During his first presidential campaign in 2015, Donald Trump blamed Mexico for taking US jobs while exporting drug traffickers and rapists. But five years later, he had updated the treaty binding their economies and called his Mexican counterpart a “great guy”.
Mexico’s business leaders felt they weathered the first Trump storm relatively well. Some believe President Claudia Sheinbaum can follow the playbook that worked for her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador: don’t criticise Trump and give him what he wants on migration.
But a second Trump administration poses far more serious challenges for Mexico, the biggest trading partner of the US. Business leaders and experts on the bilateral relationship fear that the fledgling Sheinbaum government is not well placed to navigate them.