Vicente Fox: Trump 'would have to be born again' to fix Hispanic relationship

Donald Trump’s relationship with the Hispanic community is so damaged that he would have to be “born again” in order to repair it, former Mexican President Vicente Fox said Friday.

“He would have to be born again, he would have to start from zero again,” Fox told MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson in an interview Friday. “You cannot erase what you said, you cannot back up from the comments you made. We are offended. He has said terrible things and he will never be able to get rid of that. He just cannot do it.”


Fox has long been a vocal critic of Trump’s and especially of the GOP nominee’s proposal to build a wall along America’s southern border and force Mexico to pay for it. During a February interview with Fusion’s Jorge Ramos, Fox famously said, “I’m not going to pay for that f-----g wall,” a comment for which he subsequently apologized.

But Fox reiterated Friday that Mexico would “absolutely not” pay for Trump’s border wall “because we have our pride.” The former Mexican president said the only way such a wall would be built is if Trump builds it with his own money, and Fox suggested instead that “we should use our mind, our intelligence, to deal with this problem in the border to have an orderly border.”

Ahead of Trump’s Wednesday visit to Mexico City, Fox said that Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto would be “considered like a traitor” for inviting the real estate mogul for a meeting at Los Pinos, the official residence of the Mexican president. Asked by Jackson on Friday if he stood by that characterization of Peña as a traitor, Fox backed off slightly while still slamming him for meeting with Trump, “a nobody, a candidate which is losing and dropping in the polls.”

“It was a terrible mistake, a historic mistake, but there is no traitor. If he would have signed something like Santa Anna when Santa Anna sold a piece of Mexico to the United States, then he would be,” Fox said, invoking a historical point of reference. “But here there is no commitment, nothing signed. So the word traitor does not apply. What applies is a big mistake with a high degree of myopia and him delivering on a silver tray to Trump what he came to look for.”