Mexico’s president has America hooked on what he’s selling.

[Geee]

American Mind

Yes. He just did that. He went there.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was so supremely confident that his thumb on the scale can tip the U.S. presidential election that he just issued a cash demand to President Biden along with a threat: give me money or Donald Trump wins. The spectacle, shameful for all parties, played out on the grand stage of CBS’s 60 Minutes Sunday broadcast.

As my book Overrun shows, Biden launched and nurtured a mass immigration crisis for three straight years. The knock-on effects of this debacle are now being felt all over the country, and not just in conservative enclaves. These days, Biden’s immigration policy registers as so deeply unpopular with the American people that López Obrador offered the old “silver-or-lead” option to the Biden campaign on national television.

If President Biden wants his mass migration crisis to recede from public view before the election, López Obrador will slow the flow of migrants—for the ripe price of a $20 billion down payment. This cash would be sent under the paper-thin cover of the debunked “root causes” theory of mass migration, which proposes that money from the destination country can rebuild countries generating outmigration so that their citizens want to stay.

And if the U.S. incumbent doesn’t pay the requested $20 billion a year for root causes—“then what?” asked interviewer Sharyn Alfonsi.

“The flow of migrants…will continue,” the president responded simply with a smile worthy of a mafia don.

Your critics, Alfonsi continued, have said that “what you’re asking for to help secure the border is diplomatic blackmail. What do you say?”

“I am speaking frankly, we have to say things as they are, and I always say what I feel. I always say what I think,” the Mexican president responded.

Everyone in this space knows that “root causes” is a euphemism for sending unaccountable American cash down a black corruption hole in developing countries. That’s not in doubt. But the big question that many Democratic and Republican politicians, as well as private citizens who saw this interview, must be asking is whether this public extortion proposition is credible.

Does a retiring Mexican president with six months left on his clock really have so much say over whether Donald Trump beats Joe Biden that he could ask for $20 billion to tip things toward Biden?

The short answer is: yes. Yes, he absolutely does.