Did Donald Trump lie about discussing border wall payment with Mexico's president? Maybe not.
Maybe something was lost in translation. Maybe somebody is lying. Or maybe Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Donald Trump are being super precise in their language. But there seems to be a dispute over whether or not Trump and Nieto discussed who will pay for Trump's hypothetical wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. At a joint news conference, Trump said no. "We did discuss the wall, we didn't discuss payment of the wall," he told reporters. "That will be for a later date."
Then, on TV Wednesday night, Nieto said that he had been clear and emphatic with Trump that Mexico will not pay for the wall.
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Now, there is a way that both sides can be right. Nieto spokesman Eduardo Sanchez told The Wall Street Journal's David Luhnow that Trump did not respond when Nieto told him no, so there was "no discussion" and Trump wasn't lying. A warm-up act at Trump's Arizona rally, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, said he doesn't really care who pays for the wall. Trump, in his Arizona speech, was emphatic that, despite what Nieto might have told him, "Mexico will pay, 100 percent. They don't know it yet, but they're gonna pay for it."
This is all assuming that Trump wins the election and convinces Congress (or, even less likely, Mexico) to fork over tens of billions of dollars for Trump's "great wall." BuzzFeed political editor Katherine Miller put it this way:
Discussing the Mexico City trip beforehand, a Trump adviser told CNN, "You've just got to throw in a little theater now and then." Mission accomplished: Trump sure left us with a whodunit.
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