Mexico’s ex-president, in lively speech, calls Trump “a crazy guy”
By Emily Green Updated 4:26 pm, Wednesday, April 19, 2017
Former Mexican President Vicente Fox called President Trump “a crazy guy” Wednesday while offering a spirited defense of the open trade policies between Mexico and the United States that Trump has said he wants to scrap.
In an an hour-long speech before the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Fox extolled the benefits of free trade while also deriding, sometimes with irony, Trump’s attack on undocumented immigrants in the United States.
“I’m not for open borders. I’m for an orderly border,” Fox said. “We need it in Mexico. We don’t want an invasion of gringos again.”
A former Coca-Cola executive, Fox served as president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006, representing the center-right National Action Party, or PAN. His victory marked the first time in 76 years that a candidate outside the Institutional Revolutionary Party was elected president.
Fox has embraced Twitter nearly as completely as Trump. In the run-up to the 2016 election and in the months after, Fox has used the social media platform to troll the presidential candidate. Among other things, he has called Trump “a traitor to America and everything good it stands for,” a liar, and an embarrassment with an “ugly gringo” attitude.
Fox has also repeatedly declared that there is no way Mexico will pay for a border wall between the two countries — although he used more colorful language.
Despite his own expletive-filled tweets, Fox said Wednesday that if he had one word of advice to Trump, it would be to act more presidential.
“You need to stop being selfish,” Fox said he would tell Trump. “Now you represent 300 million-plus citizens. Now opening your mouth or sending out Twitter or sending your executive order you could be affecting 8 billion people. So calm down. Calm down, be quiet and be presidential.”
Among other things, Fox said he worried about the threat of nuclear war under Trump: “Imagine the guy in North Korea and the guy in the United States. One day they wake up with a hangover and boom!”
But Fox spent much of his time throwing out statistics and talking about the benefits of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Trump said he wants to scrap if major changes aren’t made to it.
Fox said NAFTA, which was enacted in 1994, has led to higher wages for Mexicans, which he said in turn helped slow illegal migration from Mexico into the United States.
“That’s why NAFTA is so important that we keep it going,” Fox said. “Because it’s narrowing that gap.”
However, illegal immigration picked up strongly after NAFTA for a mix of reasons, including a loss of agricultural jobs in Mexico. Mexican migration into the United States peaked in 2007 before it began to decline, according to the Pew Research Center. Mexicans comprise roughly half of the country’s 1.1 million unauthorized immigrants, Pew says.
Fox also derided Trump’s proposed border tax, which would tax imported product goods at about 20 percent. The goal is to encourage American companies to make their products in the United States and raise up to $1 trillion in revenue over 10 years.
An unusual coalition of big-box retailers and progressive Democrats has come out against the tax because they say it will drive up costs and hurt the economy.
Fox cautioned that the tax would cause a trade war, one that would prove especially harmful to the American agricultural sector. Mexico purchased around $18 billion of U.S. agricultural products in 2015, including $2.3 billion of corn, according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative.
“Attacking yourself in a trade war is crazy,” Fox said. “Only a crazy guy can come up with that idea.”
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