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Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Thursday ruled out a trade war with the United States after speaking with President-elect Donald Trump, who has threatened stiff tariffs to halt illegal immigration.

“There will not be a potential tariff war,” Sheinbaum, who has been scrambling to head off threatened tariffs of 25 percent on Mexican goods, told a daily news conference.

She was speaking a day after a telephone call with Trump, who has threatened to slap tariffs on Canada and China in addition to Mexico over illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

After their call, Sheinbaum and Trump offered differing accounts of what they had discussed regarding migration.

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Trump claimed that Mexico’s left-wing president had “agreed to stop migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border.”

Sheinbaum later said she had discussed a policy already in place, and denied Trump’s version again Thursday.

“I can assure you… that we would never — we would not be capable — of proposing that we were going to close the border,” she said, adding: “Of course we do not agree with that.”

She said she had assured the Republican leader that a caravan of migrants assembled in southern Mexico, over which Trump had expressed concern, “will not reach the northern border,” pointing to Mexico’s “strategy” of preventing such convoys crossing its territory.

She said that after that, the talks had no longer revolved around the threat of tariff hikes.

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Writing Wednesday on X, Sheinbaum said she and Trump had also discussed “strengthening collaboration on security issues” as well as “the campaign we are conducting in the country to prevent the consumption of fentanyl.”

Trump caused panic among some of the biggest US trading partners on Monday when he said he would impose tariffs of 25 percent on Mexican and Canadian imports and 10 percent on goods from China.

He accused them of not doing enough to halt the “invasion” of the US by drugs “in particular fentanyl” and undocumented migrants.

Mexican Economy Minister Marcelo Ebrard warned Wednesday that some 400,000 jobs in the United States could be lost if Trump followed through on his threat.

He cited a study based on figures from US carmakers that manufacture in Mexico.

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Sheinbaum said Thursday that further conversations were planned between her government and Trump’s transition team before his January 20 inauguration.

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At an FT event a few years ago, Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates was asked what painful lessons he had learnt when building his software company. His answer startled the audience back then and is all the more resonant today.

Gates replied that in his early twenties he was convinced that “IQ was fungible” and that he was wrong. His aim had been to hire the smartest people he could find and build a corporate “IQ hierarchy” with the most intelligent employees at the top. His assumption was that no one would want to work for a boss who was not smarter than them. “Well, that didn’t work for very long,” he confessed. “By the age of 25, I knew that IQ seems to come in different forms.” 

Those employees who understood sales and management, for example, appeared to be smart in ways that were negatively correlated with writing good code or mastering physics equations, Gates said. Microsoft has since worked on blending different types of intelligence to create effective teams. It seems to have paid off: the company now boasts a market value of more than $3tn and will celebrate its 50th birthday next year.

Gates may have learnt that lesson early. But while many of his fellow US tech billionaires share his original instinct about the primacy of IQ, few appear to have reached his later conclusion. There is a tech titan tendency to believe that it is their own particular form of intelligence that has enabled them to become wildly successful and insanely wealthy and to champion it in others.

Moreover, they seem to think this superior intelligence is always and everywhere applicable. 

The default assumption of successful founders seems to be that their expertise in building tech companies gives them equally valuable insights into the US federal budget deficit, pandemic responses, or the war in Ukraine. For them, fresh information plucked from unfamiliar fields sometimes resembles God-given revelation even if it is commonplace knowledge to everyone outside their bubble. One young American tech billionaire, a college dropout who had just returned from a trip to Paris, once asked me with wide-eyed wonder whether I had heard about the French Revolution. It was incredible, apparently.

Inevitably, this leads to questions about the fungibility of Elon Musk’s IQ given his omnipresence in the US economy and now politics. The South African-born entrepreneur is blessed with an exceptional form of intelligence and clarity of vision that commands respect, even from his fiercest competitors. “I think he’s a fucking legend,” the chief executive of one rival electric vehicle company told me, even though he was personally appalled by the ways in which Musk had used his social media company X as a propaganda tool.

Although Musk excels at building cool cars and rocket ships, his personal brand extension into social media is flailing and he is facing a user and advertiser exodus at X. Still, Musk used the $44bn megaphone he bought to help elect Donald Trump. In turn, the incoming US president has now invited the “super genius” Musk to become one of two co-heads of the planned Department of Government Efficiency. 

To cut bureaucracy, Musk is advertising for “super high IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting”. Musk has already said he would like to axe three quarters of the federal government’s 400 departments. “99 is enough,” he posted.

These days, Musk prefers to troll Gates rather than listen to him. Yet he might still reflect on Gates’s painful lesson: the smartest people in one field do not always have the best ideas in others.

No doubt there is massive bureaucratic waste to be cut, but it will take many different types of intelligence to understand all the public benefits, competing agendas and conflicting interests surrounding government spending. 

There is also a certain irony in tech billionaires trumpeting superior human intelligence when they are also developing AI that may one day overtake it. Google’s co-founder Larry Page labelled Musk a “speciesist” for defending human intelligence so doggedly in the face of advancing technology. 

Naturally, Musk is working on a solution: he plans to upgrade our biological wetware using electronic brain implants developed by his company Neuralink to merge human and machine intelligence.

That prospect will terrify many but may, in a different way, prove the ultimate test of whether human IQ is fungible.

john.thornhill@ft.com

There was a refrain we heard again and again from the seven Black women NPR talked with for this story.

“It is exhausting,” says Venita Doggett, who lives in Memphis, Tenn., and works for a nonprofit doing education advocacy.

“We’re tired. We’re damn tired,” another woman told us. She asked NPR not to use her name because she works in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at a public university in Minnesota, and she fears that a lot of people who work in and around DEI are being targeted right now.

This feeling of being under threat as a Black person, as a woman, and especially as a Black woman feels non-stop, she says, even before the presidential election.

“On November 6th, I was exhausted. I didn’t realize how much it felt like I was holding my breath.”

According to the Pew Research Center, 84% of Black women are Democrats or lean that way. Black women voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in high numbers this year; exit polls show their support at over 90%. Now, many of them are grieving the loss of a candidate who would have been the nation’s first Black, female president. At the same time they are bracing themselves for what might happen under the second presidency of Donald Trump.

The woman from Minnesota says there’s constant pressure to engage politically, an unrelenting narrative that Black women will save democracy. But she asks, who is going to save Black women?

“Thinking about this demand of Black women to step up to the plate and do this work always without wavering. And I’m, you know — there’s going to be some wavering.”

Venita Doggett in her backyard garden in Memphis, Tenn., on Nov. 26.

Ariel J. Cobbert for NPR

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Ariel J. Cobbert for NPR

She says she’s found herself pulling back a little after the election, spending time with her family, with her community, and with herself.

“In a world that often boxes us in and beats us down, we can’t act like we’re not bruised,” she says. “We have to take care of ourselves. We have to tend to our wounds.”

“You definitely hate Black women”

Doggett went to sleep early on election night. She says she just didn’t want to watch.

“I got up and saw the headline that he had won, that Trump had won. And I was just despondent,” Doggett says.

“I also told my advocate friends that I had the audacity to hope, and I am mad at myself for having it.”

“Wednesday evening, I broke.” She says Trump winning the popular vote felt personal.

“I just thought, like, you definitely hate Black women,” she says, referring to the many people who voted for Trump, and against Harris. “You really hate us. Us, who essentially birthed the nation literally out of our bodies — snatched children out of our wombs to build the U.S.”

But it’s not just Black people she’s worried about now, she says. A lot of her teenage daughter’s friends come from immigrant mixed-status families, and with Trump’s plans for mass deportations, she says she is terrified for them.

“Is that the legacy of fear that we want to impart upon people,” she asks. “And why are we okay with it?”

Grief, betrayal and moving forward

“I probably really have not processed the grief yet,” Bonita Buford says. Buford is the CEO of the Gantt Center for African-American Arts and Culture in Charlotte, N.C.

“Maybe it’s hope that I’m mourning,” she says. “Maybe it was a little kind of disappointment in humanity.”

Buford says she also feels betrayed, especially by white women voters.

Bonita Buford, President of the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts and Culture, stands for a portrait at the Gantt Center on Nov. 26 in Charlotte, N.C.

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Cornell Watson for NPR

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“When you think about white women specifically, who were voting early and talking about, you know, ‘well, I voted for her… I’m not going to tell my husband.’ So, were those all lies?” she asks.

According to exit polls conducted by Edison Research, 53% of white women voters picked Trump this year. The same poll showed more Latinos and Black men also voted for him than in previous elections. Still, the majority of Latinos and Black men voted for Harris.

Buford says right now she’s focusing on what she can do. She says her work leading a Black arts organization is more important than ever. Art can disarm people, she says.

“I sometimes say it’s a sneaky way to make change.”

Doggett says as a Black woman, it sometimes does not feel like she has time to rest, let alone grieve.

She fears Black women and other historically marginalized communities will be most impacted by Trump and his allies’ proposed policies, from education to policing.

“There’s just a lot of burnout.”

She says she is turning to family and friends to recharge. She’s thinking about what outfit she will wear to a “friendsgiving,” and about which show to binge watch over the holiday.

“I spent a lot of time in my garden,” Doggett says. “I don’t know any other place except to find solace in the world that, you know, the land — that has given birth to us all. “

“At the end of the day, if there’s still some light out, I’ll go outside and just sit and stare at the flowers.”

NPR producer Walter Ray Watson contributed reporting.