Editor’s note: Claudia Sheinbaum is not Donald Trump’s foil. She is his parallel.

President Claudia Sheinbaum attending her first State of the Union address in Mexico City. Image credit: IMAGO/Carlos Santiago/Alamy.

by Andrew Law, editor and founder.

It’s been impossible to miss during Trump’s second term how, in corners of US media and the anti-Trump internet, President Claudia Sheinbaum is cast as his foil: a foreign leader ready to puncture his distortions about Mexico; a “Trump whisperer,” as The Washington Post called her.

The appeal is obvious. On paper she looks like the perfect counterweight: a technocratic climate scientist who governed Mexico City just as US tourists, digital nomads, and urban creatives were discovering it. But her record of exaggerations, denials, and narrative spin shows she can be every bit as casual with the truth as Trump. And this is what her foreign progressive fan club needs to understand: Claudia Sheinbaum has more in common with Trump than they think.

Take Project Portero. The US Department of Justice billed it as a bold new initiative with Mexico’s security apparatus. Almost immediately Sheinbaum denied it existed. Progressives on Bluesky (and what remains of them on X) seized on her denial as proof of another Trump lie. Yet her clarification — those police officers were traveling to Texas for a law enforcement conference — barely differed from the DEA’s announcement, just stripped of American hyperbole.

That reaction also ignored her track record. She has met virtually every Trump demand on immigration and law enforcement, militarizing Mexico’s border much as Trump has militarized the US’s. Sheinbaum insists such cooperation respects Mexico’s sovereignty, but sidesteps how it is enforced. NGOs have documented mass detentions and forced transfers of migrants to Mexico’s far south, where opportunity is scarce and insecurity high. In practice Sheinbaum has turned the whole of Mexico into Trump’s border wall.

Spin and denial extend beyond migration. When a Tren Maya train derailed, her spokesperson called it a “track malfunction.” When critics objected to her appointment of a partisan commentator as ambassador to Italy, she replied: “The foreign service is not impartial, it represents Mexico.” In Sheinbaum’s formulation “Mexico” plainly means MORENA.

If it stopped at rhetoric, that would be one thing. The deeper problem is how Sheinbaum manipulates the very terms of truth.

She recently declared that “There is no more corruption in Mexico.” This despite MORENA politicians having US visas revoked and while senior allies face credible scandals. More revealing still are her claims about poverty and crime — two areas where her government insists on dramatic progress.

Sheinbaum cites INEGI statistics to claim poverty collapsed under AMLO and inequality narrowed. International outlets repeated the numbers uncritically, and the line has become conventional wisdom. But INEGI’s surveys used different methodologies from prior years and, in the case of the National Income and Expenditure Survey vs. the National Accounts, even contradict each other. The former says Mexicans’ income increased by 24%; the latter shows just 5%, as Nexos has reported. And CONEVAL, the body that once measured poverty multidimensionally — capturing not just income but also education, health, housing, and security — was dissolved in MORENA’s purge of watchdog institutions.

That matters. Without CONEVAL, poverty is reduced to a narrow financial metric. Structural inequalities vanish from view. Take healthcare. According to a recent INEGI survey designed with CONEVAL’s methodology and reported by El Economista, 44.5 million people now lack access, compared to 18 million in 2018. That didn’t stop the president from saying in this week’s State of the Union address that Mexico’s inequality levels were now second only to Canada in the Americas. Nor did it stop her from celebrating, in the same speech, that the Mexico’s hospitals’ medication supplies had reached 90% capacity. Mexico’s nonpartisan Red Nose NGO flatly rebuked the president, calling her claim a “lie,” according to Animal Político.

So, while poverty likely has declined under MORENA (a trend that predates its rise), the depth and precision of that decline are questionable.

Crime follows the same pattern. Sheinbaum touts a 25 percent drop in murders as proof of her security strategy. But disappearances rise, extortion spreads, and impunity persists. During her time as mayor in Mexico City she claimed murders had halved, but critical reporters found evidence that homicides were simply reclassified.

This is not quibbling. By narrowing definitions, Sheinbaum obscures the lived reality of millions of Mexicans. This is the playbook she shares with populists and autocrats the world over: redefine the problem until the solution appears to exist.

After boasting of poverty reduction, Sheinbaum declared in her State of the Union report that “The dark neoliberal period is over.” But let’s unpack that. Her government’s signature economic goal is to secure the future of the USMCA—the successor to NAFTA and one of the most aggressively neoliberal trade deals in the world. Billionaire Carlos Slim still has a veritable hotline to the president’s desk. One of her key advisors, Altagracia Gómez, is a multi-millionaire heiress and CEO of a major Mexican conglomerate. So, while Sheinbaum and MORENA have pushed anti-market reforms like transforming the state electricity utility CFE into a State-Owned Enterprise, her “end of neoliberalism” looks far more like Trump’s emergent statist oligarchy.

Alongside that statism is a tendency to see herself as something closer to an embodiment of the state, rather than its steward. Yesterday, in her morning press conference, Sheinbaum said critics who “speak ill of the government” simply want things “to go badly (for Mexico),” according to reporting by Los Ángeles Press. By casting those who question her as enemies of the nation itself, she collapses the line between her administration and the country.

And that is the deeper reality. Sheinbaum and Trump — despite different politics, motivations, and contexts — are both narrative-obsessed politicians moving in the same authoritarian direction. Each seeks to weaken watchdogs, paint critics as enemies, expand military power into civilian life, and consolidate authority at the expense of checks and balances. Sheinbaum’s scientific and activist background differs from Trump’s dilettantism, but both flatter their bases with mythology, obscuring uncomfortable truths in service of power.

Claudia Sheinbaum should be seen not as Trump’s adversary but as his parallel. She may not understand herself to be an autocrat, but her project has an inherently autocratic logic. Her presidency is animated by two overriding goals: cementing MORENA’s total dominance over Mexican political life and keeping trade with the US flowing to sustain it. These are not incidental; they define her project.

In pursuit of this, she is ready to accommodate Trump while advancing a political project that often mirrors his. To cast her as a resistance hero is to mistake style for substance. In her manipulation of truth and power, Sheinbaum embodies many of the same dangers for Mexico that Trump does for the United States. Those who want to defend democracy cannot afford to indulge such illusions, whichever side of the border they come from.