Call me a skeptic on whether it'll change much," Selee said. "We'll know more in the next few days."
Information for this article was contributed by Christopher Sherman, Mark Stevenson and Maria Verza of The Associated Press and by Nacha Cattan and Eric Martin of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 09/02/2016