GOP nominee Donald Trump "didn't have the guts" to look Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto in the eye and talk about his call for a Mexico-funded wall at the nation's border, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine said Thursday.
"He walked into a meeting with the Mexican president, and after saying for months that we're going to build a wall and Mexico's going to pay for it, he just forgot to bring that up?" Kaine, making appearances on nearly all of the Thursday morning news programs, told the "CBS This Morning" program.
Peña Nieto and Trump offered conflicting reports after their meeting Wednesday afternoon in Mexico City about the wall.
Trump said in a press conference that he and Peña Nieto talked about the wall but not about who would pay for it, and said in a speech Mexico would "100 percent" pay for the wall. But Peña Nieto later tweeted that Mexico would not be paying for the wall.
The GOP nominee's trip to Mexico, Kaine said, was a "diplomatic embarrassment," and his immigration speech in Phoenix was "dark and disturbing" and contained statements he compared to language that had been used in the past against Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants.
He also pushed back on Trump's accusations about Clinton's immigration policies, saying she believes in comprehensive reform.
Meanwhile, Kaine, a Virginia senator, told ABC's "Good Morning America" that Trump's actions in Mexico and then back in the United States indicated he "talks out of both sides of his mouth."
Kaine told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program that within the first 100 days of her administration, Clinton would put an immigration reform plan in motion.
"It's going to have a couple of key pillars," said Kaine, including a pillar of keeping families together. "It is going to have helping employers figure out the immigration status of the people they hire. It is going to be providing a path where people who are here, if they pay their taxes and submit to criminal background record checks and follow the law, over a period of years they can earn the right to citizenship."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.