Jan-Albert Hootsen is a Dutch freelance journalist based in Mexico City since 2009. His work has been published (among others) in Newsweek, World Politics Report, Maclean's, Mashable and Dutch media.

If Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto one day decides to write a memoir and chronicle his greatest mistakes, inviting Donald Trump to Mexico City could very well end up at the top.

In Mexico, the Republican presidential hopeful is one of the most unpopular people alive; only 2 percent of Mexicans still hold a positive view of the real estate mogul. His incendiary comments about Mexican immigrants, calling them rapists and criminals, and his controversial plans to build a “great wall” at the U.S.-Mexican border and engage in mass deportation of undocumented migrants have made him an easy target for hatred and mockery.


But it is Peña Nieto, not Trump, who faces nationwide anger over the unprecedented meeting. Days after the event, the general opinion of Mexicans is that Trump might be the bad guy, but inviting him over for a friendly chat was at best ill-advised and at worst a humiliating display by a president who, far from confronting the bully from the north, acted in an awkward, subdued and, according to some, submissive manner.

“Trump won and Peña Nieto lost,” says Fernando Dworak, a Mexican political scientist. “The entire event was a colossal failure.”

What’s more, the already deeply unpopular Mexican president, whose approval rating has plunged below 25 percent and whose ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is under threat of losing the presidency in 2018 as the Mexican economy lags, criminal violence flares up and corruption scandals plague his administration, appears to have chosen the worst possible moment to have met the flamboyant billionaire.

On Thursday, the day after meeting with Trump, Peña Nieto delivered his “Informe de Gobierno,” the Mexican equivalent to the State of the Union. The Informe is usually a way for presidents to flaunt their domestic achievements, but after Wednesday’s PR debacle the national focus has been squarely on the meeting with Trump. And few commentators, if any, have been kind to the president.

“Why did you invite him?” asked Ricardo Raphael, one of the most prominent columnists at Mexico City’s El Universal, on Thursday. “Did you think you were eloquent enough to change Mr. Trump’s points of view?”

“In the feelings of the Mexicans who yesterday received with indignation the surprising presence of Trump on our territory, and in the reactions of the political opposition, president Peña Nieto was wrong and made a historical and strategic mistake,” Raphael’s colleague Salvador García Soto wrote the same day.

More than the invitation, though, what really set off public opinion was the lackluster way the president treated Trump during and after the meeting.

Peña Nieto was criticized last year for failing to issue a strong response to the incendiary comments with which Trump kicked off his campaign. While his predecessors Felipe Calderón and especially Vicente Fox have repeatedly likened Trump to a fascist and rejected (in Fox’s case, even with an expletive on live American television) the notion that Mexico would pay for a border wall, it took Peña Nieto until early this year to do the same.

Many Mexicans demanded a similar show of verbal strength yesterday or expected that their current president would at least request some kind of apology. Instead, he called Trump’s incendiary remarks about Mexican immigrants “misunderstandings” that nevertheless “pained” the Mexican people and tepidly spoke of mutual respect.

“We expected someone who would defend our national interests, not a subdued neighbor who didn’t really know what he was supposed to talk about during such an event,” says Dworak. “And not only did he disappoint people at home, he also showed an enormous lack of sensitivity towards the Mexican community in the United States by meeting with Trump.”

“There was no need to do any of this if the president is going to deal for two more years with whomsoever wins the lection in November,” he adds. “It was poorly planned, poorly executed and just a bad idea from the beginning.”

According to the office of the Mexican president, the visit was the result of an invitation Peña Nieto recently sent to both Trump and his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The parlays, the office says, were meant to be exploratory conversations of sorts to see where the two candidates stand on bilateral issues such as cross-border trade, migration and security.

But in the eyes of many here, Trump treated the chat with Peña Nieto and the joint news conference afterwards merely as a photo op to make himself look presidential, while diminishing a Southern neighbor.

The language Trump used at the news conference was surprisingly subtle and diplomatic. He praised the Mexican people, called Peña Nieto “a friend” and emphasized bilateral collaboration in the fight against illegal immigration and the cross-border flow of drugs and guns that fuel Mexico’s violent drug war. But, despite his unusually restrained demeanor, Trump did not actually retract any of his policy proposals that have Mexicans and their political class worried. Instead, in his long-awaited speech on immigration in Phoenix, Arizona, later that evening, Trump returned to the core of his fiercely anti-immigrant and, as perceived here, anti-Mexican policy proposals of mass deportation and forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall he wants to build.

Some critics have been kinder to the president and didn’t believe the invitation was, in itself, a bad idea, citing the need to gain some clarity on what Mexico might expect the future leader of its northern neighbor.

“I didn’t think it was a bad idea to invite both Clinton and Trump to Mexico, although it is unprecedented in Mexican political history,” says Genaro Lozano, a commentator who follows the U.S. election closely for the Reforma newspaper. “And the problem wasn’t the fact that the president invited them, it was that Trump is, for lack of a better term, a buffoon. He was always going to be the problem.”

“You know beforehand that Trump is going to use this to look presidential, as a photo-op he can later use during his campaign,” he added. “He wants to stand next to a head of state. That’s why he came to Mexico.”

But many here complain that Peña Nieto seemed to have no answer to Trump’s quest for a Kodak moment. Next to Trump, the president’s comments appeared as diluted platitudes, his performance strained and scripted.

Much of that is due to the president’s character, observers say.

In many ways, Trump and Peña Nieto are polar opposites. Where Trump’s campaign team has problems persuading the candidate to use the teleprompter, Peña Nieto’s public performances are usually highly prepared and scripted. The president, who is often likened to a soap opera star due to his good looks and his marriage to former actor Angélica Rivera, is controlled, restrained, slick, and devoid of the bravado and power of improvisation that helped Trump win the Republican ticket.

“Peña Nieto isn’t capable of doing anything without a script. He has no capacity for improvisation,” says Dworak. “He is the exact opposite of Trump in that sense: Trump prefers to work without the teleprompter, Peña Nieto can’t work without it.”

Peña Nieto is constitutionally barred from reelection, but his perceived failings as a president, which now include the disastrous Trump visit, could seriously hurt his party's prospects. In June, when 12 of Mexico’s 32 states held gubernatorial elections, the opposition National Action Party (PAN) won 7—an unexpected but crushing victory that analysts say was due mainly to Peña Nieto’s unpopularity. After the Trump visit, PRI is poised to suffer even more losses, both in statewide elections over the next few years and perhaps in the presidential election in 2018. Even Peña Nieto’s home state, Estado de México, where he himself was once governor and which holds elections next year, looks as though it might go to the PAN. The state has been a bastion of the PRI for more than 80 years, and losing it would be considered a calamity for the ruling party.

But many here say that the bigger calamity is for Mexico, which, thanks to Peña Nieto’s docile performance, has taken a step back on its path to becoming a global economic player.

“What this meeting did,” said Fernando Dworak, “is help Mexico and Peña Nieto go from being actors with their own interests to be just another image in the discourse of attacks between Clinton and Trump.”