Donald Trump, the presidential nominee of the Republican Party will visit with Enrique Pena Nieto the President of Mexico Wednesday in a visit to Mexico that was hastily arranged prior to delivering an anticipated speech on tackling illegal immigration.
True to the flair of Trump for being dramatic, the visit guarantees widespread coverage by the media for the GOP nominee. It also will carry risks since most visits to foreign countries at the presidential level are carefully planned and scripted well beforehand.
On Tuesday, the trip was announced by Trump on Twitter and confirmed by one other tweet from the Mexican government.
It will be the first official interaction by Trump with a foreign leader since beginning his campaign for the White House over a year ago.
These kinds of trips can be difficult to carry out. In 2012, Mitt Romney the then Republican nominee suffered gaffes during his trip in London, Poland and Israel.
Pena Nieto dismissed the demand by Trump to pay for the building of a wall between the U.S. and Mexico border that Trump has promised to build if he is elected president.
Pena Nieto has also voiced his skepticism publicly of Trump. He has currently been embroiled in controversy over whether he had plagiarized some of his undergraduate thesis during 1991.
The talks with Pena Nieto will be held only hours prior to Trump’s scheduled speech Wednesday night where he will attempt to straddle between being tough against illegal immigration yet give the moderate voter reason to give his presidential candidacy a new look.
While the lead by Hillary Clinton has been closed in certain areas, the Republican still trails Clinton in the majority of polls nationwide and in most of the battleground states with only 10 weeks remaining before the November 8 election.
Clinton is also invited to visit Pena Nieto but it is unknown whether she accepted, although a spokesperson for her campaign took a dim outlook of the trip by Trump.
She said that what matters most is what Trump says to the voters on Wednesday in Arizona and not in Mexico.
He will speak in Arizona at 6 p.m. MST in Phoenix or 9 p.m. EDT.
