The most remarkably popular major political figure in the world right now is Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, who swept into the presidency in a landslide victory last summer — and who has, in defiance of the laws of contemporary political gravity, been building on her popularity ever since. Her approval rating just hit an astounding 85 percent, according to one poll, a significant jump from an already high level, and one that has come since she started publicly sparring with President Trump.
I’m not surprised: Often when Trump picks fights abroad he seems to give a significant political boost to his antagonists.
We’re living through a global wave of anti-incumbency, as you might have heard. But it isn’t always easy to perceive the ideological signal through the white noise of frustration.
The face of Europe’s new right, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, has only a 42 percent approval rating; Argentina’s anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei’s approval rating has been stuck below 50 percent. In Britain, Labour secured a historic victory last summer, but by the fall Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s net approval had fallen to negative-38, a decline of nearly 50 points since election day. . And while despondent liberals looking for success stories sometimes point to the center-left coalition in Denmark, support there for the party of Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen slumped as low as 18 percent in November.
Sheinbaum’s approval is more than four times as high. For every Mexican who opposes her, there are now more than five who support her. And she is the face of an incumbent party, too.
There are many possible lessons here for the global left, though Sheinbaum’s success is also idiosyncratic. She’s a climate scientist who embraces fossil fuels and a social democrat who uses the left-populist rhetoric of her predecessor. Obviously, Mexico and the United States have different needs and political climates, but in her five months as president, Sheinbaum has pursued priorities that look pretty familiar to those on the American left: an expansion of social-welfare spending, particularly on health care; rhetorical and policy emphasis on equality; investment in public infrastructure, especially transportation; and a more data-driven approach to crime and the drug trade.
But one additional explanation for Sheinbaum’s post-election surge is Trump, who has a now unmistakable effect on the domestic politics of those countries he makes a sport of antagonizing. Since his election, Sheinbaum has routinely shadowboxed with Trump, participating in his for-show negotiations while just as happily rolling her eyes and trolling him — making fun of Trump for demanding things Mexico has already delivered, for instance, or proposing, after Trump unilaterally declared the Gulf of Mexico be known as the Gulf of America, that the United States be renamed Mexican America.
She has also taken a more serious tone, emphasizing the violence the United States exports to Mexico in the form of guns. Sheinbaum’s approval rating is now 25 percentage points higher than her share in the June elections, and 15 points higher than on America’s Election Day.
A similar dynamic is playing out on the other side of the U.S. border, though the personalities are — in honor of national stereotypes — quite different. In January, as Trump prepared to take office, Canada seemed destined for a right-populist future, too, with Justin Trudeau stepping aside amid abysmal ratings and the conservative heir apparent, Pierre Poilievre, leading the rudderless liberals in polls by more than two to one.
Then, two things happened. The wonkish central banker Mark Carney announced his candidacy for leadership of the liberals, to succeed Trudeau. And Trump started talking so incessantly about taking over Canada as a 51st state that his minions like Kristi Noem have used trips to the Canadian border to mock-insult our gentle neighbors to the north.
Failing a war of conquest, it was clear, there would be a protracted trade war, absurdly premised on the number of drug overdose deaths in the United States, which has been falling for a year; Peter Navarro, a Trump adviser on trade, recently argued that Canada had been “taken over” by Mexican cartels, though in total just 43 pounds of fentanyl was seized last year at the Canadian border, compared with 21,000 pounds at the Mexican border. Today, not two months later, Carney’s liberals are now neck-and-neck with Poilievre and the conservatives. Carney, who will be the next prime minister, is expected to confidently call a new election soon.
As recently as two months ago, Poilievre was talked about as a Canadian counterpart to Trump, or at least as close as genteel Canada could really get to MAGA-like anti-elitism. (He’d risen to international notoriety thanks to an interview in which he argued with a journalist who’d described him as a “populist,” combatively counterpunching while loudly eating a crunchy apple, like a suaver Ben Shapiro.) Now, he’s desperately attacking the American president, hoping to convince voters that he is actually the potential leader who would fight Trump the hardest. “My message to the president is this: Knock it off,” he declared Friday in a carefully staged news conference, two days before Carney won the vote to lead the liberal party. “Stop the chaos. You are hurting your workers, your consumers and most immediately destroying trillions of dollars of wealth on your own stock market.”
He has a point. In the first Trump term, it seemed like the president would drop almost any policy commitment at the first sign of stock market frustration. This time, he looks much less interested in being an S&P hood ornament than in testing just how far his supporters will follow him, away from the advice of almost everyone on Wall Street, down the path of a throwback William McKinleyism. Will they cheer higher prices, produced by tariffs? A huge spike in business uncertainty, depressing investment and hiring? A genuine recession, should one come? A redefinition of G.D.P., in the face of such a downturn, to preserve the illusion of economic growth?
We are just halfway through the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, and some cracks in his swaggering coalition are already beginning to show. But you can see the tremors pretty clearly abroad, too. In Denmark, Frederiksen might be getting a boost from the fight over Greenland, and in Britain, even the bedraggled Starmer appears to be getting a Trump bump, too.
A new battle about free speech
On Friday, the Trump administration announced it was canceling $400 million in federal funds, already pledged to Columbia University, to punish the school for its handling of campus protests over the war in Gaza. On Saturday, it arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a student activist and green-card holder, in what appears to be a flagrant First Amendment violation and a “blueprint for investigations against other students,” as The Free Press put it. I wrote about Khalil’s detention, and the broader turn against protest that preceded it, on Monday:
The arrest is not only a portent but also a kind of culmination, with a history stretching farther back than Trump’s second inauguration. Those protests have been going on in some form for almost a year and a half, and many of the country’s liberal institutions and organizations regarded them as dubious and perhaps criminal.
That back story is one reason I’ve found the civil-society response to Khalil’s arrest both surprising and encouraging. A pro-Palestinian activist would probably not be many Democrats’ first choice for the poster boy of a Resistance 2.0, and yet within a day his case had rallied the support not just of the A.C.L.U. and left wingers on social media but establishment figures like Larry Summers and the Democrats of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well. (It is notable, though, that only fourteen House Democrats signed a letter calling for Khalil’s release and that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer opened his statement on the subject with a condemnation of Khalil’s actions.) Read more here.
Future reading
In a weekly newsletter, I get to focus on a new book only every so often. But as we head into a bit of a new era — with even more about domestic politics, geopolitics, climate change and technology up for grabs and open for debate — I’m planning to spend a little time highlighting upcoming books that might help us make sense of those transformations, great and small.
Picture the planet and how it’s changed, over the last few centuries, and you’re likely to imagine untrammeled nature gradually replaced by cities and modern infrastructure built with concrete and steel. In reality, most of what we’ve done to the world over that time is claim more and more of it for agricultural use — only 1 percent of land that isn’t frozen or desert is urban, and nearly 50 percent of it is used to produce crops and raise animals to eat. As a result, food is now as big a climate challenge as oil, Michael Grunwald writes in his forthcoming “We Are Eating the Earth” — as vivid and unsentimental and inspiring a reckoning with the wicked problem of calorie production (and the possibilities for solving it) as has yet been written in the age of climate crisis.
In his just-published “How to Feed the World,” Vaclav Smil takes a characteristically more sanguine view, assaulting the reader with pages of dense technical analysis that doubles as a tribute to the power of modern agriculture. But while the book is presented as a work of counter-catastrophism, it’s thorough enough to surface plenty of reasons for worry, too — why, in a world of persistent hunger, are we wasting one out of every three calories we’ve managed, however miraculously, to produce?
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