In this Issue of Voices of Mexico
Content

Our Voice

A Populist United States
Trumpism and the New World Order
Paz Consuelo Márquez-Padilla

President Donald Trump’s second term has begun very forcefully. In only 100 days he has issued more than 220 executive orders (eo), which give the executive significant power to direct public policies, although they can be revoked legally by future presidents and are subject to scrutiny both by Congress and the judiciary. The system of checks and balances, established by the United States founding fathers, allows these executive actions to be reviewed, thus strengthening the principles of legality and institutional control. However, today, an intense constitutional debate is underway. Some Trump administration lawyers and officials argue that judges are exceeding their authority when they block the executive’s decisions. They maintain that the president was democratically elected and that, therefore, his orders reflect the people’s will. What is more, a Heritage Foundation document proposes that the executive branch should have more power than Congress or the judicial branch.

The Return of Neo-Imperial Exceptionalism
José Luis Valdés-Ugalde

In the history of the United States becoming a nation, the very idea of its being a chosen people justifies the concept of a historic mandate to also become the chosen nation, commissioned by God to resolve any need the world had. This notion of being designated among all the rest to fulfill a specific destiny in world affairs has a triple explanation: the need to achieve a particular identity, a series of uniform social traits, and, despite this, having an exceptional national character in the concert of nations.

Mexico-U.S. Relations during
The Second Trump Administration
Subnational and Sectoral Impacts
Roberto Zepeda

Bilateral relations between Mexico and the United Stats are in a crucial moment, marked by the uncertainty created by Trump taking office for the second time. He has focused on his well-known “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) government program with the aim of returning his country to economic prosperity, recovering jobs lost in recent decades due to globalization. To achieve that end, he has applied 25-percdent tariffs to trade with Mexico and Canada, affecting free trade and threatening the viability of the USMCA.

Hyperpolitics and Donald Trump
Estefanía Cruz Lera

When I read the news and see what’s going on in the world, I’m overcome with the question: How have we arrived at this moment of hyperpolitics? First it was postpolitics. In 2008, at the height of the Great Recession, Annie Ernaux published her autobiographical book The Years; she argued that after the 1990s, politics was dead, and history was in its twilight years. After that, many thinkers found similarities between what this Nobel laureate was describing and what was happening in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Mitigating the Cast Of Political Reality TV:
The Importance of Institutions
Juan Carlos Barrón Pastor

Donald Trump has managed to make the media universe revolve around him: his insignificance as a person, his insecurities and traumas, his ignorance and his witticisms, his understanding of patriotism and the significance of his actions. His brilliant understanding of his own megalomania led him to understand how the media system works and, from there, to storm the political power structure. In doing so, he has transformed U.S. domestic and foreign policy into his own personalized reality show.

FNeighbors and Parallel Mirrors
Leonardo Curzio

In his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump reiterated that the U.S. southern border was the most unsafe place on the planet. This idea was repeated at rallies and replicated millions of times on social networks and television, radio, and in the press, until it became a kind of “Gospel truth” that few dared question. The perception of risk was favorably echoed in a society irritated by the high number of immigrants and empowered because a politician returned to the national arena who, with disregard for political correctness, vociferated against the migrant “invasion.”

Security, Drug Trafficking, and Migration
Mexico in the Era of Trump 2.0
Raúl Benítez Manaut

Donald Trump’s inauguration for his second presidency on January 20, 2025, made for a change in the most important paradigms in the relationship between the United States and its neighbors: Canada and Mexico have gone from being strategic trading partners to countries that “cheat” the United States and who should be subject to containment policies for such drastic problems as trade, migration, and drug trafficking. Trump has transformed the paradigm by cataloguing his country, a country of “immigrants,” to a territory threatened by foreigners.

Does Trump Really Have
A Solid Strategy for Imposing Tariffs?
Preconceptions vs. Scientific Foundations
Elizabeth Gutiérrez Romero

Donald Trump’s different policies both domestic and foreign, implemented through executive orders, have a common denominator: a lack of and disregard for a consistent scientific approach. This has caused surprise and incredulity among those of us who have analyzed different aspects of the U.S. economy and economic policy development for many years, based on theoretical work by experts who have also taken it upon themselves to check these developments against the facts.