Only the Mexican President Knows how to Deal with Emperor Trump
Everyone else is failing miserably.
On Sunday, Colombian president Gustavo Petro faced off with Donald Trump, and lost. After Petro refused to allow planeloads of deportees to land in Bogotá, the American president threatened the Colombian president with tariffs. Petro folded, almost immediately.
After it was all over, the philosopher Phillippe Lemoine recorded the lesson learned:
Donald Trump reposted Lemoine’s quip on Truth Social, so we may assume that he agreed with it. I only half-agree. Trump is good at making enemies lose their minds, yes. But he is also good at making them debase themselves. Consider the oleaginous Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who opposed Trump before he endorsed Trump after Trump insulted his wife but before Cruz hailed Trump as the one man in America who can “fix it.” Today, Senator Cruz was first in line to boost Donald Trump’s imperial agenda for the Panama Canal
But Colombian President Petro actually did lose his mind, at least for an hour or so. After he came to his senses, he caved to the White House. But before that, he published a long, ruminating letter to Donald Trump, which as of this writing is still up and pinned to his X profile page. President Petro speaks:
I like to go to the black neighborhoods of Washington, there I saw a whole fight in the capital of the USA between blacks and Latinos with barricades, which I thought was bullshit, because they should unite.
…
I don’t like you oil, Trump, is going to wipe out the human species for greed. Maybe someday, over a shot of Whiskey which I accept, despite my gastritis, we can talk frankly about this …
…
Overthrow me, President, and the Americas and humanity will respond.
We’ve all had some whiskey, despite our gastritis, and have said things we would later regret. Heads of state are allowed to have regrets. But one of the marks of a capable statesman is an ability to limit the number of people who can see him when he’s having a nervous breakdown. Did Trump respond? I don’t even know; in any case, Petro soon reposted the White House’s own press release which stated that President Petro had submitted to President Trump’s demands.
Petro is not the only world leader to face off and lose badly before the American president. The Danish King and His Government have done so as well. The North American Emperor wants to annex Greenland. Denmark, which owns Greenland, refuses to give it up. But the Danes defied Trump in the worst possible way. As journalist
pointed out, in response to Trump’s tyrannical bluster, the Danish Crown updated their coat of arms to emphasize the fact that Greenland is, err, um, owned by Denmark. There’s a reason why Trump isn’t consulting with the parliament at Nuuk directly. There’s a reason why it is the Danes who are telling Trump Nej. It’s hard to call out Emperor Trump for his imperialism when you have a colony of your own, especially one that you abused with a policy of forced contraception only sixty years ago. (Can that be true? It is!).The Danes score an own goal. The Colombian president becomes an international joke. The Texas senator, a national one. But you know who doesn’t shrink when Trump sneers? There is one world leader right now who can face off with Trump and win: Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum. Trump wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”; he’s declared war on Mexican drug cartels; he’s threatening Mexico with tariffs. The last of these poses an immediate problem for President Sheinbaum (though many argue these tariffs would backfire on Trump by raising prices for Americans). Unlike Petro, she handled the tariff threat with aplomb:
“ … The Mexican people can be sure that we will always defend our sovereignty and independence. … It’s important to keep a cool head, and to refer to the signed decrees [i.e., executive orders], beyond [Trump’s] speeches.” She’s looking forward, Sheinbaum continued, to bilateral negotiations and sound communication between our two great nations. Cabeza fría. Cool head. Unlike the president of Panama, who last week told Trump to “Be serious” and stop threatening war over the Canal, Sheinbaum is patient. She knows that, in due time, Trump’s remarks will reveal themselves to be reality or bullshit. She is an expert delayer, as the clip above shows.
Even more impressive was Sheinbaum’s riposte a few weeks ago, after Trump first started calling it “Gulf of America.” Sheinbaum knows how to use history in a politically effective way. Responding to Trump, she wasn’t preening, nor did she adopt the posture of a scandalized Global South subaltern. She simply devoted a few minutes of a press conference to showcase a map from 1607 that refers to the present-day American West as “America Mexicana.” “Let’s call it: Mexican America,” she said, icily. Then she moved on to other affairs of state. No long, indulgent speechifying for her. Leave that to Maduro — or Trump. Cabeza fría.
Compare Sheinbaum’s use of history with that of his Colombian and Danish counterparts. The updating of the Danish coat of arms was an effort to remind the world that it has sovereignty over Greenland. It backfired because, by appealing to the past, it summoned its ghosts: painful memories of colonial rule, and a questionable present-day arrangement for Greenland. President Petro, on the other hand, appeals to history to establish his own righteousness, his fundamental goodness. Colombians, Petro says, have noble ancestors:
Colombia now stops looking at the north, looks at the world, our blood comes from the blood of the Caliphate of Córdoba, the civilization at that time, from the Latin Romans of the Mediterranean, the civilization of that time, who founded the republic, democracy in Athens; Our blood has the resistant blacks turned into slaves by you. In Colombia is the first free territory in America, before Washington, in all of America, there I take refuge in its African songs.
My land is of the golden jewelry from the time of the Egyptian pharaohs, and of the first artists in the world in Chiribiquete.
Petro claims a lineage that includes Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, freed American slaves, and al-Andalus. Curiously, he doesn’t mention his ancestors in Catholic Spain — one of the actual sources of Latin American identity, along with the indigenous peoples of the Americas, who Petro mentions only indirectly, when he alludes to “the artists of Chiribiquete.” I am not sure how Petro thinks he can defend identifying himself with the Caliphate, when his roots lie in the European empire that overthrew the Caliphate. A winner in the Reconquista, Petro pretends to have been a loser in the Reconquista, in a bid to claim moral superiority to Donald Trump. He fails, and the world laughs. (He’s also wrong about Colombia being the “first free territory in America” after the United States. That was Haiti. Correction: a reader points out that Petro is actually correct, as he was referring to the first free settlement, not country.)
The Danes and President Petro tried to use history to claim the moral high ground. Instead, the magnanimous and clever Claudia Sheinbaum uses history solely for the clap back. She failed to mention that, in 1607 — the year her map of “Mexican America” was made — neither Mexico nor the United States existed. At the time, all of that territory was controlled by the Spanish empire. And, of course, the Spanish had conquered that territory from various indigenous empires and peoples.
None of that matters to Sheinbaum, however, because, unlike Petro and the Danes, she is not claiming the moral high ground, and unlike the president of Panama, she can deal with Trump’s bombast even when she doesn’t know whether he’s actually bluffing. In a few short sentences, facing off against the man who would rename the Gulf of Mexico, annex Greenland, and take back the Panama Canal, Sheinbaum reminded the world that national boundaries change and move over the centuries, and that the powerful today were the weak yesterday, and might be weak again tomorrow. Doing so, she gave as good as she got. Cabeza fría.
This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.
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It's a product of America's faulty foreign reporting that I keep seeing the story that the Danish king updated the coat of arms in reponse to Trump. While it's true that the new coat of arms was unveiled around the time when Trump made his first comments (at least since 2019) on taking Greenland, it was part of the process of a new monach. Frederik took over as king last February and, as new monarchs often do, had the coat of arms updated.This kinda thing doesn't happen that fast. The new coat of arms got rid of the tri-crown symbol of Sweden and also gave equal weight to the Faroe Islands. Could the release been due to Trump's comments? Maybe, but the the new coat of arms was likely designed long before his election in November.
Frankly, Trump's bluster has lead to a better conversation in Denmark about it's historic (and current) treatment of Greenland and Greenlanders. There are a lot of dark chapters in the relaitonship between Greenland and Denmark but the goal in the last few decades has been towards independence, not sale to another state.
Not to dump on you Santiago, obviously it's not your reporting, and the point of your piece is well taken. More just my frustration as an American living in Denmark who, in reading American reporting about DK, has grown more distrustful of American foreign reporting in general as I've noticed lazy innaccuracies get bandied about often.
Loved reading this article. One small note though - while Colombia was not the first free territory, it did have the first free African town in the Americas, called San Basilio de Palenque, founded in 1619 by Domingo Biohó and a group of enslaved Africans who escaped their captors. I can only guess that this is probably what Petro was referring to, though he should've been more specific. Anyway - thanks for the entertaining and thoughtful analysis!