Mexico’s most important venue for political theatre is the mañanera—the press conference that takes place each weekday morning in the Treasury Room, a vast Italianate hall in the Presidential palace. It took its current form in 2018, under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—a pugnacious, swaggering populist known throughout Mexico as AMLO. López Obrador framed his daily encounters with the media as an exercise in openness. Over time, they became a stage from which he could lambaste his enemies, advance his initiatives, and curate his public image. AMLO’s mañaneras began at 7 A.M. and often stretched on for hours, with guest speakers, musical interludes, and endless Presidential monologues. Because he was perennially at war with the press, they were often his primary mode of communicating with the Mexican people.

López Obrador’s successor is Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female President. She is as precise and controlled as AMLO was blustery, but she has kept up the tradition of the mañanera. If anything, she talks with reporters even less, so her statements in the Treasury Room often provide the best indications of her administration’s priorities and plans.

On the morning of January 21st, Sheinbaum’s arrival was announced by the click of high heels on stone. “Buenos días,” she said as she walked onstage, wearing a black pencil skirt and a shirt embroidered with Indigenous motifs. It was the day after Donald Trump’s Inauguration, and an expectant crowd had gathered to hear how the Mexican government would deal with the belligerent new Administration to the north. To everyone’s surprise, Sheinbaum said that her comments that morning would focus on health.

Sheinbaum, who is sixty-two, had been in office almost four months, and for much of that time public discourse had been consumed by Trump’s impending return to power. The American President had, once again, made Mexico a target. He vowed that on Day One he would impose “a 25% Tariff on ALL products” from Mexico. He claimed that he would declare a national emergency at the border, suspend refugee admissions, and designate Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, allowing the U.S. to pursue them more aggressively. Drug kingpins would “never sleep soundly again,” he said.

How much any of this would translate into actual policy had been a subject of frenzied speculation in Mexico. Officials at the border had announced a state of emergency to prepare for mass deportations. Mayors declared themselves profoundly unprepared to deal with the legions of people Trump planned to send back. News outlets proclaimed the advent of “Trump Reloaded” and warned of “La Invasión.”

Every Mexican President has to contend with the looming influence of the United States—accommodating its whims and imperatives while convincing citizens that their interests come first. López Obrador dealt with this mainly through force of personality. Despite the mayhem that Trump sowed in his previous term, the two men had temperamental similarities, and AMLO at times referred to Trump as a “friend.” Though Sheinbaum is a protégé of AMLO’s, she does not entirely emulate his style. She trained as a physicist and spent years in academia before building a political career on technocratic competence. As Trump took office again, she seemed determined to project quiet control.

At the mañanera, she acknowledged the political atmosphere. “We will always defend our sovereignty,” she said. “That is a maxim the President must live up to.” Though Trump had already signed a flurry of executive orders, Sheinbaum reminded the audience, with a wry smile, “It’s always important to keep a cool head.” A screen behind her magnified the text of some of Trump’s most controversial orders, which she proceeded to parse in the patient tones of a graduate seminar.

Sheinbaum pointed out that this wasn’t the first time that Trump had declared a national emergency at the border, or tried to get Mexico to take back migrants the U.S. didn’t want. His declaration on the “Gulf of America,” she made clear, was hardly worth discussing. “For us, it will continue to be the Gulf of Mexico,” Sheinbaum said. The only real novelty was the executive order to designate drug cartels as terrorist groups. But there, again, the Trump Administration had yet to determine who would actually be on the list. So why overreact now?

Sheinbaum invited up her minister of foreign affairs, Juan Ramón de la Fuente. A former psychiatrist with silver hair and rimless glasses, he had been sitting with a hand on his chin, looking unconvinced by his boss’s assurances. Now he produced a graph showing that migrant encounters at the southern border had dropped nearly eighty per cent in a year, to “the lowest levels of crossings.” Whether these numbers could help placate Trump was an open question. But Sheinbaum seemed determined to give at least the appearance of rationality.

Midway through the press conference, she tried to turn the subject decisively away from Trump. She called on the minister of health and his deputy to detail her administration’s public-health initiatives. For nearly fifteen minutes, they discussed a campaign against dengue fever—which had spiked alarmingly the previous year—and an effort to treat cataracts for free.

After the presentation, Sheinbaum opened the floor to questions, and the conversation turned swiftly back to the U.S. Would Mexico take in all migrants? Who would cover the cost of deportations? How would the government respond to tariffs? Sheinbaum remained vague on details, but insisted that her administration would seek to work with Trump. “Step by step,” she said, gazing levelly at the audience. As reporters shouted questions, she announced that the conference was adjourned. “Thank you, compañeras, compañeros,” Sheinbaum said, and began heading for the exit. Then she backtracked to add, with a grin, “Don’t forget about the cataract program—it is very important.”

In the months before the Mexican Presidential election last June, banners went up across the country with the message “Es Claudia”—it is Claudia. The phrase, summoning a kind of papal succession, alerted the political faithful that Sheinbaum had been chosen to succeed López Obrador as the head of his party, the National Regeneration Movement, or MORENA. Sheinbaum had spent most of her career in Mexico City; she was an urban intellectual, a type that populists tend to dislike. But AMLO was revered to the point of worship, and his endorsement gave her a potent advantage. When the votes were counted, Sheinbaum had beaten her closest competitor by thirty-one points. How she would govern was less clear. The view in Washington was cautiously optimistic, a senior Biden Administration official told me—though skeptics worried that “she’d have all the flaws of López Obrador without any of his authority.”

When Sheinbaum talks about her ideological roots, she often describes herself as a daughter of el sesenta y ocho—1968, a year that Mexicans remember as a time of fervid student protests and brutal state repression. For most of the preceding four decades, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, had governed unopposed, and people were beginning to demand greater freedoms. When Sheinbaum was six years old, the military, on the President’s orders, attacked a huge student protest in the Three Cultures square in Mexico City. Snipers opened fire, prompting a frantic stampede. Thousands were held at gunpoint and hauled off to jail. The death toll remains a state secret, but estimates suggest that more than three hundred people were killed.

Sheinbaum’s family had intimate knowledge of political persecution. Her father, a chemical engineer named Carlos Sheinbaum Yoselevitz, was the son of Ashkenazi Jews who had fled Lithuania in the nineteen-twenties. Her mother, Annie Pardo Cemo, a biologist and academic, was born into a Sephardic family that left Bulgaria at the start of the Second World War. “It was a miracle they were saved,” Sheinbaum has said. “Many family members from that generation were exterminated.”

Compared with the U.S., which had strict immigration quotas, Mexico was a haven. Thousands of European Jews, including Sheinbaum’s grandparents, settled in the capital’s historic center. Still, Sheinbaum has said, “I grew up without religion.” In her family’s home, politics took its place. When students started protesting the PRI, Sheinbaum’s mother took up their cause. She brought her children to visit Lecumberri, a forbidding prison where protesters were held. The family welcomed activists into their home and hosted long deliberations around the dinner table. Sheinbaum recalls eavesdropping on their conversations, huddled on a staircase out of sight. When she found works by Marx and other subversive thinkers stashed around the house, she told herself, “Funny—there’s books in the closet.”

Her parents sent her to Escuela Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, a private school in the Tlalpan district, where children could shape their own curriculum. Early on, Sheinbaum got involved in a musical ensemble called Pilcuicatl—Nahuatl for “the children who sing.” Video from those years shows Sheinbaum, with her frizzy hair pulled back, strumming a charango, a small guitar carved from an armadillo shell. “The students all came from homes where writing, reading, and painting was encouraged and there was an appreciation for music,” Carmen Boullosa, a revered Mexican writer who was one of Sheinbaum’s teachers, said. Still, Boullosa distinguished her pupils from the city’s cloistered rich kids, chauffeured from one safe zone to another: “These were not children who were confined to their private gardens.”

At fifteen, Sheinbaum began to join protests in the streets. She participated in hunger strikes, and demonstrated alongside a group of mothers whose children had been disappeared by the state—“the very first night I spent away from home,” she later recalled. Imanol Ordorika, a social scientist and a high-school friend who joined Sheinbaum in the protests, said that the spirit of the sixties still lingered: “It all converged with the civil-rights movement, the music of Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul and Mary.”

After high school, Sheinbaum studied physics at the National Autonomous University (UNAM), Mexico’s premier state-funded institution, but she stayed interested in activism. At Ordorika’s urging, she joined a group called the Council of University Students, in 1986. The university’s president was pushing controversial reforms, including a tuition increase. The CEU, as the Council was known, rallied thousands of students and forced the school’s leaders to debate them in public. The debates went on for weeks, at Che Guevara Hall, where students with long hair and beards sat across from bureaucrats in suits, waving cigarettes as they spoke of constructing una universidad democrática. Sheinbaum was deeply engaged, but behind the scenes. Each night after the debates, she met with the students to help them plan the next day’s line of attack.