Mexico Is Showing the World How to Stand Up to Donald Trump
Donald Trump loves to try to bully Mexico. But President Claudia Sheinbaum is showing the world how to stand up to the MAGA administration without playing into its hands.
Claudia Sheinbaum speaking at the National Palace on June 19, 2025, in Mexico City. (Juan Abundis / ObturadorMX / Getty Images)
On Sunday, March 9, over 350,000 people crammed into Mexico City’s central square, the Zócalo, in repudiation of US president Donald Trump’s tariff threats. Just days before, President Claudia Sheinbaum announced the reaching of an agreement which, under the cover of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), would exempt Mexico from most of the levies. “Fortunately, dialogue has prevailed and, especially, respect between our nations,” Sheinbaum told the crowd. Sure enough, when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, both Mexico and Canada had been excluded.
The tariff dispute, however, has only proved to be an opening skirmish in the testy relationship with Mexico that has developed since. After making similar tariff threats in his first term, Trump declared victory, pocketed his concessions on immigration, and largely left the country alone. This time around, however, the administration — spurred by the reckless, nativist rage of his coterie — has taken the opportunity to ratchet up tensions again and again. This, in turn, has put to the test President Sheinbaum’s approach of handling her erratic counterpart with her now famous cabeza fría, or “cool head.”
Turning the Screws
A cursory summary will be enough to paint the picture. On March 21, for the first time since a treaty governing shared watersheds was signed in 1944, the United States denied a Mexican request for water, in this case for the city of Tijuana. After several weeks of back-and-forth, the dispute was settled at the end of April. On May 11, the United States announced the suspension of livestock imports from Mexico due to the detection of New World screwworm (NWS) in the south of the country, to the visible frustration of Agriculture Secretary Julio Berdegué, who reminded the United States of its failure to respond to requests to assist in containing the northward march of the pest when it resurfaced in Panama back in 2023. As of this writing, the ban remains in effect.
In early May, a MORENA governor and her spouse had their visas revoked without explanation, setting off a froth of speculation and rumor. Then on May 16, in violation of any semblance of diplomatic protocol or ethics, newly minted ambassador Ronald D. Johnson spent his second day in the country calling the far-right, fledgling politician Eduardo Verástegui his “brother” at a chummy dinner; the moment, widely shared on social media, further heightened suspicions about Johnson — a former Green Beret, CIA agent, and one of fifty-five “advisers” to the junta during the civil war in El Salvador.
Shortly before, the Trump administration had allowed seventeen members of the Guzmán crime family to enter the United States, barely two months after designating the Sinaloa Cartel, among others, a foreign terrorist organization (FTO). As if to underscore fears that the designation could be used to justify US military intervention in the country, Trump told Sheinbaum in a phone call that he would be “honored” to go in and “help” with the cartels, an offer she obviously refused.
On May 21, House Republicans announced the creation of an excise tax on remittances, part of a larger plan to unload the cost of tax cuts onto migrants. Sheinbaum blasted the plan as double taxation and, in an appearance in the city of San Luis Potosí, broached the possibility of domestic mobilizations to demonstrate opposition to the measure. Some ten days later, Director of Homeland Security Kristi Noem — who had been received with an excess of civility by President Sheinbaum at the National Palace in March — took advantage of an out-of-context clip making the rounds to claim that Sheinbaum was egging on violent protests in Los Angeles. This was too far even for Trump, and Ambassador Johnson was tasked with walking it back.
But nobody was there to walk back the following incident. On June 12, in the context of both the Los Angeles protests and ongoing Trumpian threats to cancel the visas of anyone supporting any kind of protest whatsoever, a member of the MORENA party for the state of Jalisco posted an irreverent tweet regarding her own visa. The tweet, fueled by righteous indignation to the abuses of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) against those of Mexican ancestry, was similar to thousands that get published every day. Nevertheless, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau — then in the midst of a visit to Mexico — responded that he had personally given the order to cancel the young woman’s visa, in the process revealing confidential information about her status for all to see.
As if that petulant display of bullying weren’t enough, Landau followed up a few days later with an out-of-place rant in response to a bland news bulletin published by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) regarding opportunities in trade relations with China. In addition to the impropriety of a State Department official swaggering around social media like a triggered adolescent, the tweets were counterproductive in another way. By revealing visa cancellations to be arbitrary, motivated by little more than personal bile and pique, Landau inadvertently undermined the Trump administration’s attempt to use them as a pressure tactic.
The icing on the cake arrived on June 25 at a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee when Attorney General Pam Bondi asserted that the Trump administration “will keep America safe . . . not only from Iran, but from Russia, China, and from Mexico. From any foreign adversary, whether they’re trying to kill us physically, or by overdosing our children with drugs.” To this impromptu lumping-in of Mexico as a US adversary on par with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, Sheinbaum responded coolly that the attorney general “is not very well informed.”
“We Are Nobody’s Piñata”
Finally, President Sheinbaum’s long-simmering patience was to run out. The following day, the US Treasury Department, wielding the Fentanyl Sanctions Act and the FEND Off Fentanyl Act, sanctioned three Mexican financial institutions for being “primary money laundering concerns.” Sporting a more combative tone at her morning press conference, Sheinbaum challenged the Treasury Department to send proof of the allegations, “that is, if it has any.”
“We are not going to cover for anyone, there is no impunity, but it has to be demonstrated that there was money laundering, not with statements, but with conclusive evidence,” she noted. “Our relationship with the United States is one of equals, not of subordination. We are nobody’s piñata.” As the three institutions in question — CiBanco, Intercam Banco, and Vector Casa de Bolsa — do significant business with China, the Treasury’s maneuver gave every appearance of being an attempt to disrupt Sino-Mexican relations under the guise of fentanyl precursor tracing.
To be sure, Mexico is hardly alone in being on the receiving end of such treatment; indeed, inciting people the world over has been more the rule than the exception in the volatile relaunch of Trumpism. And in the face of his administration’s dogged determination to provoke reactions in order to justify a more aggressive response in turn, Sheinbaum’s stubborn refusal to be goaded has much to recommend it. It is also important to distinguish what in all of this is official policy and what — like the outbursts of the Noems, Bondis, and Landaus — may instead be the product of institutional disarray, personal toxicity, power trips, and racism.
That said, Sheinbaum’s belated change in tone likely reflects a growing realization that imperial antagonism cannot be impeded by charm and rational argumentation alone. The current spate of bludgeoning is simply an extension of the perennial US insistence that Mexico come to heel. And if it can do so without the messiness of an unpopular military operation, all the better.
To that end, every tool in the kit will be trotted out: official and unofficial slander, media smears, taxes, sanctions, border closings, visa cancellations, treaty disputes — carefully calibrated to start small so that they can be ramped up as needed. And all designed, moreover, to back Sheinbaum into a damned-if-you-do (provoking retaliation), damned-if-you-don’t (green light for further encroachment), no-win situation.
This is the bind Sheinbaum must avoid at all costs. The answer passes somewhere through popular mobilization, autonomous media, strategic alliances, sovereignty over core economic sectors, industrial policy, regional coordination — and, fundamentally, a rejection of any kind of naivety regarding US brinkmanship. Keeping one’s head down is no solution, nor is banking on the moderating effects of economic integration.
Playing nice, in short, is not going to make it go away. With the West discrediting themselves in their ongoing silence over Gaza, Mexico’s voice is one that is sorely needed on the international stage. As the world’s twelfth-largest economy and geographic bridge between the Global North and South, it must find that voice and stand up to the bully.