Mexican ex-president Vicente Fox is outraged at Donald Trump's trip to Mexico

By Charles Pulliam-Moore | August 31, 2016 | 3:13pm

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Today, Donald Trump, a man who has accused Mexico of funneling drug dealers and rapists into the U.S., is meeting with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico after receiving an invitation directly from Peña Nieto himself.

Trump’s set to meet with Peña Nieto just hours before a previously scheduled campaign stop in Arizona later in the day. One imagines that the Mexican leader and the GOP hopeful will have a chance to sit down and discuss what sort of relationship they might have should Trump become our next president. One imagines that said conversation might also be a difficult, tense one considering that, in the past, Peña Nieto’s compared Trump to other famous demagogues like Adolf Hitler—and that many Mexicans are deeply skeptical of their unpopular president’s decision to meet with him.

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One such person? Former Mexican president Vicente Fox. Try as he might, Fox—who has had very memorable tussles with Trump in the past—told CNN that he can’t imagine why Peña Nieto would ever agree to meet with Trump, let alone invite him to Mexico, unless it involved coordinating a very public apology to the Mexican people as a whole.

“I don’t understand what’s going on here, and I really apologize for our president taking this step forward,” Fox said in an interview with CNN on Wednesday. “I really expect from him, as all 130 million Mexicans, all of our great brother Mexicans in the United States, an explanation from both, from President Peña and Trump himself.”

Peña Nieto’s invitation is a politically questionable maneuver that’s more likely to benefit Trump than himself. Were Trump to meet with Peña Nieto, double down on his position that a wall needs to be built between the U.S. and Mexico, and leave the meeting having come to no agreement, there is a way in which he could spin the meeting as an instance of him playing hardball. Conversely, Peña Nieto could demand that Trump answer for his campaign’s explicitly anti-Latino, anti-Mexican rhetoric in an attempt to save face in front of his constituents.

For his part, though, Fox really isn’t sure what’s going on.

“I mean, you cannot lie to people. You cannot take advantage of people all the time like he’s doing,” Fox said, referring to Trump. “You have to be straight. You have to speak the truth. This is what he has done none at all.”