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."

Nieto did not disagree with Trump at the time, but a spokesman said soon after that the Mexican president made clear to Trump that Mexico is still not building that wall. On Twitter, Nieto tweeted that "at the beginning of the conversation with Donald Trump I made it clear that Mexico will not pay for the wall."

Then, on TV Wednesday night, Nieto said that he had been clear and emphatic with Trump that Mexico will not pay for the wall.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

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.