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IS CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM THE ANTI-TRUMP?  
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Michelle Goldberg
April 4, 2025
New York Times
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_ Last year was a bad one for incumbent political parties and for
women. One country, however, bucked all these trends: Mexico, where
Claudia Sheinbaum, won the presidency in a landslide. _

, Luis Antonio Rojas for The New York Times

 

Last year was a bad one for incumbent political parties, as voters
worldwide rebelled against representatives of the status quo. It was a
bad year for the left, with Donald Trump winning in the United States
and reactionary nativism advancing across Europe. And it was a bad
year for women in politics; as the BBC reported
[[link removed]], in 60 percent of the
countries that had elections in 2024, the number of women in
legislatures fell.

One country, however, bucked all these trends: Mexico, where Claudia
Sheinbaum, heir apparent of the flamboyantly disruptive left-wing
leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador, won the presidency in a
landslide.

A secular Jewish climate scientist, Sheinbaum is in many ways the
antithesis of the swaggering strongmen who make this moment in world
politics feel so suffocating. I’m talking not just about Trump and
Vladimir Putin, but also the new techno-caudillos of Latin America,
figures like El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Argentina’s Javier
Milei, who combine far-right politics with the postmodern smirk of
message-board trolls.

Around the globe, liberal humanism is faltering while the forces of
reactionary cruelty are on the march. So Sheinbaum, who has adopted
López Obrador’s slogan “For the good of all, first the poor,”
can seem like a shining exception to the reigning spirit of autocratic
machismo.

 

“I feel very proud about her,” Marta Lamas, an anthropology
professor and leading Mexican feminist who has known Sheinbaum for
years, told me in Mexico City last week. “She is a light in this
terrible situation that we are facing: Putin, Trump.”

Lamas said she’d feared a sexist backlash against Sheinbaum,
Mexico’s first female president, but six months into her term,
there’s no sign of one. Sheinbaum was elected with almost 60 percent
of the vote. Today her approval rating is above 80 percent. Last week,
Bukele, who likes to call himself “the world’s coolest
dictator,” asked Grok, Elon Musk’s A.I. chatbot, the name of the
planet’s most popular leader, evidently expecting it would be him.
Grok responded, “Sheinbaum.”

For those of us steeped in American identity politics, it can be hard
to understand how a woman like Sheinbaum came to lead the world’s
11th-most-populous country. Her parents, both from Jewish families
that fled Europe, were scientists who’d been active in the leftist
student movement of the 1960s. As a child, Sheinbaum was dedicated to
dancing ballet, a discipline that still shows up in her graceful
posture and in the many social media videos of her doing folk dances
with her constituents. She did research for her Ph.D. in energy
engineering at UC Berkeley and shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for
her work on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change.

She is, in short, part of the cosmopolitan intelligentsia typically
demonized by populist movements. But as I was told again and again in
Mexico, her rarefied background meant little in light of her close
relationship with López Obrador, who she’d worked beside since he
was mayor of Mexico City 25 years ago, and whose economic populism
earned him the enduring devotion of many downtrodden citizens.

As president, López Obrador more than doubled the minimum wage and
pegged it to inflation to ensure that workers wouldn’t fall behind.
He enacted broad social programs, including stipends for young people
doing job training and, most important, universal cash transfers for
the elderly. According
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Mexico’s National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development
Policy, five million Mexicans escaped poverty during the first four
years of his presidency. (Extreme poverty, however, increased by
nearly half a million.)

Ahead of the last election in 2024, a Gallup poll
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that Mexicans were more optimistic about improvements in their own
living standards than at any other time since Gallup began surveying
the country.

Some Mexican economists see their country’s expanded welfare state,
which Sheinbaum hopes to grow further, as unsustainable. They note
that López Obrador didn’t raise taxes on the rich to pay for it,
instead relying on deficit spending and severe cuts to other parts of
the government. Overall economic growth was slow during his
presidency, and the health care system declined precipitously.

Carlos Heredia, a left-leaning Mexican economist and onetime adviser
to López Obrador, criticizes the former president for handing out
money rather than investing in education and, especially, health care.
“Instead of establishing and improving a functioning system that
belongs to the users,” Heredia said, “what we have is a
disaster.”

But whatever the argument against cash transfers as policy, they are
excellent politics. Money in people’s pockets is simply more
tangible than even the wisest improvements in public services.
Francisco Abundis, the director of the public opinion research firm
Parametrics, told me that by giving people cash, López Obrador’s
administration also gave them a measure of self-respect, a feeling of
being seen and valued by their government. Retirees, he said, gained
independence and enhanced status within their families from their
ability to contribute.

“It was a matter of dignity, the role they play,” he said. During
López Obrador’s presidency, said Abundis, about one of every four
Mexican adults had received government aid, but that support also
benefited their relatives, so 48 percent of people who went to the
polls last year said they’d received money from the government.

 

Mexico’s voters, then, weren’t looking for change last year. The
country’s presidents, however, can serve only a single six-year
term. Unable to run again, López Obrador anointed Sheinbaum, a woman
known for steely competence and intense loyalty, as his successor, and
his record propelled her into office.

Not surprisingly, some leftists in the United States have latched on
to Sheinbaum as a rare symbol of progressive success. Her ascendance
seems like evidence that the road to victory lies in running against
entrenched economic elites and delivering concrete material benefits
to people who are struggling. In other words, it’s a data point
supporting the politics of people like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez.

When I spoke to Representative Ro Khanna of California in January, he
described Sheinbaum’s victory as “an example of working-class
politics working.” At a forum for left-leaning New York City mayoral
candidates last month, the democratic socialist and social media
phenomenon Zohran Mamdani drew cheers when he promised to take “a
page from neighbors like Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico who has shown
what can be won when you’re willing to fight.”

During Trump’s first term, the young, liberal New Zealand Prime
Minister Jacinda Ardern was sometimes held out as the “anti-Trump
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Now, said Waleed Shahid, a progressive Democratic strategist,
Sheinbaum occupies a similar place in the left-wing imagination, as an
“intelligent, inclusive, social democratic” woman offering an
alternative to the brutish rule of oligarchs.

Obviously, Mexico is different from the United States in too many ways
to list, and it’s simplistic to assume that what works in that
country would translate north of the border. But in America, as in so
many other places, there’s a revolt against a style of politics —
often short-handed as neoliberalism — that vests too much power in
markets, ceding the ability of government to promote collective
flourishing.

Because this revolt has led, in the United States and elsewhere, to
unremitting ugliness, it can sometimes feel like our only choices are
neoliberalism or barbarism. Sheinbaum is one of just a few world
leaders offering hope for a different path.

It is, in Mexico’s case, a fragile hope; the country has a weak
economy and is besieged by cartel violence. Trump has been a boon to
Sheinbaum’s popularity, but his policies could still wreak havoc,
even if Mexico has so far been spared the worst of his tariffs. If her
presidency succeeds in spite of all these challenges, it will be a
source of inspiration in a world increasingly bereft of it.

Luis Antonio Rojas for The New York Times

MANY MEXICAN LIBERALS find foreign romanticization of Sheinbaum
exasperating, a projection that says more about American despair than
Mexican reality. She is, after all, López Obrador’s protégé, and
they see him as an analogue to Trump, not an antidote.

“Left-wing populism is not a democratic alternative to right-wing
populism,” said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst in Mexico
City. “It’s still authoritarian, but it’s a more palatable
authoritarianism.”

 

López Obrador, it’s important to note, oversaw significant
democratic backsliding, leading attacks on the media, watchdog
agencies
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most recently, Mexico’s independent judiciary. He was an audacious,
bombastic figure who reveled in insulting his enemies during his daily
morning press conferences, or mañaneras, which included a regular
segment calling out unfriendly journalists, “Who’s Who in Lies.”

Like Trump, López Obrador saw himself as the embodiment of the
people’s will and his opponents in both politics and civil society
as fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate. When the well-known
journalist Carlos Loret de Mola published an investigation into the
opulent lifestyle of López Obrador’s eldest son, López Obrador
struck back by releasing a chart of Loret de Mola’s allegedly lavish
income. It used information that Loret de Mola claimed came from
confidential tax records.

The economist Luis de la Calle, a former Mexican trade negotiator,
keeps in his office a handwritten two-page list of similarities
between López Obrador and Trump, who he describes as “carbon
copies.” For liberals like him, the big question about Sheinbaum is
the degree to which she’ll follow López Obrador’s example.

“The true test for her,” he said, “is not going to be in
economics and trade, which are important, of course. We’ll see
whether she’s truly committed to democratic processes and the rule
of law, equality before the law. That’s what’s going to define her
term historically.”

But even though de la Calle is skeptical of Sheinbaum, he acknowledges
that her character is very different from that of her political
patron. She’s a self-described “lover of data
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a person known for her close attention to detail more than her
ideological crusading. López Obrador set himself against “the
tyranny of the experts,” said de la Calle. “She’s an expert.”

 

Sheinbaum’s ex-husband, Carlos Ímaz, helped found the left-leaning
Party of the Democratic Revolution, or P.R.D., which López Obrador
led for three years in the 1990s. But she didn’t get to know him
until shortly after he became mayor of Mexico City in 2000, when he
tapped her to be his environmental chief, charged with dealing with
the city’s notorious air pollution.

Impressed by her abilities, he put her in charge of a major
infrastructure project, building a second story to the Periférico,
the beltway around Mexico City. She grew into one of his most loyal
allies; in 2014, when he formed his own populist party, known as
Morena, she went with him. In 2018, the year he was elected president,
she became mayor of Mexico City.

During her presidential campaign, Sheinbaum often said she wanted to
build a “second story” to López Obrador’s political revolution.
Many wondered, however, if she could maintain his fervent support
without his brash charisma. At the start of her presidency, there was
a broad sense that she was hemmed in by the need to remain faithful to
him, even in areas where he was considered weak, like security policy.

López Obrador was reluctant to take on the cartels, which have deeply
infiltrated Mexican politics and had allegedly funneled money
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his failed 2006 presidential campaign. He once argued that the gangs
“respect the citizenry,” and he tried to address the country’s
epidemic of cartel violence through programs to give would-be recruits
better options, a policy dubbed “Hugs Not Bullets.”

While the homicide rate dropped slightly toward the end of his
presidency, it remained exceptionally high, with over 30,000 killings
in 2023. In 2022, Reporters Without Borders declared the country the
deadliest in the world for journalists.

 

In polls, Mexicans gave López Obrador low marks on security, but
several people told me that his core followers would see any attempt
to break from his policies as a betrayal. “People _love_ López
Obrador,” said Lamas, the anthropology professor, who served on an
advisory board for Sheinbaum during her mayoral campaign. “You go
out to rural communities and he’s God. You’re not going to fight
with God.”

Yet if Sheinbaum’s room for maneuvering was initially somewhat
narrow, Trump has done a great deal to expand it. She’s earned
widespread praise, including from critics of López Obrador, for her
deft handling of his erratic tariff threats.

Sheinbaum has flattered Trump without appearing supine; he’s called
her “tough” and a “wonderful woman.” Unlike Canadian leaders,
who’ve been shocked by American belligerence and have channeled the
fury of their populace, she’s been stoic and strategically patient
in announcing retaliatory measures. She frequently uses the phrase
“cabeza fria” — cool head — and people just as often use it
about her.

“She has been incredibly good at managing time,” said Bravo
Regidor, the political analyst. Trump, he pointed out, initially
imposed 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada on March 4. Sheinbaum
announced that she would have a phone call with him two days later and
then unveil Mexico’s countermeasures at a rally two days after that.
That gave time for pressure from American industries hit by the
tariffs to build, and on the same day Trump spoke to Sheinbaum, he
declared that the tariffs would be delayed.

Though Trump seemed to give Sheinbaum credit for the move, it’s
unclear how big a role their conversation truly played, since Canada
got a reprieve as well. Nor does the public know what she might have
offered Trump in return. But at least in Mexico, it looked like
Sheinbaum’s call had worked wonders. “She didn’t have a great
hand, but the hand she had, she played well,” said Bravo Regidor.

 

Trump has since imposed tariffs on Mexican exports that aren’t
covered by the U.S.M.C.A., the trade deal he negotiated with Mexico
and Canada during his first term. Still, Mexico has fared far better
in its economic dealings with the new Trump administration than many
other countries. On Wednesday, when Trump unleashed a new round of
so-called reciprocal tariffs, both Mexico and Canada were excluded, to
Mexico’s profound relief. Héctor Cárdenas, president of the
Mexican Council on Foreign Relations, predicted official celebrations,
and though he hadn’t voted for Sheinbaum, he thought she’d earned
them.

“I don’t know if ‘triumph’ is the right word, but it’s an
outcome that Mexico can live with,” he said. “Now, of course, we
don’t know what will come next week.”

Cárdenas has also been impressed by the way Sheinbaum has used
Trump’s pressure to her advantage in tackling organized crime.
There’s significant fear in Mexico that Trump could unilaterally
bomb the country’s drug cartels, an idea that’s become
increasingly mainstream in Republican circles. Already, Trump has
issued an executive order designating foreign cartels as international
terrorist organizations, and he’s reportedly considering declaring
fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction.”

“There’s a higher likelihood of U.S. military action in Mexico
than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere,” Brian Finucane, a
senior adviser to the International Crisis Group, told me. Such an
action would all but guarantee a nationalist uproar in Mexico, making
it impossible for Sheinbaum to cooperate with the United States on
drug trafficking or immigration.

The need to maintain Mexico’s relationship with America has given
Sheinbaum cover to go after the cartels without disavowing the
approach of her predecessor. In December, Mexican authorities seized
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a ton of fentanyl in the state of Sinaloa, the largest such bust in
the country’s history. In February, the country extradited 29
alleged narcotraffickers to the United States. “We have never seen
such an overwhelming and daily operation against the cartels,” a
Sinaloa journalist told
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Associated Press.

 

It remains to be seen whether Sheinbaum’s more technocratic
temperament will lead to more liberal governance. Just before leaving
office, López Obrador pushed through a constitutional change that,
among other things, made judges elected, rather than appointed,
officials. Though this was popular with the public, legal
experts widely saw
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Obrador’s maneuver as undermining the rule of law; The Journal of
Democracy described
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as “a last-ditch effort in his longstanding plan to undermine
democracy in Mexico.” Stripping judges of their independence, after
all, is a move straight from the authoritarian playbook, one that has
been used in countries as diverse as Turkey, Hungary and Israel.

Some in Mexico hoped
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Sheinbaum might water down the judicial changes. Instead, she moved
quickly to carry them out. Lamas believes Sheinbaum would have
preferred to slow-walk the remaking of the judiciary, but that doing
so was politically impossible, since they were so important to López
Obrador.

“I know her,” she said. “I think she wants judicial reform, but
not this year, in this moment with all the problems she’s facing,
economic problems, Trump problems. This was not the moment to do it,
but she had a compromise with López Obrador to do it now.”

It’s an open question whether, as Sheinbaum accumulates more of her
own political authority, she’ll have either the desire or the will
to stop the dismantling of Mexican institutions that might provide a
check on her and on future presidents. In the past, the United States
exerted diplomatic pressure on Mexico to maintain independent courts
and other structures undergirding liberal democracy. But liberal
democracy is not, to put it mildly, a priority for the Trump
administration.

And Morena partisans I spoke to are dismissive and a little baffled by
accusations that Sheinbaum is traducing democratic principles.
“It’s difficult to say that this government and the previous one
are not democratic, considering the amount of popularity they have,”
said Vanessa Romero Rocha, a lawyer and member of a government
committee vetting judges to run for office.

An easy riposte is that democracy means more than just elections. But
that argument is convincing only if you’ve already accepted that
liberal democracy is a superior system, and it’s increasingly clear
that many people do not. In elections across the globe, we’re seeing
how little many voters care about abstract liberal proceduralism;
they’re happy to cede power to the executive branch if they think it
will improve their lives.

I find this trend tragic, but there are no signs that it’s going to
reverse any time soon. Given this reality, we should judge politicians
not just on how they amass power, but also on what they do with it.

In the United States, centralized authority has allowed Musk, inspired
by Argentina’s Milei, to take a metaphorical chain saw to all sorts
of federal programs, including those that help the most vulnerable.
Sheinbaum, by contrast, is trying to build a national care system
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children, the disabled and the elderly, lifting the burden of unpaid
labor from many Mexican women. American progressives should be
cautious about projecting their desperation for a heroine onto
Sheinbaum. But at least right now, her kind of populism looks far
better than the alternatives.

Last year, Bravo Regidor was an author of an essay
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The New York Review of Books about López Obrador’s
“constitutional chicanery and disregard for the law,” which warned
that Sheinbaum could follow in his footsteps. Bravo Regidor’s fears
haven’t been entirely assuaged. Still, he says, “When you look at
the rest of the world, we’re not that bad.”

_MICHELLE GOLDBERG is an American journalist and author, and an op-ed
columnist for The New York Times. She has been a senior correspondent
for The American Prospect, a columnist for The Daily Beast and Slate,
and a senior writer for The Nation. (Wikipedia
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