(Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto giving a speech during a lunch for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Mexico City.Thomson Reuters)

To the shock and wonder of many on both sides of the border, US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump announced this week that he would visit Mexico on Wednesday ahead of his much-anticipated speech on immigration, a trip confirmed by Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.

Peña Nieto said he extended an invitation to both Trump and Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, but the visit by Trump — after months of his disparaging Mexico and Mexican immigrants on the campaign trail — has already been decried by observers on both sides of the border as a considerable misstep by the embattled Mexican leader.

Much of the criticism has centered on the notion that Peña Nieto, in an attempt to be diplomatic, has played into Trump's hands.

"I think President Peña is taking an enormous political risk by hosting Trump," former Mexican President Vicente Fox told CNN on Wednesday. "If he's perceived as going soft on Trump, it will hurt him greatly — he will even be considered like a traitor."

"Well I will say something else ... great photo for his campaign that the government has given to Mr. Trump," Mexican journalist Carlos Puig wrote in the above tweet.

"Peña Nieto repeated time and again that he would not put himself in the foreigners' election. He is doing that and in the worst way: lending himself to help Trump," Carlos Bravo Regidor, a professor in Mexico City, tweeted.

Regidor added that Peña Nieto would try to show that he could moderate Trump's rhetoric but said it wouldn't work, as Trump would return to the US and say he had backed down the Mexican president.

Trump has a rich history of comments involving Mexico and its government. He kicked off his presidential campaign by declaring that Mexico was sending rapists and other criminals across the border. Peña Nieto, in turn, has compared Trump's rise to that of Mussolini and Hitler. And he has said Mexico will not pay for the border wall Trump says he will build to combat illegal immigration from Mexico.

Yet with the invitation, Peña Nieto "has converted himself into a piece of propaganda for the worse enemy of the country," read a tweet from Jesús Silva Herzog Flores, a government and public policy professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey.

While the visit has elicited a kind of amused surprise in the US — another twist in a campaign full of them — the news of the trip has stirred outrage in Mexico. The anger with Trump there is widespread and noticeable.

By giving the appearance of accepting the Republican candidate's past statements, the Mexican president has opened himself to more criticism from his compatriots — only 23% of whom approve of his performance in office.

"High risk: Mexicans would not pardon [Enrique Peña Nieto] for remaining silent before Trump. [Peña Nieto] has to demand an apology from" Trump, influential Univision anchor Jorge Ramos said.

"Trump is saying that we will pay for his wall and we respond [by] receiving him with open arms. Really?!?" Wilson Center scholar Viridiana Rios added in a tweet.

"The biggest stupidity in the history of the Mexican presidency," Herzog Flores said. "There is no parallel to what was just announced."

If the tensions that have built between Mexico and Trump surface in the meeting, it probably won't be immediately apparent. Peña Nieto and Trump are slated to meet early Wednesday afternoon at Los Pinos, the Mexican president's official residence in Mexico City. The two leaders will issue statements after the meeting, but neither plans to take questions, according to The Wall Street Journal.

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