Donald Trump says Mexico should ‘absolutely’ pay for US border wall

Donald Trump says Mexico should ‘absolutely’ pay for the US Mexico border wall as he sat down with Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto at the G20 summit in Hamburg
President Donald Trump meets with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto at the G20 Summit, Friday, 7 July, in Hamburg. Photo: AP
Washington: President Donald Trump said on Friday that Mexico should “absolutely” pay for his proposed border wall as he sat down with Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto at the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Hamburg, their first meeting as leaders after Pena Nieto scrapped a sit-down in January over the issue.
As the two leaders began their meeting, a reporter asked Trump if he still wanted Mexico to pay for a wall stretching along the Mexican border to control the flow of illegal immigrants, a proposal that was one of Trump’s biggest applause lines during the presidential campaign. “Absolutely,” Trump said.
Mexico has said it has no intention of paying for the wall, and even Trump has talked less lately about getting the US’s southern neighbour to chip in for a wall it opposes.
At the meeting, Trump is seeking a path forward on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and drug-policy cooperation with Mexico after a rocky start to the relationship.
“We’ve all had a very successful day and a very interesting day. It’s great to be with my friend, the president of Mexico,” Trump said as he and Pena Nieto began the meeting. “We’re negotiating NAFTA and some other things with Mexico. Let’s see how it all turns out. But I think we’ve made very good progress.”
Later on Friday, Trump will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, one of the most closely watched events at the summit. Trump and Putin shook hands at the start of the summit, and their foreign-policy chiefs —secretary of state Rex Tillerson and foreign minister Sergei Lavrov—met for an hour on the sidelines of the summit on Friday. Trump and Putin are scheduled to sit down at 3.45pm local time in Hamburg.
Trump also attended an opening session with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders, huddling with his top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, and treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin ahead of the meeting. At the event, Trump was seated between Chinese President Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister Theresa May.
This is the first sit-down between the Mexican leader and Trump since Trump visited Mexico last August during his presidential campaign. Pena Nieto scrapped the January session after Trump tweeted that “it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting” if Mexico remained unwilling to pay for the construction of a “badly needed” border wall between the neighbouring allies and trading partners.
Trump in April threatened to terminate NAFTA, which he has highlighted as a cause of US job losses, only to pull back from that stance and call for renegotiating aspects of the agreement with Mexico and Canada.
While maintaining a push to increase deportations, Trump has dialled back the frequency and intensity of his rhetoric over the border wall even as he continues to tell supporters at rallies that the wall will be built. Many Republicans in Congress remain sceptical of the proposal.
At a rally last month in Iowa, the US president proposed building a border wall that includes solar panels, saying it could pay for itself by creating energy, thereby allowing Mexico to “pay much less.” Bloomberg

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