How Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum Won Trump’s Praise
Americas|‘You’re Tough’: How Mexico’s President Won Trump’s Praise
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/world/americas/sheinbaum-trump-mexico-tariffs.html
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With a trade war brewing, President Trump gave the Mexican president a sign of grudging respect: “You’re tough,” he told her in a phone call last month, according to four people with knowledge of the exchange.
By their most recent conversation, the two leaders were trading compliments and carving out a reprieve from some tariffs in real time, the people familiar with the call said.
When Claudia Sheinbaum became president on Oct. 1, the first woman to ever govern Mexico, there were doubts about how she would handle the relationship with the United States, especially if Mr. Trump won the election.
A proud leftist and a scientist by training, Ms. Sheinbaum had little foreign policy experience in her previous post as mayor of Mexico City. Unlike her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who got along with Mr. Trump and shared his bombastic style, Ms. Sheinbaum was seen more as a reserved technocrat than a political show woman.
But she has surprised many in her country not only by fending off a barrage of threats from Mr. Trump, but also by forging, somewhat improbably, a relationship of budding public respect with her American counterpart.
“Nobody expected her to be this good, or this lucky,” said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a Mexican political analyst. “Whatever it is, it’s working.”