Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has already won because he has been able to use the election to further his brand, according to former Mexican President Vicente Fox.
“I cannot understand why the Republican Party lets somebody come in and use it to make the Trump brand more successful in the business world,” Fox told The Washington Post in an interview Thursday.
According to Fox — who has been sparring with Trump in the press over the frontrunner’s call for a Mexico-funded border wall — Trump had won already, regardless of whether he is elected.
“And the Republicans are quiet? He is laughing at everybody. He is amassing a fortune. Today the Trump brand is worth a hundred times more than it was before. So for him, he already won,” Fox said in his interview with the paper.
The former Mexican president, in his interview with the Post, explained the Trump and Bernie Sanders phenomena as part of a more worldwide phenomena of declining trust in government.
Fox said he sees the rise of Trump — and, on the Democratic side, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont — as part of a global trend toward dwindling confidence in government and angry outsiders upending politics, from Britain to Spain to Brazil.
“This is what explains to me a guy like Trump and a guy like Bernie,” Fox said. “They come in and break the system and provoke a revolution. We’re going to see more surprises, because democracy is not delivering what people expect.”
In the same article, another former president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, took Trump to task for his border wall proposal, telling The Post that the wall would be “useless,” paid for by Americans — not Mexico — and harm relations with the U.S.’s neighbor to the south.
“Good collaboration between governments is a safer way to protect the United States than any stupid wall,” he said. “We won’t pay a single cent for that stupid wall. It’s pathetic. . . . Trump is completely demagogical.”
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