During Donald Trump’s first run for the presidency, China, the economic behemoth that was gutting America’s manufacturing base and flexing its muscles in East Asia, was his favorite punching bag. Yet as Trump was seeking to reclaim the presidency after four years in the political wilderness, his new foreign target was much closer to home: Mexico.
By and large, Trump’s political coalition loved it. The trade hawks wanted large-scale tariffs on products coming out of Mexico, both to send a message that the United States would no longer be taken advantage of and to ensure China wasn’t using America’s southern neighbor to sidestep American levies on a laundry list of Chinese goods. Immigration hard-liners like Stephen Miller viewed Mexico as a big part of the problem, averting their gaze as tens of thousands of migrants made their way north to the U.S. southern border. The law enforcement community, meanwhile, regarded Mexico as the chief adversary in America’s battle against drug addiction, whose government was either incapable of stopping fentanyl from being smuggled into the U.S. or, even worse, cooperating with the cartels to do so.
Fortunately for proponents of the U.S.-Mexico relationship, the worst-case scenario of a complete and total rupture hasn’t come to pass. At least not yet. For now, Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum seem to respect each other on a personal level. The cartels, who have taken control of roughly a third of Mexican territory, are under a significant degree of military pressure compared to what they dealt with under Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. And the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquin “El Chapo” Archivaldo Guzman Loera’s former group, is busy fighting a two-front war against the Mexican state and the descendants of El Chapo’s former business partner, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, who pled guilty to drug trafficking and was sentenced in July to life in prison.
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