While no longer focusing on his bugaboos of “rapists” and “bad hombres,” Trump’s 2024 campaign still found plenty of time to lay the groundwork for renewed conflict with the United States’ number-one trading partner. In addition to the now-standard fearmongering over “open borders” and “illegals voting in elections,” the campaign also trotted out a host of new phrases, such as “a bloodbath that is destroying the country,” “every state is a border state,” and most insidiously, “immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country.” Meanwhile, Trump was allowed to repeatedly lie that Chinese car manufacturers such as BYD are building “some of the largest auto plants anywhere in the world” in Mexico despite the fact that, as Sheinbaum herself was quick to point out, the largest BYD plant in North America is actually in California.

The scattershot attacks reflect an underlying confusion in Trump’s circle as to the justification for applying tariffs on Mexico in the first place. Immigration? Fentanyl? The trade deficit? Backdoor entry into the US market? It’s a confusion reflected in the broader rationale for such a widespread reliance on tariffs in general: As a coercive practice? Revenue generator? Hail Mary attempt to foster national reindustrialization? Whatever the revolving-door set of reasons happened to be, Trump leapt out of the gate quickly, announcing on November 25 that tariffs on both Mexico and Canada were set to go into effect on day one of his term. President Sheinbaum pushed back promptly with a letter calling for cooperation, warning that one tariff would be met with another and reminding the president-elect of US responsibility for both drug consumption and the southward flow of weapons.

Inauguration Day came and went without an announcement. Then Trump announced the tariffs were to come into effect on February 1. In its “fact sheet” accompanying the announcement, the White House alleged that “drug trafficking organizations have an intolerable alliance with Mexico” — precisely the evidence-free accusation peddled by publications from ProPublica to the New York Times in a blatant attempt to interfere in Mexico’s 2024 presidential campaign. In a highly amusing bit of historical irony, one of the articles used to substantiate its assertion referred to Genaro García Luna, the public security minister in the conservative administration of Felipe Calderón and a US ally decorated by the CIA, FBI, and DEA before being convicted of collusion with the Sinaloa Cartel and given a thirty-eight-year prison sentence.

Just before the measure was to go into effect, however, Sheinbaum announced in her morning press conference that they had reached a temporary agreement: Mexico would send an additional ten thousand national guard troops to its northern border, the United States would work to crack down on arms trafficking, the two countries would set up working groups on security and commerce, and the tariffs would be postponed by a month. For a nominal concession, Sheinbaum’s cabeza fría, or cool-head diplomacy, had won an initial victory.

When round two started in March, the presidenta had her facts and figures ready. Border crossings and homicides were down. Drug seizures were up. Meth labs were being dismantled. Mexico had handed twenty-nine drug capos over to US custody, including the long-wanted Rafael Caro Quintero, accused of masterminding the killing of a DEA agent in 1985. No matter: the White House declared it was going ahead with the tariffs anyway, putting out a carbon-copy communiqué of recycled accusations that Sheinbaum qualified as “offensive, defamatory, and baseless.” The following Sunday, she would announce a series of both tariff and nontariff countermeasures at a public assembly in the Zócalo. It was back to the phones.

This time, Sheinbaum negotiated another one-month reprieve for goods covered by the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, not with any new concessions but, as Trump allowed, due to his “respect” for his Mexican counterpart. With each delay, the threat of the vaunted tariff juggernaut was allowing itself to be diluted that much more.

Perhaps more than any other country, Mexico’s diplomatic corps has a long history of handling asymmetric negotiations with the United States. At times, that has made the nation’s foreign policy lapse into the excessively timid; but it has also provided a wealth of experience in dealing with situations like the present.

Add to this Sheinbaum’s own skills in the area. For a president who was criticized early in her campaign as being “uncharismatic” (in large part an unsubtle attempt to play her off against her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador), she has, in barely six months in office, become an international example for how to deal with a volatile, capricious Trump. Her poise and the famous cabeza fría in the face of tariff and invasion threats, Trump’s designation of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and a series of sloppy, adolescently antagonistic communiqués from the American president have won her plaudits from world leaders as disparate as Gustavo Petro and Olaf Scholz. Finessing the art of statesmanship in the face of crass belligerence, the presidenta has walked a fine line between firmness and flexibility, tossing Trump something he can use to declare a “win” without compromising her position in future negotiations. This has gained her repeated praise from Trump personally, who has openly cribbed her idea for carrying out a national anti-fentanyl campaign. Where Justin Trudeau went to grovel at Mar-a-Lago, or Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, and Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to the White House only to get snapped at, Sheinbaum has remained in Mexico, negotiating, governing, and refusing to play Trump’s game on his terms. And as it turned out, delaying the announcement of reciprocal tariffs for a few days to allow both space for last-minute dialogue and time for the organization of a public rally turned out to be the right move on both counts. It is the kind of strategic thinking Sheinbaum will need in spades in the days and weeks ahead.