In his latest public remarks regarding Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum, U.S. President Donald Trump drew laughter from attendees by imitating what he characterized as her unusual pronunciation of the country’s name.
Speaking at a General Motors assembly plant in Michigan, where he touted the return of manufacturing operations from Mexico to the United States, Trump described Sheinbaum as “very nice “.
However, he then started mimicking her speech patterns, saying that the Mexican leader pronounces “the country’s name as “Me-hee-ho,” and jokingly recounted how he had adopted the pronunciation in a recent conversation, though they didn’t understand him.
“There’s a very nice president of Mexico, you know that, she is very nice. She speaks beautifully and she calls it “Me-hee-ho”, so I said to a group the other day: “We will stop all business going to Me-hee-ho and they didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. It didn’t come out as well,” he stated.
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Auto Industry Pushed Out of Mexico
The remarks come amid a broader push by the Trump administration to incentivize companies to relocate production from Mexico back to the United States, a recurring theme in the president’s recent public engagements, while repeatedly casting Mexico as a primary destination for outsourced production that he vowed to end soon.
For example, just days earlier, Japanese automaker Toyota announced plans to move production of its Tacoma pickup truck from its Tijuana, Baja California, facility to a plant in San Antonio, Texas.
While the company has stated that the decision was not driven by external political or economic pressures, it comes at a time when the Trump administration has imposed significant tariffs on auto imports. These measures have not gone unnoticed by industry analysts, given that automotive exports account for a substantial share of Mexico’s shipments to the United States.
