Mexico runs away

The President of Mexico doesn’t dare to face the God-Emperor:

Mexico’s president on Thursday scrapped a planned summit with Donald Trump in the face of insistent tweets from the U.S. president demanding Mexico pay for a border wall, a spat that threatens Mexican efforts to salvage trade ties. Taking a page out of Trump’s playbook, President Enrique Pena Nieto fired the salvo on Twitter, after Trump’s call for Mexico to foot the bill for his planned wall prompted a groundswell of calls in Mexico for next week’s meeting to be called off.

Trump said in a Twitter message earlier on Thursday that his Mexican counterpart should cancel his scheduled visit to Washington if Mexico refuses to pay for the wall that he has ordered constructed along the border. Trump views the wall, a major part of his election campaign, as part of a package of measures to curb illegal immigration.

Trump, who took office last Friday, signed an executive order for construction of the wall on Wednesday, the same day that Mexico’s foreign minister held talks with Trump aides in the White House aimed at healing ties.

I won’t try to guess at the President’s objectives, but what are the odds that this move on Mexico’s part wasn’t anticipated and doesn’t play right into the God-Emperor’s hands? Trump is adroit at setting up the heads-I-win, tails-you-lose play; merely showing up meant Mexico had to commit to funding the wall. If things continue on this track, Trump may well run Mexico out of NAFTA without having to talk Congress into doing anything or even having to issue an executive order.

And the Deep State is being cleaned out as well:

At least three senior U.S. diplomats at the State Department have left their posts, State Department officials told Reuters on Thursday. It was not immediately clear whether their departure was part of the normal transition process when a new administration starts or whether it was a coordinated walkout by diplomats who had served in Democrat Barack Obama’s administration.

Who cares why they left? The important thing is that they won’t be in place to play their usual whispering games.

UPDATE: They were kicked out. The swamp, she is draining!