By Mary Beth Sheridan · The Washington Post (c) 2025
MEXICO CITY – As President Donald Trump threatened mass deportations and crushing tariffs on Mexico in recent weeks, this country’s leader stuck to a constant refrain.
“We have to keep a cool head,” President Claudia Sheinbaum told her daily news conferences.
While Sheinbaum is a committed leftist, she has rarely criticized Trump publicly. When he started deporting undocumented migrants, Sheinbaum welcomed them without complaint. She made clear that Mexico was prepared to retaliate for U.S. tariffs. But, like a seasoned poker player, she held off on announcing countermeasures, hoping to win a last-minute reprieve from Trump.
On Monday, she did.
But it’s just the first round.
As Trump embarks on a no-holds-barred foreign policy, Sheinbaum shows how some leaders are maneuvering to contain the fallout. She persuaded Trump to hold off on imposing 25 percent tariffs for 30 days while the two sides negotiate on security and trade. (Hours later, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau notched a similar deal.) Sheinbaum addressed Trump’s concerns about fentanyl trafficking by promising to send 10,000 more national guard personnel to the U.S. border. Yet it may prove to be a relatively modest concession. Sheinbaum has also drawn red lines, blasting the Trump administration when she deemed it was attacking Mexican sovereignty.
Many Mexicans are comparing Sheinbaum favorably against another leftist Latin American leader, Colombian President Gustavo Petro. Last month, he refused to accept U.S. military jets carrying back deportees – then abruptly folded when Trump threatened stiff sanctions.
“World leaders will look at Petro as an example of what not to do, and at Sheinbaum as a symbol of how to manage this well,” tweeted Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican ambassador to China.
The U.S.-Mexico relationship will probably still face considerable turbulence. Trump and his top aides have issued a host of complaints about Mexico, such as on trade and sex trafficking. The country is the biggest source of deadly fentanyl reaching the United States. “The sword of Damocles is still hanging over our heads,” Mexico’s former ambassador to Washington, Martha Bárcena, wrote on the X platform.
So far, however, Sheinbaum has developed a pragmatic working relationship with Trump. As the first female president of Mexico, she was prepared, a longtime colleague said.
“Since we were young, this has been a country of machos,” said the woman, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “When it comes to managing strong personalities, she has a real talent for that.”
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Following López Obrador’s ‘bromance’ with Trump
Sheinbaum, 62, was elected president in June by a 30-point margin. She is in many ways Trump’s opposite: a leftist, an academic with a PhD in environmental engineering, a longtime proponent of green energy.
She’s the first Jewish leader of this mostly Roman Catholic nation, as well as the first “presidenta.” She insists on the female term, rather than the one used for men – “presidente.”
Her political career developed in the shadow of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the charismatic founder of the nationalist, left-leaning Morena party, who concluded his presidency in September. Sheinbaum served as Mexico City’s mayor during his term. So far, she has largely continued his policies. They include popular cash-benefit programs, such as scholarships and pensions, but also a radical overhaul of the judicial system that legal scholars say will severely weaken its independence.
The ruling party and its allies control the National Congress and 23 of the 32 Mexican states. That political dominance has strengthened Sheinbaum’s hand as she deals with Trump. She may lack López Obrador’s folksy charm, but she also enjoys strong popularity. A recent poll gave her a 78 percent approval rating.
Sheinbaum has frequently noted that Mexico has little choice but to get along with the United States – no matter who is its president. More than 80 percent of Mexico’s exports go to its northern neighbor. Trump threatened tariffs that could have driven Mexico into a deep recession.
Some Mexicans questioned whether the cerebral Sheinbaum would establish the kind of “bromance” that López Obrador had with Trump. But the Republican has described his conversations with Sheinbaum as “wonderful” and “very friendly.”
During one of their calls, in November, the translator’s line dropped, Mexican officials said. Sheinbaum shifted into English. She speaks it well, having spent four years doing postdoctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley. “President Trump was very impressed,” Sheinbaum’s colleague said.
Sheinbaum has repeatedly offered to negotiate since Trump announced in late November that he intended to impose 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, citing what he called their failure to stop the flow of migrants and fentanyl. She has avoided high-profile gestures, such as Trudeau’s trip to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, to try to head off the tariffs. Quietly, though, she has made concessions.
She has accepted non-Mexicans – as well as Mexicans – deported by the Trump administration. She has signaled her willingness to host asylum seekers whose petitions are pending in U.S. courts – a program known as “Wait in Mexico,” which Trump is reviving.
Yet the Mexican leader hasn’t hesitated to express her differences. After Trump declared he was bestowing a new name on the Gulf of Mexico – the “Gulf of America” – Sheinbaum puckishly produced a map labeling the North American continent with a 19th-century term, “América Mexicana,” or “Mexican America.”
Last weekend, Sheinbaum expressed outrage when the White House alleged that drug-trafficking groups had an “intolerable alliance” with Mexico’s government.
“Our sovereignty is not up for negotiation,” she said in an address to the nation.
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Mexico already has troops on the U.S. border
Mexico’s efforts to open talks with the White House trade team had been stymied by the lack of confirmed appointees to negotiate with. On Sunday, Mexican Commerce Minister Marcelo Ebrard finally managed to have a conversation with Howard Lutnick, the nominee for U.S. commerce secretary, officials said.
In her phone call with Trump on Monday morning, Sheinbaum responded to his concerns by saying she’d fortify the border with 10,000 national guard troops. “These soldiers will be specifically designated to stop the flow of fentanyl, and illegal migrants into our Country,” Trump wrote on his social media site, Truth Social.
However, Mexico already has thousands of troops along the U.S. border. Sam Storr, an analyst with the Citizen Security Project at the Ibero-American University, said that there were 1,115 national guard and 7,959 army troops assisting with migration enforcement at Mexico’s northern border in the first half of 2024, according to freedom-of-information requests. Mexico had intensified its enforcement last year under pressure from the Biden administration, helping drive down the arrests of migrants at the U.S. border to four-year lows.
John Feeley, a retired career U.S. diplomat who served in Mexico, said that the new measures represented more of what Mexicans had already been implementing. “What they are cagily doing is letting Trump claim credit for it,” he said.
As Trump considers tariffs on other countries – he has mentioned the European Union as one potential target – its leaders are closely watching how the North American trade confrontation plays out. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Monday that he was impressed by Sheinbaum’s strategy.
“The Mexican president is a smart politician,” he told reporters. “I think she acted with a cool head.”
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Valentina Muñoz Castillo in Mexico City and Kate Brady in Berlin contributed to this report.