Mexico’s president trolls Trump, suggests US be renamed ‘Mexican America’

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum responded sarcastically on Wednesday to US president-elect Donald Trump’s proposal to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

Standing before a global map in her daily press briefing, Sheinbaum proposed drily that North America should be renamed “América Mexicana”, or “Mexican America,” because a founding document dating from 1814 that preceded Mexico’s constitution referred to it that way.

“That sounds nice, no?” she added with a sarcastic tone. She also noted that the Gulf of Mexico had been named that way since 1607.

The exchange has started to answer a larger question lingering over the bilateral relationship between the two regional powers: how would newly elected Sheinbaum handle Trump’s strong-handed diplomatic approach, and promises of mass-deportations and crippling taxes on trading partners like Mexico?

Sheinbaum’s predecessor and political mentor Andrés Manuel López Obrador – who hailed from a similar strain of class populism as Trump, even though he leaned left – was able to build a relationship with Trump as an ally, and his government began to block migrants from going north under US pressure, a boon to Trump.

But it was unclear if Mexico’s first woman president, a scientist and leftist lacking the folksy populism that rocketed López Obrador into power, would be able to build the same relationship.