Donald Trump’s Wednesday morning tweet-tantrum was another reminder of why his tweets aren’t just idle social media chatter: He tried to provoke armed conflict with Mexico in a tweet claiming that “Mexico’s Soldiers recently pulled guns on our National Guard Soldiers, probably as a diversionary tactic for drug smugglers on the Border” and threatening “Better not happen again! We are now sending ARMED SOLDIERS to the Border. Mexico is not doing nearly enough in apprehending & returning!”
Trump started off with an error—these were not National Guard members but active-duty soldiers—and it’s a revealing one, because on Sunday, the head of a Border Patrol union made the exact same error and offered the same theory about Mexican soldiers “performing diversion tactics for criminal cartels in order for them to smuggle drugs or high-value contraband into the United States.” Maybe Trump DVR’d that show and watched it Wednesday morning?
This is not a theory shared by the U.S. military, which has looked into the incident. “We believe this brief exchange was a misunderstanding concerning the location of the unmarked U.S. surveillance vehicle and an honest mistake by the Mexican soldiers,” a military spokeswoman told the Washington Post. “The Mexican military has been and continues to be a great partner with the United States military.”
As for Trump’s threat, there are already some armed U.S. soldiers at the border, but it doesn’t sound like he was thinking about military police guarding unarmed soldiers doing other work. As is so often the case with Trump’s policy-by-tweet, though, it’s not not clear whether that was a real plan or a childish outburst. Luckily, Mexican President Andrès Manuel Lòpez Obrador is keeping a clear head, telling reporters that “We are not going to be tripped up by any provocation, I say to President Donald Trump that we want to maintain a respectful, friendly relationship with his government, that we will investigate this incident (regarding the military on the border), that we will take into account what he is saying, and we will act according to our laws, and respecting our sovereignty.”