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- Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s careful responses to President Trump’s trade threats helped stall the imposition of new tariffs.
- Trump, so ready to demean and insult foreign leaders, has called Sheinbaum a “marvelous woman.”
- Polls show that Sheinbaum’s handling of Trump and other issues have won her unusually high approval numbers, often above 70%.
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MEXICO CITY — The president stood amid the admiring throngs and declared victory.
“We have gathered here to congratulate ourselves because — in relations with the United States, with its government — dialogue and respect have prevailed,” President Claudia Sheinbaum told the adoring multitudes gathered in the capital’s historic central plaza, or Zócalo, in a mega-event organized by her ruling party.
Sheinbaum’s triumphalist exhortations on March 9 dramatized how she has, to date, successfully walked an extremely precarious tight rope: Appeasing President Trump and postponing enactment of most of his threatened tariffs, while also convincing fellow Mexicans that she won’t jettison national sovereignty to avert import duties that could throw the already shaky economy into recession.
“We will always place respect for our beloved country and our blessed nation above all,” Sheinbaum said.
Her scrupulously calibrated responses — she repeatedly stresses the need to keep a “cool head” on tariff talks — have earned Sheinbaum a reputation as a kind of Trump whisperer, a rare national leader who seems to have figured out how to play the mercurial New Yorker. Her eleventh hour telephone calls with Trump have twice helped stall the imposition of new tariffs.
Thousands of supporters attend a rally as Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum speaks at the Zócalo in Mexico City on March 9. The rally was held after President Trump paused suspending tariffs on Mexico a few days earlier.
(Anadolu via Getty Images)
Many Mexicans applaud Sheinbaum’s handling of a delicate predicament.
“It’s difficult when you have to negotiate the economic future of your country with someone like Trump, who says one thing today, something else tomorrow,” said Laura Mendoza, 36, who runs a shop in the capital selling nutritional goods. “She’s facing a lot of challenges. We have to give her time. This country’s many problems won’t be solved in a few months.”
The U.S. president himself has lauded Sheinbaum as a “marvelous woman,” a stark contrast to his habitual disparagement of other world leaders, notably former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Unlike Trudeau, who blasted Trump and called his import taxes a “dumb idea,” Sheinbaum has kept the tone of her public comments direct, but civil, even as Trump denounced an “intolerable alliance” between her government and organized crime. She also has taken action.
Sheinbaum has dispatched troops to the northern border to deter illegal immigration and launched a law-enforcement crackdown that has seen surging arrests of alleged drug kingpins, near-daily takedowns of drug labs and record seizures of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid blamed for tens of thousands of U.S. overdose deaths.
Her administration even handed over 29 purported drug cartel leaders to Washington in a fast-track process that bypassed formal extradition procedures.
Consigned to the rearview mirror, it would seem, is the “hugs not bullets” approach of her predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who eschewed direct confrontations with cartels in favor of funding social programs in a mostly futile effort to deter vulnerable youth from joining organized crime — which is among Mexico’s largest employers.
Thus far, U.S. law enforcement authorities — who had a strained relationship with President López Obrador — have mostly praised Sheinbaum’s cooperation in sometimes touchy operations, including stepped-up secret CIA drone flights over Mexico in apparent search of illicit drug labs.
Apart from racking up international plaudits, Mexico’s first woman president appears genuinely popular among many, if not most, Mexicans, despite the inevitable complaints about the country’s seemingly intractable problems — rampant crime, rising prices, deeply ingrained corruption.
Polls have shown Sheinbaum, who took office Oct. 1, with extraordinary approval ratings topping 70%.
To protect thousands of varieties of Mexico’s prized heirloom corn, leaders vote to amend the constitution to ban the planting of genetically modified corn seeds.
Still, some wonder how much of her popularity is on shaky ground, a potentially short-lived holdover from the enduring affection for López Obrador, who showered aid on needy Mexicans. It was a strategy that, while aiding long-neglected poor and working-class masses and building grassroots political support, has, in the view of critics, hiked deficits and left the country in a parlous economic predicament.
“Although the cool head that has bought her time against the threats of Trump is laudable … the sword of Damocles that Trumpism brandishes over our neck has not disappeared,” columnist Denise Dresser wrote in Mexico’s Reforma newspaper. “Behind [Sheinbaum’s] personal popularity and her party acclaim there are inescapable realities,” Dresser continued, citing the country’s economic difficulties and deep divisions about a Sheinbaum-backed judicial reform package that detractors view as a radical step toward one-party hegemony.
In the eyes of many, Sheinbaum’s sanguine assertions that Mexico will bypass a tariff calamity seem somewhat premature, like the praises she has received worldwide as a leader who knows how to handle Trump.
“The president says she is confident there will be no more tariffs, but that is an act of faith,” wrote columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio in El Financiero. “Trump is indecipherable, even for those closest to him.”
To date, skeptics note, Sheinbaum has won no guarantees from the Trump administration, beyond putting off the threat of 25% import taxes on most merchandise shipped to the United States, the destination of more than 80% of Mexico’s exports. Nor did Trump exempt Mexico from tariffs on steel and aluminum imports imposed on Wednesday.
Those levies appear to blow a hole in the intricate architecture of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the duty-free trade accord negotiated by the first Trump administration as a “wonderful” (Trump’s word) successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Trump labeled “the worst trade deal ever made.”
Unlike Canada, Mexico decided not to impose retaliatory levies on U.S. imports in response to the metal tariffs, preferring to wait until the next tariff deadline, April 2.
The March 9 downtown rally was originally intended as a forum to unveil slap-back tariffs against U.S. imports, a show of muscle by Mexico. Although Trump paused the tariffs, Sheinbaum opted to go ahead with the rally, calling it a “party.”
“What did the president celebrate?” asked Riva Palacio. “A new pause, which doesn’t cancel the threat.”
Sheinbaum, a former mayor of Mexico City, was the handpicked successor of López Obrador, founder of the Morena party that now dominates Mexican politics. Both are lifelong activists of the left. And both once denounced free-trade as a racket to benefit the rich.
A historical snapshot of Sheinbaum — then a young scientist doing doctoral work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California — shows her with fellow Mexican students protesting the presence at Stanford of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, an avid free-trader. The youthful Sheinbum, hair in a headband, defiantly brandishes a placard declaring (in English): “Fair Trade and Democracy Now!!”
But both López Obrador and Sheinbaum — the old-school, back-slapping pol and the steely, U.S.-educated technocrat — ultimately embraced U.S.-Mexico commerce. And both put ideology aside and turned pragmatic in their machinations to placate Trump, despite his long history of demeaning Mexico and Mexican immigrants.
As the Trump administration cracks down on illegal immigration, California farm groups are working to influence legislation that would ensure a stable supply of laborers for an industry long reliant on a foreign-born workforce.
But Sheinbaum also isn’t shy about talking back to the Trump administration. When Trump declared that the Gulf of Mexico should be called the Gulf of America, she sarcastically suggested that the United States be renamed “Mexican America,” citing colonial-era maps with that title.
“That sounds beautiful, no?” she quipped.
When asked Friday about recent comments from Ronald Johnson, a former military officer nominated as U.S. ambassador to Mexico, that “everything is on the table” when it comes to curtailing drug cartels, Sheinbaum scoffed.
She and other officials are deeply concerned about the prospect of unilateral U.S. military strikes against Mexican drug cartels — an idea that Trump has long seemed to embrace.
Even more than tariffs, a U.S. military attack on Mexican soil would likely test Sheinbaum’s cool-headed approach.
“We don’t agree,” Sheinbaum responded when asked about Johnson’s militaristic musings. “He said everything is on the table. That’s not on the table. Nor on the chair. Nor on the floor. Nor anywhere.”
Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed to this report.
