What Trump 2.0 Means For Mexico
He will pressure Sheinbaum on migrants; could there be military strikes on cartels?
After Donald Trump’s sweeping electoral victory became clear on Wednesday morning, he took to the stage in West Palm Beach, Florida, and gave a speech that was triumphalist yet fairly benign, especially by Trumpian standards. “We’re going to help our country heal,” he said to his elated and sleep-deprived supporters. “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”
However, he finished with a fierier conclusion about a divine mission. “Many people have told me that God saved my life for a reason,” he said to a roaring applause, referring to the assassin that clipped his ear with a bullet. “And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness. And now we are going to fulfill that mission together…I will govern by a simple motto: promises made, promises kept.”
This last line gives pause because Trump has said he will do many things, some drastic. In September, he promised that, “We're going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country.” Last year, he called for the death penalty for drug dealers. In July, he said he would consider U.S. military strikes on cartels.
Yet, it’s tricky to predict what policies Trump will actually pursue as president. There has been a long standing claim that you need to take him “seriously but not literally.” His rhetoric can be fiercer than his actions. He likes to be unpredictable to keep his enemies off guard.
His election victory in 2016 shook Mexico and made the peso plummet as he had promised to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement, deport millions, and build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. However, the U.S.-Mexico relationship did not fundamentally change under his presidency. NAFTA was renamed and renegotiated and trade grew to new heights, and there were actually less deportations than under Obama’s first term (a fact neither Democrats nor Republicans like to highlight).
Still, the question of “The Border” was crucial to Trump’s new victory and the issues around it are more incendiary than in 2016. Biden’s presidency saw record numbers coming over the river, with agents “encountering” over eight million people on the southern border from fiscal years 2021 to 2024. Drug overdoses have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in this period, with deaths driven by fentanyl that cartels make and smuggle through Mexico.
Trump 2.0 looks almost certain to take some hardline actions on these issues. But what exactly they are and how hard is more difficult to see. These questions are already rattling Mexico with the peso losing value again in the hours following the vote, although a lot less than in 2016.
In one of his last campaign rallies, Trump said he will immediately lay the law down to President Claudia Sheinbaum, who took power last month as Mexico’s first female leader. “I'm going to inform her on day one or sooner, that if they don't stop this onslaught of criminals and drugs coming into our country,” Trump said, “I'm going to immediately impose a 25 percent tariff on everything they send into the United States of America.”
Sheinbaum did not immediately congratulate Trump on his victory Wednesday, saying she would wait until the result was official but struck an optimistic note. “There will be good relations with the United States,” she said. “There's no reason to worry. Mexico always comes out ahead."
Here, I look at how a new Trump presidency will likely act in three key areas in relation to Mexico - on border security/asylum claims; on deportations; and on cartels. The first area, I think, is easiest to predict. The last is the trickiest to forecast and potentially most explosive.
Border Security and Asylum Claims
Trump will almost certainly send more troops to the southern border and get them to use controversial defenses such as razor wire. He will also likely continue to work on extending the “wall” - which is really a series of reinforced fences and other barriers that have been constructed since the 1990s (and even before).
However, these tactics have a limited impact…
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