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Donald Trump Meets With Carlos Slim, Reverses Feud

By Nick Younker
Published on: 12:10 PST, Dec 20, 2016

Donald Trump seems to be mending his ways with people who were common targets for him while on the campaign trail this year just before his November 8th victory over Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 presidential election. This time, Trump has made progress with settling a feud that he has had with Mexican billionaire and the sixth wealthiest man in the world, Carlos Slim.

In recent weeks, since Donald trump wrapped up his election win, the president-elect has made some shocking alliances with people who served as an adversary to him during the political campaign, which includes Mitt Romney and Ben Carson. But this will mark the first time he has made any progress with healing wounds south of the border.

According to a report on The Washington Post, Donald Trump has met with billionaire Carlos Slim at his private estate, Mar-a-Lago, in Florida for a dinner that seems to have ended well for the two former foes.

Some of the former beefs between Donald Trump and Carlos Slim stemmed from the very onset of Trump’s campaign, where he famously remarked that Mexicans were rapists and murderers, just after announcing that he was running for the republican nomination for president of the United States.

That comment, among others, seemed to set off a chain of actions and reactions between both Donald Trump and Carlos Slim that has ignited a widespread furor between the two billionaires. Even though Donald Trump himself is a billionaire, Carlos Slim has him beat in terms of wealth by a wide margin with his estimated net worth around $77 billion.

Even though the two billionaires had never personally met, Carlos Slim did make scathing comments about Donald Trump that have caused him to fire back at Slim and the rivalry raged on between the two. Slim is also a stakeholder in The New York Times, according to a report by CNBC, which has frequently been at the receiving end of Donald Trump’s ire over the last several months.

Donald Trump saw Carlos Slim as a threat due to his large shareholder stake in the NYT and used that as a reason to attack him and the publication, most notably via Twitter.

So what would make a multi-billionaire like Carlos Slim want to make nice with a guy like Donald Trump? Well, one of the biggest issues that threaten Carlos Slim and his business dealings is the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Donald Trump has vowed to do away with.

NAFTA is something that has greatly benefitted Carlos Slim and many other wealthy Mexican elite. If Donald Trump makes good on his promise to do away with it, that could shake up the wealthy elite in Mexico and potentially lead to a loss of jobs for the struggling country that has vowed to reject any demand by Donald Trump to pay for the building of a wall between the United States and Mexico.

For a better understanding of how this could impact Mexico, former U.S. ambassador to Mexico under President Obama, Earl Anthony Wayne, spoke with The Washington Post and gave them some insight into what’s at stake if NAFTA goes away.

“It’s a million dollars a minute in trade that goes across our border,” Wayne told The Washington Post.

“The CEOs are very interested in preserving what they see as mutually beneficial relations. There’s a lot of attention to what the policies will turn out to be and a desire to have a dialogue with whoever the new officials will be.”

Donald Trump has already commented on Twitter as to how the dinner went between himself and Carlos Slim. He described Slim as a “great guy” and “a great businessman from Mexico,” but stopped short of revealing that any progress had been made between the two.

[Featured Image by Tom Pennington/Getty Images]

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