Mexico’s leader surprised Donald Trump in a phone call by speaking in fluent English, an ability he’s rarely encountered with Latin American leaders.
The move eliminated a barrier between the pair by removing the need for a translator, helping to create rapport between the two leaders in the interaction last week, according to people familiar with the conversation, who asked not to be named discussing the private call. Trump shortly after described it as a “wonderful conversation” in a post on Truth Social.
That marked a contrast from their first call at the start of November, when President Claudia Sheinbaum called to offer her congratulations on Trump’s election — all in Spanish and via an interpreter, the people said.
Sheinbaum, who took office Oct. 1, stands out among her contemporaries in Latin America’s largest economies — including Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro and Trump favorite Javier Milei in Argentina — for her fluent command of English. It’s a language skill that she honed during her time living in Berkeley, California while completing her doctorate in energy engineering.
Sheinbaum rarely shows off her English in public, signaling its use is strategic. Days after she was elected in June, amid market jitters over the power her party had amassed in Congress, she posted a video of a call in English with the head of the International Monetary Fund.
While the common language helped, Sheinbaum still has much work to do to win over the president-elect, who has blasted Mexico with claims the government should do more to curb undocumented migration and fentanyl smuggling.
The most recent conversation with Trump has led officials to believe the tone of interaction between the two has improved — for now — after he earlier in the week threatened a 25% tariff, the people said. It also represented a contrast with her predecessor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO, who is monolingual and seldom traveled outside Mexico, and Enrique Pena Nieto, who canceled a planned meeting with Trump after a confrontational phone call in 2018.
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San Miguel Times
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