A wide Aronszajn tree is a tree of size and height $\omega _{1}$ with no uncountable branches. We prove that under $MA(\omega _{1}\!)$ there is no wide Aronszajn tree which is universal under weak embeddings. This solves an open question of Mekler and Väänänen from 1994.

We also prove that under $MA(\omega _{1}\!)$ , every wide Aronszajn tree weakly embeds in an Aronszajn tree, which combined with a result of Todorčević from 2007, gives that under $MA(\omega _{1}\!)$ every wide Aronszajn tree embeds into a Lipschitz tree or a coherent tree. We also prove that under $MA(\omega _{1}\!)$ there is no wide Aronszajn tree which weakly embeds all Aronszajn trees, improving the result in the first paragraph as well as a result of Todorčević from 2007 who proved that under $MA(\omega _{1}\!)$ there are no universal Aronszajn trees.