ACROSS THE GULF

Can President Claudia Sheinbaum manage Trump—and Mexico’s fragile democracy?

- BY STEPHANIA TALADRID

In response to a belligerent new Administration to the north, Sheinbaum has said, "It's always important to keep a cool head."

Mexico’s most important venue for political theatre is the mañanera—the press conference that takes place each weekday morning in the Treasury Room, a vast Italianate hall in the Presidential palace. It took its current form in 2018, under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—a pugnacious, swaggering populist known throughout Mexico as AMLO. López Obrador framed his daily encounters with the media as an exercise in openness. Over time, they became a stage from which he could lambaste his enemies, advance his initiatives, and curate his public image. AMLO’s mañaneras began at 7 A.M. and often stretched on for hours, with guest speakers, musical interludes, and endless Presidential monologues. Because he was perennially at war with the press, they were often his primary mode of communicating with the Mexican people.

López Obrador’s successor is Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico's first female President. She is as precise and controlled as AMLO was blustery, but she has kept up the tradition of the mañanera. If anything, she talks with reporters even less, so her statements in the Treasury Room often provide the best indications of her administration’s priorities and plans.

On the morning of January 21st, Sheinbaum’s arrival was announced by the click of high heels on stone. “Buenos días,” she said as she walked onstage, wearing a black pencil skirt and a shirt embroidered with Indigenous motifs. It was the day after Donald Trump's Inauguration, and an expectant crowd had gathered to hear how the Mexican government would deal with the belligerent new Administration to the north. To everyone’s surprise, Sheinbaum said that her comments that morning would focus on health.