Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum received news of U.S. tariffs on automobile imports with her usual calm demeanour. At her morning news conference last week, she said, “Of course we disagree with this unilateral decision on tariffs,” but then spoke optimistically about continental free trade. “What are we doing? We’re trying with the U.S. government to strengthen the USMCA,” she said.
Ms. Sheinbaum’s popularity has soared as she adroitly deals with U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats of tariffs – assuming a reassuring tone with her people, refusing to overreact to Mr. Trump’s provocations and continuously promising to co-operate with a mercurial counterpart.
Ms. Sheinbaum has stoked Mexican nationalism, too, without targeting Mr. Trump or indulging anti-American rhetoric. And she appears to have even charmed the U.S. President, who told reporters, “President Sheinbaum is a woman I like very much.”
But it remains to be seen whether her diplomatic skills spare Mexico from U.S. tariffs coming Wednesday, which could cripple its export economy. Ms. Sheinbaum did not avoid Mr. Trump’s 25-per-cent auto tariffs, the exact impact of which is still not known, particularly when it comes to cars with parts made in the U.S. (Canada is also awaiting clarity.) They could affect a sector responsible for nearly 32 per cent of Mexico’s exports. The country manufactured nearly four million automobiles in 2024, according to INEGI, the state statistics service, accounting for 4.7 per cent of GDP and one million direct jobs.
Mexico reoriented its inward-looking economy to a manufacturing-for-export model with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Ms. Sheinbaum and her predecessor and mentor, former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, decry the “neoliberal period” ushered in by NAFTA. But they have doggedly defended its crowning accomplishment: continental free trade.
“The Mexican government defends this model of North American integration more at this moment than the governments of Canada and the United States,” said Harim B. Gutiérrez, a history professor at the Autonomous Metropolitan University. “Separating from the United States is a much more critical question” for Mexico “than it would be for Canada.”
Ms. Sheinbaum speaks often of keeping a “cool head” – a sharp contrast with the “elbows up” ethos in Canada – and has twice won tariff reprieves after conversations with Mr. Trump.
“This approach of keeping a ‘cool head’ has had good results. It’s been smart,” said Alexia Bautista, a former diplomat and lead analyst for Mexico at political risk consultancy Horizon Engage. “But the truth is Canada has achieved exactly the same thing. And it did so with a completely different approach.”
Some analysts point to another, easier explanation for Ms. Sheinbaum’s success with Mr. Trump: She quietly agreed to his demands to stamp out fentanyl smuggling and illegal migration. Mexico avoided tariffs in February by sending 10,000 soldiers to its northern states. Ms. Sheinbaum later presented figures from U.S. authorities showing a 71-per-cent drop in fentanyl seizures at the U.S. border. Mexico handed over 29 cartel bosses to the United States. And the country beefed up migration enforcement, sending migrant encounters to the lowest monthly total this century, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Still, Ms. Sheinbaum can respond pointedly. She demands U.S. actions on the guns flooding south into Mexico and arming drug cartels. She questions U.S. societal shortcomings, too, such as fentanyl addiction, saying Mexico is helping in the fight against drug smuggling for “humanitarian” reasons and insisting – without offering proof – that strong families and a rich culture have spared her country from a similar scourge.
“She does this balancing act of figuring out how to talk to the Trump administration and then how to talk to her base in Mexico as well, so it doesn’t look like she’s capitulating,” said Carin Zissis, editor-in-chief at AS/COA Online, a publication of Americas Society/Council of the Americas.
Her handling of Mr. Trump has sent her approval rating soaring, hitting 85 per cent in the last survey for the newspaper El Financiero.
“Sheinbaum is very popular, she has enormous power and she has an advantage that many other leaders don’t have, which is absolute control of public discourse through her morning press conferences,” Ms. Bautista said.
The Mexican President addresses the country every weekday morning in a news conference called “la mañanera,” which sets the news cycle. She pushes favourable statistics, jawbones opponents and takes softball questions from pro-government influencers, while occasionally sparring with critical reporters. No slights go unanswered.
“Sheinbaum doesn’t seem to be under as much internal pressure to respond to Trump,” said Bernardo Sainz, a professor at the IPADE business school in Mexico City. “Canada has many more checks and balances in the provinces, Parliament and a critical press.”
Mr. López Obrador forged an unlikely relationship with Mr. Trump. They won power as populists and anti-elite outsiders, whom critics accuse of attempting to centralize power in the presidency. AMLO, as Mr. López Obrador is commonly called, commiserated with Mr. Trump over the latter’s false claims of election fraud, while relitigating his own grievances from past Mexican contests.
Ms. Sheinbaum, a climate scientist who started out in left-wing student politics, is more technocrat than populist. But analysts say she knows the type.
“For 20 years she managed her relationship – personal and political – with an impetuous, capricious, impulsive, power-hungry politician who was totally ambitious and had uncanny political instincts. And she’s the only one who was able to do it,” said Federico Estévez, a political science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.
“All she’s done now is apply what she learned to do so well over 20 years with a politician that’s exactly the same type as López Obrador, which is Trump,” he added. “This is a real talent she has and has been able to use in her favour.”
Much like Mr. López Obrador, Ms. Sheinbaum weaves nationalist rhetorical flourishes into her stump speeches and news conference soliloquies. “We co-ordinate, we collaborate, but we never subordinate ourselves,” she said in December. “Mexico is respected,” she says frequently, repeating an AMLO line.
She outlined the “five principles” of her foreign policy during a recent weekend tour of Baja California: shared responsibility, mutual trust, respect for sovereignty, “co-operation without subordination” and “respect for Mexico and Mexicans.”
She then asked the audience to raise their hands if they had relatives “on the other side of the border.” Many did.
Nearly 12 million Mexican nationals live in the United States, and the country received more than $82-billion in remittances last year – some 4.5 per cent of GDP – as migrants supported family in downtrodden communities back home.
“We always strive for a relationship of respect, and so far, that’s been the case,” she said. “We will continue working to ensure that this relationship of friendship and co-ordination always prevails between the United States and Mexico.”
The federal government has unveiled a buy domestic initiative with an illustrated Mexican eagle and the words “Hecho en México” (Made in Mexico.) But such initiatives and boycotts of U.S. products have been less robust than similar movements in Canada. Ruling party supporters have kept their Trump criticism in check, too.
Some analysts point to the absence of annexation talk to partly explain Mexicans’ more moderate attitudes, saying the trauma of losing half the national territory in a U.S. invasion still lingers.
“Mexican society doesn’t like trouble with the United States,” said Ilán Semo, a history professor at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City. “If Claudia did what the Canadians are doing, her approval rating would drop. … It’s nationalism without being anti-American.”
