MEXICO/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “In President Donald Trump’s telling, officials from Mexico City to Boy Scouts headquarters are lighting up his phone line with praise.
In the leaders’ telling, though, the calls never happened.
It’s an unusual pattern of pushback against the President of the United States, a frequent and expansive telephoner who sometimes hands out his personal cell number to the people he meets. And it raises questions about which presidential assertions can be believed and which cannot.
This week alone, Trump’s boasts about two phone conversations have been contradicted by the alleged other parties.
On Monday [8-2-17], Trump heralded a call from Mexico’s President about a decrease in border crossings.
‘Even the President of Mexico called me,’ Trump asserted in the Oval Office on Monday after swearing in his new chief of staff. ‘Their southern border, they said very few people are coming because they know they’re not going to get to our border, which is the ultimate compliment.’
In Mexico, however, officials recalled a different version of events.
‘President Enrique Peña Nieto has not been in recent communication via telephone with President Donald Trump,’ read a statement from the Mexican President’s office.”
-Kevin Liptak, “Trump’s call history called into question,” CNN Politics, CNN.com, Aug. 2, 2017 12:05pm